Robert E. Lang

Well, you know, everybody thinks, well, I'm doing everything right. The region is booming. The houses are selling. The jobs are growing. And, in fact, what happens is that if you grow in just one way, let's say tourism, and then you face a contraction in tourism, then you pay a bigger price than you would if you had more broadly grown or you'd grown at a slower rate and had a sense of ... having to hustle a bit for those jobs.

It wasn't long ago that Las Vegas was given up as dead — another sunburned city that had become the new Detroit. It was easy to write this city off.