Las Vegas Delenda Est
Landing in Las Vegas in August, it feels like the desert is trying to reject you like a bad organ. Or maybe dry heaving to avoid ingesting some poison, like a middle-aged sales executive whose stomach still turns at the smell of tequila thanks to one bad night in her sorority thirty years ago. The roiling columns of hot air coming off the desert buffet plane to try and deter landing. They almost always fail, unfortunately for both you and for the desert.
After three hours in that place, forsaken by all benevolent spirits and good sense, any reasonable person will start having vivid fantasies about it being reclaimed by the desert. It is a deeply immoral city and if we’re ever to live in a just world, it needs to be leveled by some great cataclysm and then buried by the sands. That it has been allowed to survive and metastasize for as long as it has is a stain on humanity’s collective soul.
I want to be clear that it’s not the booze or the sex that I object to. Those are noble elements of the human experience and you won’t hear me say a bad word about either of them after my hangover burns off. Rather, the original sins of Sin City are its antihuman design and the existential horror of its location. Simply put, Las Vegas should not be, and while it exists it serves only to immiserate and torment its occupants and visitors.
Las Vegas must be destroyed.
In order to understand why, we should talk about what makes a good city and why we have cities in the first place. Cities exist primarily as habitats for human beings. This means they should be shaped such that they promote and sustain human flourishing. They need to be appropriately situated in locations that humans can live in sustainably. They should foster individual and collective growth. They should reflect the ways in which humans live good lives by fostering community, health, education, shelter, and play.
The best cities do this organically, growing over time with their population in an ecological relationship with its inhabitants over many generations. Technocratically planned cities are always inferior, but those that are then responsive to their on-going populations (such as Washington, D.C.) or that only have brief, feverish bouts of top-down planning (Paris) can still thrive. But whether heavily planned or largely organic, good cities must provide a healthy ecology for their residents.
Las Vegas supports none of the elements of a healthy city. In fact, it is both naturally predisposed and intentionally designed to do the opposite in every case.
To understand how dire Las Vegas is and why it needs to be obliterated, let’s focus first on its more noticeable, though arguably venial, sin: its intentionally anti-human design.
The defining element of Las Vegas architecture is, of course, the Casino Hotel. These temples of Capitalism are built primarily to extract material wealth from people at every turn and only for people to reside in as a secondary effect. If casino owners could siphon just as much money without providing beds, they would.
This objective means that they are intentionally hard to navigate or relax in. On a recent, forced trip to Las Vegas, I had the displeasure of staying in the Wynn. I was in the Encore tower despite the fact that no encore was needed or desired to the original garish obelisk. On the night I arrived, I decided to find the conference room that I was meant to be at first thing the next morning. Without walking outside and while trying as best I could to follow the available signage and maps, I walked two miles without finding it.
I asked several employees on the casino floor. None had any clue where I needed to go. I eventually found myself near a concierge. On asking the concierge, who was a pleasant and quick-witted woman in her mid-50s, she had never heard of the room. We scoured a map together and, on locating it, she directed me down a long, empty labyrinth of broad hallways. After twenty minutes, I finally arrived at the room, took note of it, and walked back to my room.
This whole fiasco had taken over an hour, and that is very much an intentional byproduct of the design of these casinos. They are designed to disorient their occupants and be hard to navigate, to maximize the amount of time that people spend wandering among tuned-alike slot machines and faux-fancy cocktail bars.
The architecture of the places is anti-human by design. Not only do they disorient us spatially, but temporally as well. Several of them have long hallways with fake daytime sky scenes painted on their vaulted ceilings. There are no clocks to be found anywhere in public spaces. The designers want to make sure that your body and mind do not know if it is night or day and to keep you awake as long as possible.
Of course once you leave the casino, you are immediately confronted with the fact that Las Vegas as a city is unnavigable by mere humans. You cannot walk, roll, or bike anywhere one might want to go in the city. The clear preference given to cars has led to a civic design oriented around highways and broad, half-dozen-or-more lane megastreets. What overpasses there are are typically either exposed to the weather, or between casinos of shared ownership that take you far out of your way.
Waiting at a light in the August heat, it is clear that pedestrian traffic is deprioritized. Even at smaller, uncontrolled intersections, the drivers are arrogant to the point of menacing. Once off the strip itself, walking becomes nearly impossible. Low zoning and a preference for sprawl means that anything worth going to is miles apart. Mass transit consists of a few bus lines, many with half hour or more lead times and stops far from anything one might want to visit. Anyone who wants to actually navigate the city as a dignified human being is likely to be run over, die of heat stroke, or go to jail for a rage-induced crime of violence long before they get to their destination.
Of course, most of the people who experience Vegas in any given year don’t live there. Las Vegas, prior to this year’s fascism-induced tourist slump, attracted about forty million visitors per year. This is twenty visitors for every actual resident of the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which includes outlying communities like Henderson. For some context, this ratio of visitors to metro area residents is ten times higher than New York City.
And the primary mode of relationship between Las Vegas and its visitors is an unrelenting attempt to fleece them at every turn. From the centrality of casinos, to the surcharges on hotel rooms, to offensively high prices for food, drink, and entertainment, Las Vegas is the world’s greatest capitalist parasite. This effect extends beyond simply sticker prices, however. Las Vegas has stripped the visitor experience of anything required for a comfortable travel or stay and turned it into a premium purchase.
In my most recent stay, I bought two bottles of IPA at one of the in-casino convenience stores (at a cost of approximately one dollar per fluid ounce of beer) and returned to my room only to realize that there wasn’t a bottle opener in my room. (Nor, of course, was there a usable fridge in the room.) I suddenly realized why the convenience store I’d just been in so prominently sold novelty bottle openers by the till.
Fortunately, I am an extremely experienced beer drinker and retain the gifts of growing up in poverty, so I merely punched the beers open on the side of the trash can, causing part of the fake-leather plastic covering to peel away.
That lack of a bottle opener in an ostensibly upscale hotel room and the faux-leather covering of the desk-side trashcan are two parts of a larger element of the Las Vegas rot: the simulacra of luxury. Las Vegas at all times has a veneer that is meant to look luxurious. Or rather, it’s meant to look like the median American conception of the notion of luxury. The interiors have cheap plaster moldings and filigrees, the buildings are immense, there are fountains and fake gilding galore.
None of the actual elements that make one feel luxurious are ever present. The appearance is paint-chip deep and meant to evoke the sensation that one is in a luxurious place, without ever actually affording ease, comfort, wealth, or quality. In fact, Vegas is designed to be antithetical to all of these qualities while still maintaining the surface image of luxury.
This bone-deep fakeness is not accidental. Rather, it is ontological. It is one expression of the deeper, mortal sin of Las Vegas: that no city should exist there in the first place.
For a city to exist, it first needs a local, geographical reason to be there, and the ability to support itself in the local ecology. Las Vegas has no natural resources. It cannot support itself from local agriculture or water tables. About half of the economy of Las Vegas is from tourism, and those tourists are not visiting for any purpose that is inherent in the region or the history of the city. They are coming because that is where we have decided to create a massive zone of regulatory arbitrage.
More than having no purpose for being where it is, it is intentionally sited in a place that is antithetical to human life. Were it not for one of the largest dams in the world, Las Vegas would have died out to drought decades ago. Were it not for modern air conditioning, the city would be intolerable for half the year. Were it not for modern air travel, it would be so remote as to be logistically infeasible to visit for all but perhaps the middle class of Los Angeles, and (to damn with faint praise) they already live in a notably better city.
Lest you think that Las Vegas’ continued existence is some grand story of human survival against the odds to create something grand or beautiful, I defy anyone to look at the stark, sweeping beauty of the mountains and canyons that surround it and come to any other conclusion than that Las Vegas is an aesthetic blight upon the landscape. Its primary function in the vista is to mar it with a few spikes of chintzy faux-splendor, surrounded by miles and miles and grubby suburban sprawl.
It has no meaningful connections to the other cities of the American west. It provides no raw materials for an industrial town nearby. It conducts no trade to speak of with any other metropolis other than to take advantage of their visiting citizens. It doesn’t even have a twin with which it could have a rivalry, which it would surely lose. There is no Portland to its Seattle, no St. Louis to its Chicago, no Boston to its New York.
In fact, Las Vegas actively harms other cities in its region and across the globe. This isolated resource suck in the desert will devastate local communities by draining aquifers and polluting the air with its massive road networks and suburban sprawl. It contributes about 7 times more CO2 to global warming per capita than London. It has a murder rate almost five times higher than New York City. It is a useless, sweltering, festering gash in an otherwise beautiful and austere desert landscape. Its very existence harms its residents, visitors, nearby communities, and the entire planet.
Ultimately, Las Vegas isn’t actually a city. It’s the simulacra of what a city might be if it were imagined from first principles by amoral aliens trying to maximize human misery over the long run without getting caught breaking any laws. Its nature as a bad imitation of an imagined city is seen in both the small details and on the larger scale. Under its trappings, Las Vegas is not a city. Las Vegas is a miserable pile of sins trying to convince you that it deserves to exist.
And like all living lies, it will die someday. It is sustained only by massive effort and government largesse in the form of massive civil engineering projects and regulatory favoritism. Like all sick beasts, though, we have a choice. Do we let it wither and putrefy and sicken the world around it? Or do we, as human stewards of our urban centers, put it out of its misery?
Its death could be quick and relatively painless. We stop subsidizing its water and power. We support those who need assistance to go live in a real city (even the blighted asphalt planes of Los Angeles would be an improvement). We force the casino owners and real estate developers to pay for their pollution and the roads that feed the beast. We remove its monopolies by loosening laws on gambling and vice across the land. We remove the social subsidies that allow this pretender of a city to continue to squat in its own filth in the desert.
Then we all watch from afar as it dies in its sleep and the desert sands sweep in to bury the body.