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This precarious moment--early on a Tuesday afternoon--I could not be more unconcerned that my room reservation has been screwed up. In this city hurt hardest by recession, partly because it built too many hotel rooms, I smile at the man behind the desk, sure that I am about to be upgraded to a presidential suite. Then I'm told there are no more rooms of any kind available at The Hotel. When I go to meet a friend by the pool at the Mandalay Bay, it's too crowded to find chairs. All the price-cutting has succeeded: the town is full. This recession business is totally not working for me.
As I turn out of my hotel's full parking lot, veering onto the Strip, I come across something rarely seen in Vegas: frozen construction projects. I pass cranes abandoned at the site of the Echelon, a huge, multibillion-dollar project of four hotels that is now just three buildings of nine floors of concrete and steel beams sitting idly on some of the most expensive real estate in the country. I pass three more abandoned sites--63 empty steel floors of the Fontainebleau, a sad unfinished shell that was supposed to be Caesars Palace's Octavius Tower and two cranes halted on a structure that was supposed to be a St. Regis condo building. I then drive up to where the New Frontier was razed to build a resort modeled on New York City's Plaza Hotel. It's just a dirt wasteland, so ugly that Wynn planted a row of trees so his hotel guests wouldn't stare at it from their windows. I never realized an economic defeat could look so much like a military one.
Just as Americans did with their houses, casino owners borrowed way too much money to build hotels that were way too big. Economists like Yale's Robert Shiller have warned that the next big wave of failures in the U.S. recession will be in commercial real estate--and once again, Las Vegas is headlining. Even worse, the bottom fell out as casino owners were building, so a number of them couldn't replace construction loans with the financing that was once readily available to complete and open hotel-condo-casino projects. Deutsche Bank foreclosed on the $3.9 billion Cosmopolitan Hotel; only it couldn't find a buyer, so the bank is in the odd position of owning a casino--though given the way banks have operated in this decade, that seems like a logical business extension. Meanwhile, Station Casinos, Tropicana and Herbst Gaming have disproved the adage that you can't lose money owning a casino. They borrowed big and went bankrupt.