Growth surges in Nevada, but middle-class voters say they're not sharing in jackpot
HENDERSON, Nevada
The signs of Nevada’s resurgent economy are everywhere in this community outside Las Vegas, the fastest-growing city in one of the country’s fastest-growing states.
New housing developments are spilling up the mountainsides, filled with families and retirees fleeing California and the East Coast for sunshine, cheaper land and lower taxes. Warehouses are sprouting beside a huge new practice facility for the Las Vegas Raiders football team - another set of California transplants. Even the names on new apartments and Spanish-tiled subdivisions mirror the optimism of a state on a hot streak after years of a plodding economic recovery: Elysian. Inspirada.
“It’s a boomtown,” said Ivonne Hernandez, 28, who was in high school when her family lost their home in the housing crash.
But Hernandez and other middle-class voters said they are not sharing in Nevada’s jackpot. As the state handed out millions in tax incentives to lure businesses here, working-class voters said they are struggling to keep up with rising rents and still feel economically vulnerable more than a decade after the recession plunged Las Vegas’ tourism and construction-?dependent economy into disarray.
Today, Hernandez has a good-paying job at a gas company but said she has been unable to afford an apartment of her own. She has already voted early for Sen. Bernie Sanders before Saturday’s Democratic caucuses. “There’s just not opportunity out here for me.”
Nikki Peters, who markets timeshares in Henderson, said that despite the booming economy, her family struggles. She and her husband voted early for Sanders this weekend because they feel he cares about people like them.
“It’s not better,” Peters said. “We can’t afford to take vacations. We can only pay bills.”
Nevada lagged in recovering from the chasm of the recession, but it is now growing at a faster clip than much of the country. In southern Nevada, median home prices have increased by 40% to $305,000, according to the Las Vegas Realtors group, and builders now complain they cannot find enough workers.
As new neighborhoods sprawl into the creosote desert, local officials here in Clark County have begun warning they are running out of space and have proposed opening new federal lands to development. In Reno, a flood of newcomers from the Bay Area and companies including electric carmaker Tesla have sparked a runaway spree of growth.
To President Donald Trump’s supporters, Nevada’s growth has become the strongest argument for his reelection. Housing prices have rebounded. Marquee projects like a $4 billion Resorts World development and the Raiders’ onyx-black stadium are reshaping the Vegas skyline.
Victoria Seaman, a Republican Las Vegas councilwoman, lauds the president for it all. She recently wrote an op-ed declaring that Nevada was the beneficiary of a “blue-collar boom” driven by Trump’s tax cuts and trade policies. Over the past six months, 500 new businesses have opened in her ward on the west side of the city.
“I don’t think he gets enough credit,” Seaman said in her ?seventh-floor city offices overlooking a jumble of half-built buildings, shortly before she dashed off for a security screening to meet Trump as he made a campaign swing through Las Vegas.
Henderson, the second-largest city in Nevada with 316,000 residents, cultivates an image as Vegas’ genial kid sibling - a spread of subdivisions, golf courses and master-planned communities knit together by the decidedly un-Sin City slogan, “A Place To Call Home.”
It is whiter than the rest of Nevada, which is nearly 30% Latino and 10% black, but local officials and demographers said waves of new arrivals are transforming it into a more diverse suburb with an increasing number of foreign-born residents.
“There was a lot of empty real estate here for many years after the recession,” said Scott Muelrath, chief executive of Henderson’s Chamber of Commerce, as he drove down St. Rose Parkway. And now: “You can go two weeks and come down this street, and there’ll be something new going on.”
He passed just-opened big-box stores and bulldozers leveling the rocky ground for new shipping and distribution warehouses. Henderson, like the rest of Nevada, has tried to diversify its economy since the crash to make it less vulnerable to Nevada’s boom-and-bust cycles. Google has opened a data center, and plans are underway to build a machine-tool plant and a huge Amazon fulfillment center.
Of the more than 141,000 people who moved to Nevada in 2018, about 50,000 of them were from California, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported, amplifying an eastward flow that goes back decades. Today, nearly one-third of eligible voters in Clark County, which contains about 70% of Nevada’s population, were born in California, said Robert Lang, executive director of Brookings Mountain West. Only 1 in 10 is from Nevada.
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