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I met Ron and Ricky in Las Vegas in late August 2005. Both African American men were new to the city and recently homeless. They revealed to me the difficulties faced by many new Las Vegas residents who have little savings and who are trying to avoid current and future homelessness. They also showed me the importance of recent technologies being used by homeless people and how Las Vegas’s promises of distraction and entertainment draw both stable and unstable people to the city. The night we met I was walking on the Fremont Street Experience (f se). First developed in 1991, the f se is a four-block-long, canopy-covered pedestrian area adjoining several popular downtown hotel casinos. The seventy-million-dollar canopy, featuring millions of lights and an extensive sound system, provides spectacular shows at night and a misting system during the day (Gottdiener, Collins, and Dickens 1999, 55). This project has helped the old downtown of Las Vegas compete economically with newer “megaresorts” on Las Vegas Boulevard. Ron and Ricky were sitting at an outdoor patio of a Starbucks coffee shop attached to the Golden Nugget casino. The patio lay in an unclear blend of public and private space: a gated metal fence enclosed the patio, but the patio itself was on the f se. I noticed that they were the only two African American men on the patio, that they didn’t have any cups with the Starbucks logo, and that they were using a laptop computer. I asked them if there was a wireless signal outside, as I wanted to use my laptop to check e-mail. “Certainly,” Ron said. I sat near them, and they asked me what I did. I said I was researching homelessness in the city. Operating in the Space Between Homelessness and Tourism R o n a n d R i c k y : : o n e : : 12 : h o me l e s s i n l a s v e g a s “Wow—that’s fantastic,” Ricky replied. “We were homeless for two weeks when we first got out here.” Ricky was thirty-five, from Cincinnati, and had a goatee. He was casually but neatly dressed in a black Star Wars shirt and khaki pants, and he appeared to be in good physical shape. Ron was twenty-nine, clean shaven, heavyset, and dressed in khaki pants and a polo shirt. They told me they’d been in Las Vegas for three weeks and had been homeless for two. Ron said he was a video editor, explaining that their computer was essential to their website and business. While Ron used the computer, Ricky became the more gregarious of the two. “We call this [Las Vegas] the place of geometry—everybody here has an angle,” he said. While they were homeless, Ricky and Ron said, they had protected their laptop by putting it at the bottom of a worthless-looking bag. They slept among bushes, and one of them held onto the bag all night. Even after years of research on homelessness, I had never heard anyone describe how he protected his laptop at night from potential thieves. I asked what brought them to Las Vegas. “We came out here for the opportunity,” Ricky said. “In the Midwest, there [are] no jobs; it’s all industrial. There’s nothing.” I asked about their initial experiences in the city. “We were both working when we were homeless,” Ron said. “Being down there inspired me to try harder.” By “down there,” Ron meant the homeless corridor, where services for homeless persons in Las Vegas are centralized. The homeless corridor is downhill and about one mile north of the f se. The popular Las Vegas Boulevard south, or the tourist corridor, is about five miles away from the homeless corridor. In recent years resort development has increased on Las Vegas Boulevard south (often called the Las Vegas Strip). It is home to twelve of the world’s fifteen largest hotels. Images of these gargantuan hotels and megaresorts are regularly seen in popular U.S. television programs and films. Most of the thirty-five million annual visitors to Las Vegas stay on this part of the Strip. The homeless corridor, by contrast, is in an economically marginal part of the city, has far higher crime rates, and is rarely seen by tourists (Borchard 2000; 2005). Ron explained that they eventually had found a shelter in the home- [18.222.163.31] Project...

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