Harry Zernike Photography

PROJECTS: BOOM TOWN

The city of Las Vegas, and its surrounding suburbs, is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in North America. Federal lands, auctioned to developers, are being turned at a dizzying pace from dusty, inhospitable desert to acres of houses, shopping centers, schools and golf courses.

As many as 6000 people move to Las Vegas and Clark County every month. They are drawn from all over the US by the American Dream, re-written for the 21st century: The promise of home ownership at low prices, and the prospect of wealth and riches- mined from the gambling and entertainment deposits of more than 30 million visitors each year.

Las Vegas‘ existence depends on water from the Colorado River, stored behind the Hoover Dam in Lake Mead. The river‘s water is shared by allotment among seven western states, and two Mexican states. Downstream from Las Vegas, it provides over half of the water used by the cities of Phoenix, San Diego, and Los Angeles. The river is so over taxed that only a trickle reaches its mouth in the Gulf of California. Despite these limitations on the most basic of natural resources, the Las Vegas Valley continues to be developed. It is difficult not to question how long such growth can be sustained.

  
"...A new house gets built here on average every 20 minutes, and even that is not enough to keep up with the convoy of moving vans rolling into town."-The New York Times, May 30, 2004
   
"Growth right now is simply unmanageable. You can’t build the roads fast enough, we’re opening a school every month. Until you have seen those places that you thought were so far out in the desert you’d never want to go, all of a sudden being small cities in and of themselves, you can’t imagine how quickly this has happened."-Judge Gerry Hardcastle, from an interview on nytimes.com/lasvegas
     
  
   
  
"One could say that the age of great expectations was inaugurated at Hoover Dam- a fifty-year flowering of hopes when all things appeared possible. And one could say that, amid the salt encrusted sands of the river's dried-up delta, we began to founder on the Era of Limits"-Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner, 1986
     
  
   
  
     
  
   
  
     
  
   
  
     
  
"Ours was the first and will doubtless be the last party of whites to visit this profitless locale." -Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives, on sailing up the Colorado River to a point near the present location of Las Vegas, in 1857 (from Cadillac Desert)