Las Vegas is at the center of a population boom that has transformed the American desert over the last three decades.
LAS VEGAS, May 29 — South on Las Vegas Boulevard, well beyond the casino-scraped skyline, there is a three-story hotel where tourists seldom go.
The parking lot is sprinkled with U-Haul trucks and trailers. A school bus stops at the front office. A sign on the lawn offers discounts for guests who stay a week or more.
Inside the no-frills rooms, where sheets and blankets cost extra, a desert city's promise of new beginnings is regularly put to the test. This busy hotel and others in the Budget Suites of America chain are the cinder-block equivalent of circled wagon trains, a community of dreamers, pioneers and strivers pulling up for a while en route to someplace and something better.
"When we got here, I slept wrapped up in my dad's shirts," said Jamie Rose Galloway, a toughened California transplant whose family recently passed her 17th birthday in a two-room unit at the back. "We've been through worse. We were homeless once and lived in my dad's truck."
Many newcomers to Las Vegas use the Budget Suites to find their footing in the slippery city, the eye of a population storm that has transformed the American desert from forlorn frontier to chosen land over the last three decades.
The metamorphosis has not only altered the barren landscape — Las Vegas and its suburbs in Clark County unfold across 235 square miles of desert, compared with 38 square miles in 1970 — it has exacted a social price that many newcomers find unbearable.
Based on federal tax returns, the Internal Revenue Service estimates that nearly 55,000 people gave up on their dream of living in southern Nevada last year and moved elsewhere. A study in 2003 by the Fordham Institute for Innovation in Social Policy identified Nevada and its neighbors Arizona and New Mexico as "social recession" states because of chronic problems like crime, child poverty, suicide among the elderly, and high school dropouts.
"It is just growing too fast for its own good," said Sarah S., a 25-year-old bartender from Missouri, who put up at the Budget Suites on her way to Dallas with her husband and 6-year-old daughter after two years in Las Vegas. "I don't give out our full name to anyone. I learned that living here."
The hotel on Las Vegas Boulevard South, like seven other Budget Suites in the city and its suburbs, is owned by Robert T. Bigelow, a wealthy businessman and U.F.O. enthusiast who a few years ago pledged to spend $500 million developing tourism in space. On earth, Mr. Bigelow's properties are the buzz of the Internet among people mulling a move to Nevada, the nation's fastest growing state for 17 consecutive years, and even with the flaws, its newest perpetual dream machine.
"We were pretty lucky and our only problem was kids racing shopping carts down the hill in the parking lot," one new resident, Walt Flesher, wrote in recommending the Budget Suites on the Web site movetolasvegas. com "Smashed into the side of my wife's car a week before we moved out."
Mr. Flesher, 61, and his wife, Shelley, 57, spent three months in a two-bedroom unit on Boulder Highway, piling their furniture from their townhouse in Anaheim, Calif., into the extra room. They moved out last spring to the southern fringe of the desert after buying a $193,000 house with a brown gravel yard and a twinkling view of the Strip.
A year later, the desert has retreated and the view is now of a column of newer houses with gravel yards. Mr. Flesher's primary preoccupation, his search for a permanent job, just ended. A computer system administrator by profession, he began working in the front office of a repair shop for Rolls-Royces and other luxury cars. The Fleshers celebrated with a $5.99-per-person steak and lobster dinner at a nearby casino.
"Thank God for the housing inflation in California, because we came out here with a good chunk of change," Mr. Flesher said. "I sent out lots of résumés and made lots of phone calls, but it was hard to even get an interview."
Waiting for the 'Brink's Truck'
The Budget Suites require no long-term commitments or credit cards. While that means little to guests with financial resources, it opens the doors to legions of credit-unworthy Americans. They arrive with a basic yearning for a good job and a house, regardless of the bumps on the road that brought them here.
"People really did once just pass through here, and now more and more they stay," said Hal K. Rothman, a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has written extensively about the city. "Most everyone who comes here plans to move on. It is an opportunity stop. But what happens when this town loves you, it backs the Brink's truck up to you, and lets you take what you want."
Jamie Rose's mother, Lori Galloway, is still waiting for that truck. She is the family's self-appointed cheerleader, seeing a garden with roses and daffodils in their future even as she recounts one hard-luck story after another.
At one low point in their lives in California, she would slip bologna and cheese under her blouse when buying bread at the grocery store. "What would you have done if your children were hungry?" she asked directly. "I could only afford the bread."
Things here are already better. She can keep meals on the table by making the rounds at church-run food pantries and frequenting bargain buffets at the casinos. She collected her family's simple white dishware by playing a game the children call Dumpster diving. She found the vacuum cleaner that way, too.
The two blankets on their bed belong to a young mother in an upstairs unit. She lent them when her daughter, who plays with Breanne, Jamie Rose's 10-year-old sister, told her that Breanne was cold at night. The Galloway sisters share the family's only bed at the Budget Suites.
"I think this is going to be better for my kids," said Mrs. Galloway, whose 21-year-old son in California is expected to join them here this summer. "Jamie Rose likes to cook, and there is a great culinary school here."
Mrs. Galloway, 44, can take to complaining about gaining weight because of her heart medicine and about a government that does not seem much interested in helping families like hers, though she does collect a disability check every other week. But she catches herself.
"I sure would like a little more house," she said from the hotel sofa that doubles as her bed, before suggesting more cheerfully, "We are more of a family here."
NY Times
