Vegas

Because we have family there, I have ended up spending a lot of time over the last few years in Vegas. I don't gamble and have adopted the attitude of the locals so I avoid the Strip. Against all odds, I find the city to have a certain undeniable charm.

1. Yes, the existence of Vegas at its current size is an affront to God and a sign of the hubris of man. Stipulated. It's in the middle of the desert, for one. Spend enough time in various American deserts and you'll recognize some differences: Phoenix is similar, but is such an eerie red that an incoming flight does feel, briefly, like you might be landing on Mars. Vegas is just brown. The city had water use issues before the current ones, and a flight in from the east lets you see just how depleted Lake Mead is for yourself. It's not that no one should live there, just many fewer people than currently do.

On the other hand, "an affront to God and a sign of the hubris of man" is a reasonable description of a lot of places humans live. Berlin and Washington DC are both built on swamps; New Orleans and the Netherlands (and lots of other places) are infill, reclaimed land, and elaborate systems to keep water away from places technically below sea level; Miami in a lot of places is poorly built on a sinking foundation; we inhabit lots of places too cold or too hot to survive without extensive environmental manipulation; most cities now are designed around cars. The disadvantage of Vegas here is that it is new so it's considerably harder to pretend it has always been this way.

2. It also has the problems inherent to any growing city in the US, specifically that horizontal growth will continue for as long as there's money to fund it, and money can always be found for horizontal growth. Vegas sprawls out. But I've seen actual uninhabitable desert turned into planned communities far away from Phoenix for people craving the exurb lifestyle (like, across the street is miles of desert and a railway in the distance), and here in NC we have been trading out forest for subdivisions since I arrived 20+ years ago. (10 years ago, we briefly looked at a house that backed up on a forest adjacent to a major road; I told the realtor I liked the house but was worried that the land would eventually be developed; he told me it was too hilly and too close to a flood plane to ever be developed; it is now a subdivision.) 

3. Even with all this, the city has a certain charm I find hard to deny: it has streets in a grid-like orientation, it has endless strip malls and subdivisions each of which were certainly intended to be as far into the desert as anyone would go; I am there at most twice a year and every time it's a little different because of the construction. So tooling around the city reminds me, fondly, of my misspent youth riding around all day in cars with my friends. So much of it is No Place, but my hometown was a No Place, too, and I love it still.

The mountains and nature areas are real, substantial, and interesting; all those strip malls contain a wide variety of world cuisines to support various populations that have made Vegas home; the city loves a diner (LA-style, with varying levels of Mexican or Mexican-American authenticity). Many of these benefits are more theoretical than actualized; the family will put up with a long afternoon at the bird sanctuary or lion habitat but not go hiking in the mountains; palates are limited and so, therefore, are dining options; but they remain there all the same--Lotus of Siam will be there waiting for us when the time is right, and so will Red Rock Canyon.