Made in Las Vegas

All but two states—Utah and Hawaii—have legalized gambling in some form: bingo halls, off-track betting parlors, Indian-reservation casinos, state lotteries. Casino gambling, once restricted to Nevada and New Jersey, has spread to Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Mississippi, and Louisiana. This proliferation is likely to continue. Despite New Orleans' well-publicized failure, a number of cities, including Detroit, are planning casinos as tools for downtown revitalization. Atlantic City is poised at the edge of a major building expansion. Meanwhile, Las Vegas, the original gambling Mecca, shows no signs of slowing down, let alone aging. With some thirty million visitors a year, the Nevada city has joined Orlando, Florida as America's chief destination for tourists. The Las Vegas metropolitan area economy is booming. From June 1995 to June 1996, Las Vegas led the country with an 8.49 percent gain in employment (compared to 2.1 percent nationally). Some three thousand people move here every month, attracted by well-paid casino work, service and manufacturing jobs, and employment in the building trades—six billion dollars of construction is said to be planned for the next three years.