Las Vegas Perspective offers portrait of ‘many communities’

Jeremy Aguero said his favorite part of the 148-page 2012 Las Vegas Perspective book is the section on demographics. It says so much about Las Vegas.

Of the valley's nearly 2 million residents, 46.8 percent are white, 30 percent are Hispanic, 10 percent are black and 8.7 percent are Asian. Forty-five percent of voters are registered Democrats, 33.2 percent are Republican and 16.3 percent are nonpartisan.

Average age is 35.6 years and median household income is $54,255. Nearly 30 percent of residents have a high school diploma or equivalent, and 24.7 percent have some college, but no degree.

Newcomers who are single tend to live in the central part of Las Vegas; married couples tend to live in the suburbs.

"What occurs to me is we are not one community. We are many communities," Aguero, principal of Applied Analysis, said Tuesday at the 32nd annual Las Vegas Perspective, a comprehensive publication on Southern Nevada's community, business and industry, real estate, retail and tourism.

"We have 2 million people, and it's the same 500 people you see every day at work, at Starbucks, at the doctor's office, the store, at church," Aguero said.

People continue to move to Las Vegas for the quality of life, he said. Summers are a little hot, winters a little cold, and we don't have seasons like other parts of the country, but weather is still the main attraction, even if some want to call it cliché, Aguero said.

One of the questions in the 2012 Perspective: Has growth been good for me personally?

More than half agree that growth is good, while 40 percent disagree. The bottom line is newcomers to Las Vegas generate about $1 billion more in spending every year, Aguero said. A lot of them are retirees who don't take a job, own their home outright and spend their money on food and entertainment.

"We should turn Las Vegas into Jurassic Park," Aguero said.

The cover of the 2012 Las Vegas Perspective shows a tachometer above the Strip skyline, redlining at 4,000 revolutions per minute. That symbolizes how the Las Vegas economy was running at its peak.

The economy is transitioning, Aguero said, but it's still in gear and moving forward.

"The good news is consumers are consuming again," Aguero told about 300 business and community leaders at the Four Seasons. "Taxable sales are up 6.3 percent in the last 12 months and every major category is showing an increase."

With the unemployment rate hovering around 13 percent over the last two years, people are still concerned about job availability, but there's a disconnect between job creation and unemployment, Aguero said.

The economy has added 9,500 jobs over the past year, though construction and government sectors of employment continue to slide to their lowest level since the 1980s.

"We've given people every reason to leave this community and yet they stayed," Aguero said. "We gave businesses reason to fail, and yet they're still here."

Guest speaker Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, said Las Vegas has survived the "cataclysmic decline" in home prices and is on the mend.

"Regarding the Las Vegas market, one can say it is falling, but the rate of decline is minimal and the last three quarters you can see it's moving sideways," Yun said as he showed graphs of home prices.

"Las Vegas is clearly ground zero for the housing bubble and the painful crash, but there are some encouraging signs despite the strangeness in the marketplace," he said, citing an increase in January and February home sales from a year ago and 15 percent decrease in inventory.

Home affordability is the best it's been in 30 years, new-home inventory is at 40-year lows, yet builders have not reacted to market conditions.

Copies of the 2012 Las Vegas Perspective, sponsored in part by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, are available for $50 through Applied Analysis (info@appliedanalysis.com).

Contact reporter Hubble Smith at hsmith@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0491.