Can someone tell me the pros and cons to living in Las Vegas ?

Question

i am planning on moving to las vegas and I was wondering how people feel about living there. How easy is it to find a job and what is the traffic like ?

Answer 1

http://www.city-data.com/forum/las-vegas/25082-living-las-vegas-overrated.html

Answer 2

Laiping pretty much hit it on the mark. Where are you moving from?

EMPLOYMENT
Most of the jobs here are in retail: mall, casino stores, kiosks, etc. Alot others are in customer service. Working for a casino has it's benefits, like the union. Working directly for a hotel: waitress, teller, room service, security, bar, night club, etc can range from $9-$14 or higher. I would suggest finding several possible jobs prior to moving. What i'v experienced alot with employers is that they want people with experience. Here are a few palces to look for jobs:
www.reviewjournal.com
www.jobing.com
http://lasvegas.craigslist.org/
http://secure02.mgm-mirage.com/employment/aboutus.asp

TRAFFIC
Traffic is the same anywhere else as far as rush hour goes. I'm not sure what the average is for accidents per day, we always have them in several areas in the valley. Taking the bus sucks (epecially if you live on the south end or far north.)

HOMES
Areas- Las Vegas, Henderson- Anthem/Sevin Hills, Summerlin, Southern Highlands, Lake Las Vegas.
I dont know what your income looks like so i'll give you a break down:
far north, far west, south west, south, south east: good neighbor hoods
north, central, parts of the west, most of the east- not so good neighborhoods.
Rent:
apartments/nice neighborhood- starting around high $700s
apartments/not so good- starting as low as $400
Houses/ 3 bd rm+/nice neighborhood: starting around $1100. But it depends on if it is a new home or not
houses. Some 3 bd rm houses you can find around $1050
There are alot of condos being built and severl apartments are being switched over into condos.
www.rent.com
www.apartmentguide.com

WEATHER
Weather. i cant really stand the winter or summer. It was a high of 126 i think on Friday (7-6-07). Imagine going otuside, the sun is blazing, there are no clouds, and when the wind blows it's like a blow dryer. Thats Las Vegas summer. We also get rain because of monsoon season. So it has a tendency to flood. It can go down to about 40-35 degrees during the winter. The winter that just past, it was so cold it started to snow, which is rare. It snowed the previous winter as well. I think it's global warming. But anyway, the weather is nice/warm from september to about before holloween. And starts to warm up around march. It's usually around the 90's by mid june or little bit before then.

hope this helps. anymore questions feel free to email me. i've lived here for six years and lived in about four different area of the valley.

Answer 3

Between 1 June and 15 September, the temperature is between 100 and 120 degrees. The rest of the year, the weather is very pleasant and arrid. I love it in Vegas except for the summer. I usually go away to cooler places. I am not sure what kind of jobs you are looking for. Because of gaming, there are plenty of jobs available. Traffice is not bad, in my opinion. If you move there, try live in Summerlin and work there. Especially if you have a young family. Summerlin is a master planned community and have good schools. It is on the northwest side of the Strip. I hope this helps.

Answer 4

MSC has nailed down most of the highs and lows of Sin City.

I've been here for just under a year, and I like it a lot more than I thought I would.

Some of the pros:
- There is ALWAYS something to do...this town NEVER sleeps.
- You can meet lots of new peeps. There are so many different people out here!
- It's pretty fast paced...but you can definitely find places to chill.
- Once you find a good job, you're usually set. A lot of the companies I deal w/ take good care of their employees. But it can be harder than you think getting in w/ places like casinos. It's all about who you know around here.
- The weather. I hate cold winters, and it doesn't get all that bad here.

Some of the cons:
- Cost of living. Rent is expensive, gas is crazy high (it was costing me almost $80 to fill up at one point...but I drive a truck, so...) and it can be an arm and a leg if you want to eat out.
- Crime is pretty high too. Since there has been such a boom in population over the past few years, high crime rates come w/ the territory. The worst part is that crime can be bad in all parts of town, even the nice areas.
- Traffic is heinous! I've lived all over and it's pretty darn bad here. I think it's b/c there are so many people in a not too huge city (not to mention the huge number of peeps moving here every month). And there are a lot of different driving styles since everyone is a transplant. It definitley doesn't help that there is always a construction project on major roadways (I-15 & US 95).
- The weather. It gets freaking hot...and I don't care if it is a dry heat!

All in all, it's a great town. Folks always go on about the Strip, but once you're a local that's the last thing on your mind.

But it is really nice to know that you're w/in driving distance of places like the Bellagio & MGM. Seeing the fountains at night always gets me!!

Answer 5

it is paradise nice weather
nice people
jobs are plentiful
traffic is awful and I am originally from NYC, so it is bad
but that is the only point of my negative
you will be very happy here

Answer 6

It is unbearably hot most of the year. Other than that, don't know much about it.

Answer 7

Diatribe on Sin City and the Decline of Friendship

It is very difficult to make lasting friendships in a city that prides itself on entertaining distraction and superficiality. Friendships are as fleeting as old buildings on the Las Vegas Strip. The town is about new and cool not about romantic sentimentality. It glitters and glows with facades designed for decadence, not for warmth and goodwill. The casino resorts suck us in to suck us of our wealth, luring us with superficial prettiness. This is no place for deeper feelings. Despite the magnitude of weddings, this is no town for romance or sentiment. To have those feelings, people must work very hard at turning from the distractions.

Romantic sentimentality is what makes for life-long friendships. It is a loyalty to an ideal of camaraderie, a belief in "once a friend, always a friend". It takes special people to stick to one another through thick and thin. We see half of marriages fall despite vows to stay together for life and sometimes even for eternity. If marriages fall apart even with the insurance of vows, then friendships with no vows stand an even smaller chance of survival. In Las Vegas, a couple can get married and divorced in virtually no time whatsoever. What then does this mean for friendships?

Las Vegas has a culture of change. It is a transitory city where people move in and move out within a few months or a few years. With so much immigration and emigration, is it a wonder that people do not want to put forth the energy to make commitments to others? No one wants to waste time, energy, and emotional stability by making friends who will leave and have no interest in longevity of the relationship.

It is hard to say that Las Vegas is a community. It is rather a hodgepodge of communities, which are also in states of flux. We have communities based on neighborhoods, such as "Aliante", "Summerlin", and "Green Valley" where the people feel a sense of belonging because of the styles of tract homes they live in which are governed by Home Owners Associations. We have communities based on religion, such as Mormon, Catholic, and Jewish. We have communities based on ethnicity, such as the Chinese community, the German community, or the Native American community. Each of the communities also suffers a steady flow of people moving in and out of them. People will pop into a community, lose interest, and move on.

"New and cool" is what destroys marriages, families, and ultimately the entire country. People lose interest too quickly and want constant change to stimulate their short attention spans. Marriages fall apart because partners grow tired of each other and yearn for newness. Friendships fall because of the same lack of effort to keep alive a relationship. It is easier to make many short-term associations than long-lasting, meaningful ones. It is easier to like someone new for superficial reasons, such as looks or tastes in music, than it is to like someone old who has many faults. Thus, nowadays, new is cool, old is cold.

People look to the new in hopes of finding something that will benefit them. Upon latching onto something new, they get rid of the old since the use has run out. Social networking and small talk in bars, at conventions, or at business mixers are all aimed at meeting new people to take advantage of in some way. We may not admit that our goal is exploitation because it sounds so awful, but if we are honest with ourselves, we know that networking is often more for selfish reasons than the pretend reason, to make long lasting friendly relationships.

This outlook so many people appear to have probably stems from a lot of American traditions such as "keeping up with the Joneses", the "me" mentality, the "I deserve it" mentality, and the "gotta have it now" mentality. Most of these slogans come from corporate commercialism. Corporations care only about monetary profit and care little about social expense. We are trained from toddlerhood that new is better.

Corporations require us to believe this because their products are not designed with the quality of old. Products are designed to break so that those of us who are not enticed to buy the new, are forced to instead. Most Americans only own their new cars for three or four years before getting new ones. New is better! Newer computers come out every four to six months with just enough added features to make us want to purchase them. Newer cell phones. Newer appliances. Newer furniture. Newer—well, you fill in the blank: __________.

The short attention spans of so many coupled with their impatience is tearing at the fabric of our national cohesiveness. We divide ourselves from each other because we grow impatient for the new. How can we spend quality time with the old while we are out searching among many communities for the new? We cannot and so we break up relationships and move on. A wise old man, Lincoln, said, "a house divided against itself cannot stand". His words have never ringed truer. Our homes are divided, our children are divided, our cities are divided and fractured into numerous sub communities, and our nation is divided. It is a wonder that with all the division, our nation can still advance and add to itself in positive ways.

Perhaps we are not advancing into the light, maybe, by forgetting history, we are advancing backwards into the Dark Ages. We feel like we are advancing but without knowing the end destination, we may be going in circles. Ironically, the Dark Ages (476 AD to 1000 AD) was the time period when humans started to define sin and virtue which then led to Enlightenment and the Romantic age. They say we are now in the "Information Age", but perhaps we are drowning in all the information and losing sight of the hopes and understandings that got us here.

You see, in this Information Age, we are learning from present advancement instead of from history. We continually build upon technologies and forget the adages, parables, and idioms of bygone eras that were tried and tested over millennia. These old ways were found long ago to be the best to preserve humanity and the relationships among people. We focus on creating new innovations to sell new gimmicks. We are relying heavily on the invention of Man to make us happy and ignoring the values of our ancestors that made them happy.

Sure, we see amazing discoveries in genetics and strive to learn more, but we forget the old wisdoms involving the sanctity of life. We marvel at new ways to abort or prevent pregnancies, but we deny a fundamental part of our conscience, which tells us killing is wrong. We gorge ourselves with the technologies that allow for mass production of livestock, but we ignore the suffering of our animals who share life on this planet with us. We enjoy consumerism and have to have the latest trademarked items that sparkle and do cool things, but we forget that soulless corporations whose blood is lucre impress us with this desire to buy. And we buy, though buying may be beyond our financial means or may be yet another distraction to prevent meaningful relationships (i.e. new televisions, new video games, new music, new clothes, new, new, new, forever, adnauseam).

In Sin City, we can see the entire little list of vices that plague the nation: avarice aka greed (i.e. gambling and get-rich schemes), gluttony aka eating too much (buffets and fast food joints); sloth aka laziness (Section 8 housing and welfare entitlements); lust aka sexual desire (nudie bars and prostitution); pride (living in nice homes with snobbish attitudes and driving gas guzzling SUVs and other fancy new cars); envy (probably accounts for drug addiction and depression); and lastly, wrath aka anger, which I am guilty of when I see all of the above so flagrantly shoved before my disapproving eyes.

In days of old, it was easy to find a person who suffered from one of the above vices while turning away from the others. For instance, we might find a fat man who desired food but had no interest in the other sins. Or, we might find someone who was exceptionally lazy. Now, though, it is not unusual to find a greedy, fat, lazy, sex addict, who is proud of nothing, envious of everything, and angry at the fact that there is never enough. Who wants someone like that for a friend? Well, the trend is that more and more are becoming like that.

The devil is tricking us into pursuing pleasure, which leads only to misery. True peace and inner-satisfaction comes from the old virtues which many of us laugh at now, namely chastity (Courage and boldness. Embracing of moral wholesomeness and achieving purity of thought through education and betterment.), abstinence (Constant mindfulness of others and one's surroundings; practicing self-control, abstention, and moderation), liberality (Generosity. Willingness to give. A nobility of thought or actions.), diligence (A zealous and careful nature in one's actions and work. Decisive work ethic. Budgeting one's time; monitoring one's own activities to guard against laziness.), patience (Forbearance and endurance through moderation. Resolving conflicts peacefully, as opposed to resorting to violence. The ability to forgive; to show mercy to sinners.), kindness (Charity, compassion, friendship, and sympathy without prejudice and for its own sake.), modesty (Modest behavior, selflessness, and the giving of respect. Giving credit where credit is due; not unfairly glorifying one's own self.).

If you think that I am wrong, go tell someone you are chaste and abstinent and see the reaction you get—if they even know what the words mean.

Friendship comes from noble feelings about one's self and the person of the other. Nobility is nearly dead. For those who do not know, "noble", according to Merriem Webster, means: "possessing, characterized by, or arising from superiority of mind or character or of ideals or morals." In the stead of nobility, we find loneliness and a constant thrive to fill the void with distraction. Distraction aimed at our base desires abound. (base: "lacking or indicating the lack of higher qualities of mind or spirit"). Las Vegas is the home of probably every sensual distraction known to man. As long as we are distracted, we cannot focus on ourselves or others. Relationships therefore fail due to self-gratification and self-indulgence.

Many of us become sad because we do not understand that our behaviors, our hedonism (hedonism: "the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the sole or chief good in life"), ends only in loneliness and misery. But for some of us, sadness comes not from engaging in the vices, but from recognizing that too many partake to their own detriment.

I am sad. I am sad because most of the people who agree with me are two to three times my age. I am sad because I have far too few friends my own age since they are busy, busy, busy, indulging, indulging, indulging. I am sad because I see destructive behavior in others and want to help them avoid it, but am powerless to do so. Were I to attempt to help, I would be accused of being too judgmental or behind the times.

Do you see the irony in that? They would judge me for judging them. My intentions may be good, but they see them as bad because they are blinded by the pain of their miseries. Human nature also compels them to deny when they are wrong. Denial is easier than acceptance because acceptance of one's bad behavior leads to responsibility for it. And who wants to shoulder the responsibility of fixing other people's problems? Greedy friendless lawyers!

sigh…