Worth my time: Las Vegas transplants

I didn't spend a lot of time reading a lot of fascinating Vegas stories this past week. There are a couple of things I have wanted to check out, but never got to them. 

One thing that stood out was this article I stumbled upon via Yahoo. This article isn't really stunning, but it speaks to a common phenomena. People who work in fancy, expensive tourist destinations may have a hard time living where they work. Not exactly shocking, I know. 

It's easy to work in the Beverly Hills service industry and commute to and from your job, although I have it on good authority it's not exactly cheap to live in Burbank. 

If you live in Hawaii, however, it's not so easy to commute to work from a modest suburb, for obvious reasons. This article notes that folks, particularly descendants of Hawaiian natives who don't have extraordinary wealth, flee to the contiguous 48 for its more reasonable cost of living. And the most popular place they choose to congregate? Yep, Las Vegas. 

There is a bit of irony in this phenomena. The wealthiest of tourists tend to flock to Las Vegas Strip properties. Yet the fancy houses and high-end real estate isn't found in the shadows of Caesars Palace. 

From my experience, you can live in modest, and in some cases less than modest, housing a few blocks off the Vegas strip, as there's not a lot of high end real estate, other than maybe high-rise condos, to be found around the strip, not that I know of anyway. 

My buddy lives in a nice apartment complex south of the Tropicana. He can walk to the south Strip casinos, or the Pinball Hall of Fame, without a lot of effort, if it's not 110F when he does it. Yeah, it takes more than five minutes, but it's quite walkable in the evening. I've been to his apartment, and took a picture of the strip from his apartment balcony. It's a quiet area, if you don't mind noise from the nearby airport. I didn't notice airport noise while inside his apartment one November evening. But I imagine he deals with it. 

If I moved to Vegas, I'm not sure where I'd want to live, but you could do a lot worse than my buddy's apartment complex. 

If I lived in Vegas, perhaps I'd live this close to the Luxor, and the abandoned Skyvue wheel poles, as seen on the left side of this photo.