No limits to really bad taste

We're talking Vegas, baby, Vegas, and the NYT concludes in its headlne that "Too many hotels are not enough." With a 95 percent weekend occupancy rate - and an astounding 90 percent weekday rate - you can see why there's a hotel construction boom in Sin City. The latest and most spectacular effort is MGM's CityCenter project, which borders the Strip, covers 67 acres and will include a 4,000-room hotel, a convention center, a half million square feet of retail space and 2,700 condominium units. Y'know, real cozy. Fueling all this building are aging, prosperous boomers entering the empty-nest years.

And contrary to some predictions, the opening of American Indian casinos and other gambling outposts in more than 30 states has not hurt Las Vegas. Far from it. The smaller, more prosaic gambling halls stretched across the country have actually helped the boom, casino executives say, serving as a kind of a feeder system for Las Vegas as people gain a taste for gambling and then aspire to a touch of the big time. The soaring popularity of poker has also helped drive growth as the game has drawn a younger crowd to the city.

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“Las Vegas has morphed from a place that is simply a casino box with rooms to rent for 23 bucks a night,” said William P. Weidner, the president of Las Vegas Sands, the parent company of the Venetian. “It is now a place with mixed-used developments which take advantage of the new Las Vegas, a multiday-stay destination and a place where increasingly people want to live.”