Vegas's famously overheated housing market may have begun to cool - the median home price is $308,874 and is predicted to drop to $283,200 by 2008 - but slowing or not, the city still looks every bit the boomtown. Job growth last year was double the national rate, and about 6,000 newcomers arrive every month, an influx that has remained steady for more than a decade. Few of these transplants plan to serve drinks or deal cards: They're here to treat sniffles, write contracts, maintain computer networks, and teach schoolchildren. The fastest-growing job category in Las Vegas is that of professional and business services. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, each new casino job is matched by four others on the outside. The arrival of so many non-entertainment industry employees has transformed Las Vegas into more of a real city and less of a theme park.
Forty million people flood into Las Vegas each year. People have thought once that the Las Vegas civic motto should be the oft-used "Nice place to visit, but they wouldn't want to live there." Now they are having serious second thoughts now. Because so much of the desert surrounding Las Vegas is federally owned, there's hardly any room left for the city to expand. "Most of that land is either protected or owned by the military". The houses for sale in the town's more than a hundred new communities are crunched so close together - usually less than a few feet apart, with minimal front lawns ¡s that newcomers expecting spread-out suburbs are welcomed instead by the concentrated feel of a true city. This proximity has one effect: Las Vegas is starting to feel less like sprawling Phoenix and more like metropolitan Los Angeles .
People don't move to Las Vegas to be closer to slot machines or first in line for Celine Dion tickets. They move for opportunity, both financial and recreational. This kind of opportunity may be more organic in Las Vegas than in any other city on Earth. That puts pressure on its civic planners - the town has huge challenges in terms of energy efficiency and water consumption - but while it has nearly doubled in size since 1990, it is doing better than most cities at managing growth. The average commute takes 24.4 minutes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, compared with 39.1 in New York City and 29.6 in Los Angeles . The Vegas figure has dropped by almost a minute since 2000. (But you need to stay away from the Strip with your car.) Transportation remains one of the town's open-ended questions.
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