Sunday, February 17, 2008

The Las Vegas Strip Ignors the Slowing Economy

In today's business section of the Review Journal/Wall Street Journal Sunday was an article entitled "The R Word" describing the effects of a slowing economy here in Las Vegas. Of the three page article, I found the comments of Dick Rizzo, the Western Division chairman of Perini Building Co. comments best reflects the anecdotal evidence I use to time the cycle in our economy. Perini is building CityCenter and Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas and has a backlog of two more huge projects on the way, though Rizzo wouldn't identify them.

"We have a unique perspective into the future because we get invited to meetings two and three years in advance of these programs and I can tell you tha the list is significant," Rizzo said from his Las Vegas Office. "People are still able to justify and finance significant new programs in the next three to five years."

Meanwhile, Las Vegas' employment growth has slowed to 1.1 percent with a total work force of roughly 945,000. And unemployment has crept up to 5.6 percent. Roughly 15,000 jobs were lost in the construction industry, which accounts for 11 percent of total employment, twice the national average. Other posts on this blog point out that the recent construction lay-offs are resulting in
Class - C apartment vacancies reaching 9 percent.

Rizzo siad it's important to distinguish that most of the job losses came from residential construction, not commercial. He tracks the union employment base monthly and said availble manpower for the mostly union crafts people used for Strip construction has increased.

The sheer size of Strip projects adds thousands of workers at each site. CityCenter has 6,000 to 7,000 workers now on site and will peak at 8,000 in mid-2009, Rizzo said.

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