Now We're Getting Serious

The very short street I live on in northeast Los Angeles and the Las Vegas Strip suddenly have something in common.

Sure, the Strip is loaded with dozens of massive casino resorts on both sides of a street that, in most places, pedestrians can't even cross. The modest block-long Dove Drive has seven or eight houses on it (depending on how you're counting – more on that in a moment), and neighborhood cats and dogs roam freely. But today, it and the Strip have at least one thing that's the same.

When we moved into our house two years ago, construction was just getting underway on a new house on the lot next door. Every morning in those first months we were awakened by construction workers screaming to each other in multiple languages. The cheerful contractor promised us he would be quick about his work, pay for our cars to be washed since he was the one getting them dusty and even do the landscaping in our side yard adjacent to that house since it didn't make sense to start anything there until he was done.

Then one day, when the house looked to my untrained eyes like it was about two-thirds completed, nobody showed up. That was more than a year and a half ago. Still, nobody's shown up. A brush pokes up out of the paint bucket where one worker left it the day he walked away; scaffolding clings to the back wall.

The handful of times I've called that once-cheerful contractor to find out when he'd be back, his answer always has been, “Two weeks.”

Boyd Gaming's version of “two weeks” is “three or four quarters.” That's how long company officials said, in a conference call with investment bankers last month, that its Echelon project on the Strip would be delayed because of problems with the economy.

So far, Boyd's spent $500 million on the five hotel-resort properties and the 750,000 square feet of meeting and convention space it planned to open in late 2010. Yet today, it's more or less like that unfinished house next to mine – a blemish on what we still hope will one day be the perfect street to live on.

There are unfinished houses in millions of American neighborhoods today, but in Las Vegas' fanciest, highest-profile neighborhood? Maybe there is something to this economic downturn business after all.

Michael Hart is editor-in-chief of Tradeshow Week. He can be reached at hartm@reedbusiness.com.