Vegas Wins Subprime

Congratulations, fellow gamblerholics and people who moved to Vegas to get started on your career in the adult movies: we win subprime. According to all the news numbers, Las Vegas stands at the top of the US market of housing price drops.

I remember wandering around in Phoenix's totally awesome Copper Square, which is kind of like urban shopping, except more sexlike. I walked into a pawn shop that was closing its doors and holding a huge liquidation sale. As I browsed musical instruments and shotguns, the clerk made small talk with me. And by small talk, I mean I elicited his confession that Las Vegas was totally growing faster than Phoenix. I forced him to say, "We're number two". Which made me giggle in the store, because I thought he was talking about poop.

If you drive down some random streets on the south side of Las Vegas, you'll find millions of crackerbox McMansion communities, each development of which has about two residents. All the rest of the houses are totally and completely empty, because nobody actually wants to live in Las Vegas except for meth junkies, alcoholics, and aspiring transgendereds who are also prostitutes. After the subprime crisis hit, all the construction companies went "oh noes!" and watched as their gigantic housing projects did not form Voltron, as well as not getting any residents ever.

Personally, I think the solution is simple. Every single one of those houses should be turned into one of the three things we can't seem to get enough of in the valley: convenience stores with slot machines, music venues with slot machines, and casinos with cigarette girls (slot machines optional). If there's one thing Vegas has an awful lot of, it's old people who live their entire lives in front of the spinny flashy money eaters; why not open more venues to cater to them? Just like real estate, you can never have too many places to put video poker.