Learning from Las Vegas

viewpoints working class and immigrant origins. The rise of Las Vegas is, in effect, a mirror image of industrial cities’ long decline. Dependent on gambling and the tourist trade and stricken by a high rate of mortgage foreclosures, Las Vegas is also speculative capitalism writ large. As a tourist, one experiences this in a mildly exploitive way: you can only sit down if you’re eating a meal, buying a drink, or placing a bet. The dominant gaming and tourism industry has a compli- Saturday nights, thousands of people are walking, talking, and gawking, an endless, formless, milling crowd dwarfed by the Bellagio’s fountains, a fake Eiffel Tower, and the replica Coney Island roller coaster and Statue of Liberty. Since nearly a quarter of all visitors to Las Vegas come from southern California, the Strip functions as Los Angeles’s Times Square, offering the thrill of a street carnival with all its strangers, tricksters, and costumed street performers. "UT THE PRIVATIZATION OF THE SIDEWALKS ON the Strip relegates peddlers, “card slappers,” homeless people, and folks selling trinkets to the footbridges, which are controlled by Clark County. Fearing there is too much disorder for tourists to feel safe, the authorities are moving closer to the model of the actual Times Square, which is managed by a business improvement district and bounded by theaters and offices. Outside, the neon fantasy of the Strip anchors the money-making machine of the casinos. Indoors, perpetual night transforms spectacle into speculation: who will “score” tonight? Synecdoche, however, is not destiny. Las Vegans might only think of the Strip if they’re headed to work, but it’s the unifying landmark for anyone else thinking of this desert town. Behind the play of lights is a city whose economy and image are built on tourism, gambling, and sex—a money machine in the desert. Vegas is a Darwinian landscape of modern capitalism and human arrogance. cated relationship with the city. The casino complexes are located in Clark County, outside Las Vegas’s borders, so, though they dominate local politics, these economic powerhouses aren’t under the city government’s control. By being separate from the city, yet clustered together, the hotels gain leverage in the regional economy. They enable visitors to escape normal obligations, while they reap profit and influence from buying up large tracts of relatively inexpensive, undeveloped land in unincorporated areas where they evade public control. The hotels’ autonomy extends to their control of Las Vegas Boulevard, the famous Strip. For many years, the Strip had no sidewalks linking the hotels, and people could not walk from one casino to another. In recent years, the hotels built both sidewalks and footbridges, yet the street is their private space; they offer no benches or lawns for sitting. On a Sunday morning the Strip is mostly empty, but on Sharon Zukin is in the sociology department at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. surviving the odds by matt wray /N A HOT 4UESDAY AFTERNOON IN *UNE OF  ,INDA &LATT A 50-year-old dental receptionist, returned home from her job to find her parents and daughter pulling into the driveway. Her ex-husband was waiting with the news that their son Paul was dead. Paul had gambling debts, and Linda’s first thought was that he had been murdered. But then her husband revealed that Paul had killed himself. He was just 25 years old. As she recounts the story of her son’s brief life and sudden death, Flatt’s voice is steady and calm. But when asked how Paul’s suicide affected her, she whispered, “I was shattered. I never saw it coming.” For several long years after Paul’s death, Flatt relied on the support networks she had developed in the wake of a difficult divorce years earlier. “I felt like a total failure as a mom, but I decided pretty early on that I would survive,” she says. Flatt now works for the Nevada Office of Suicide Prevention 20 contexts.org (NOSP), an entity created by the state legislature in 2005 in RESPONSE TO THE PETITIONING OF CITIZEN ACTIVISTS LIKE WELL ,INDA Flatt. She oversees the operation of the Las Vegas office of the NOSP, promoting community-based suicide prevention efforts primarily in Southern Nevada, but Flatt is the first to admit that she’s an unlikely activist. Raised in a military family, she has the kind of serious, disciplined demeanor that reflects a wellbehaved childhood. A Republican and a regular church-goer, she was, until the death of her son, not one to question the status quo—much less challenge it. Trying to prevent suicides anywhere is a very tricky business, and Flatt’s job is especially daunting: for five decades, Nevada has had one of the highest suicide rates in the nation. The state’s high rate is driven in large part by the extremely high rate of suicide in Las Vegas, where more than 70 percent of Nevadans reside. Vegas has by far the highest suicide rate of any large city in the nation (18.4 per 100,000 residents, about double the national average and fully 16 percent higher than the next highest city). Though the city is known as a travel destination, more than 90 percent of the Las Vegas suicides each year are by residents. Frankly, the odds are heavily stacked against NOSP. The recession that began in 2007 has hit Nevada harder than any other state. The twin engines of its economy—tourism and homebuilding—have sputtered, producing extremely high rates of unemployment, home foreclosure, and personal bankruptcy, all within the context of massive cuts to state spending on services people need most in times of economic trouble. Such forces conspire to push people to leave the state, resulting in even further declines in tax revenues. No longer one of the fastest growing states in the country, Nevada appears to be losing residents to states with more robust labor markets, such as Texas. Hundreds of thousands of residents want to leave to find better opportunities, but because an estimated 80 percent of homeowners owe more on their homes than they are worth, they’re stuck. Being trapped can be a strong motivator, spurring Las Vegas has—by far—the highest suicide rate of any large city in the nation. WINTER 2012 contexts 21 Associated Press individuals to work harder to change their circumstances, but it can also lead to feelings of insecurity, hopelessness, and despair. These are precisely the feelings that could place Las Vegans at an even higher risk for suicide than in the past. Three years after her son’s death, Flatt founded a support group devoted to helping others who had lost someone to suicide. “I was scared to death,” she recalls. “Some who were 22 contexts.org SuperStock/Getty Images grieving were now suicidal themselves and I had no idea how to help them.” After finding that local resources for suicide preVENTION EDUCATION WERE LIMITED SHE JOINED FORCES WITH *ERRY AND Elsie Weyrauch, founders of Suicide Prevention Advocacy Network ( SPANUSA), in an effort to unite local grassroots advocates for suicide prevention. “At some point,” she says, “I asked Elsie WHAT IT MEANT TO BE A @COMMUNITY ORGANIZERv 7EYRAUCHS REPLY still makes Flatt laugh: “Well, it means whatever you want it to MEAN DEARIE
v &LATT SIGNED ON AS A VOLUNTEER LOCAL ORGANIZER AND found, somewhat to her surprise, that she was good at it. In short order, she reached out to a local Republican state senator from her church for help. It was that senator who successfully pushed for the legislation that, ten years later, launched the NOSP. Among its more impressive achievements are the creation of a school-based text messaging support system that provides live crisis intervention for students; annual fundraising walks in eight communities; a statewide epidemiological working group to establish a server-based, comprehensive dataset on completed suicides; training of over 8000 Nevadans in suicide risk assessment; and screening programs that have served over 2,500 youth. NOSP has also helped tribal governments secure funds to reduce methamphetamine-related SUICIDES AND SUCCESSFULLY DEVELOPED DOZENS OF PRIVATEPUBLIC partnerships between the state and non-profit agencies and ORGANIZATIONS DEVOTED TO SOCIAL SERVICES FOR THE YOUNG AND THE elderly. To accomplish all this, the NOSP raised millions of dollars in grants from federal agencies and private foundations. All this with a staff of just four people and state funding of less than $150,000 per year. It is too early to say exactly how the recession will impact Nevada’s suicide rate. But there are some indications that it will climb as the recession grinds on. Preliminary mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics reveal a sharp, 10 percent spike in the rate in 2008 and another (this one 17 percent) in 2010. Historically speaking, these are massive increases (suicide rates typically fluctuate only 2 to 4 percent each year). If this trend continues for another few years, it will effectively reverse the long decline in the suicide rate that has been ongoing since the 1970s. There are good reasons to believe that this could occur, since the impact of the economic recession is likely to reverberate for years even after economic growth returns to THE STATE &OR SOME OF .EVADAS MOST VULNERABLE CITIZENS THE damage will already have been done. However, suicide rates are complex phenomena and notoriously difficult to predict. How it will all turn out is anyone’s guess. To sociologists accustomed to viewing suicide through a Durkheimian lens, the meaning of the statistical trends is clear and unsurprising: compared to other large cities, we say, Las Vegas must be suffering from low levels of social capital and weak social integration and regulation. We’re partially correct: the suicide rate is not likely to come down unless fundamental features of community cohesion are addressed. After years of observing the heroic efforts of Flatt and her colleagues, though, I’m not so sure we’re right. While some of us might find the statistics depressing and adopt a fatalistic tone, Flatt sees them as a call to arms. Numbers aren’t everything—the human spirit does its own kind of math. This is what is unexpected about Las Vegas, something that nearly all outside Residents are not hapless victims of social forces—they organize themselves to resist those very forces. observers fail to grasp. Residents are not hapless victims of social forces beyond their control: led by people like Flatt, they orgaNIZE THEMSELVES TO RESIST THOSE VERY FORCES When I spoke with Flatt in early October of 2011, she was exceptionally busy: just a week earlier, the coroner confirmed that there had been six teen suicides in the past month, a shocking number given that there were only seven in all of 2010. How was she managing this latest crisis? “I’m persevering,” Flatt said, the resolve edging through her voice. “Things keep getting worse and worse. It’s generally such a scary time. We need to be more creative in how we think. And we need to persevere.” Spoken like a true survivor. Matt Wray is in the sociology department at Temple University. He is currently writing a book about the ecological determinants of suicide in Las Vegas, tentatively titled Death in Vegas. WINTER 2012 contexts 23