{"id":9738,"date":"2026-03-31T17:15:33","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T17:15:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparkdb.com\/blog\/?p=9738"},"modified":"2026-03-31T17:15:33","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T17:15:33","slug":"build-it-and-they-will-come-las-vegas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparkdb.com\/blog\/build-it-and-they-will-come-las-vegas\/","title":{"rendered":"Build It and They Will Come: Las Vegas"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the first in an exploratory series looking at destination development success stories.\u00a0 From the smallest FECs to the largest master planned cities, our business is the business of placemaking, of creating something from nothing, of building something so people will come.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

In general, while acknowledging the fact that looking for lessons in the past is fraught with survivorship bias, narrative fallacy, and confounding factors, we believe there still may be some durable knowledge to be gained.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With that in mind, this introductory post is about Las Vegas.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 It’s one of the world’s premier tourist cities: home to half of the 30 largest hotels in the world<\/a>, several of the United States’ highest-grossing restaurants<\/a>, and is the second-highest grossing gaming jurisdiction in the world after Macau.\u00a0 Its 40 million annual visitors are enough to place it alongside cities like Bangkok, London, and Paris as among the most visited globally<\/a>.\u00a0 Yet unlike those cities, Las Vegas is a true tourism product.\u00a0 It has 20x more annual tourists than residents (2.4 million) in its metropolitan area.\u00a0 And this population growth has been driven by tourism too – a century ago, fewer than 5,000 people lived in all of southern Nevada.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Note: here we discuss the success of “Las Vegas” as an entire region, comprising the incorporated cities of (downtown) Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, and Henderson, as well as the unincorporated Clark County “Strip”.\u00a0 It is the Las Vegas Strip that has been the driver of the regional economy, and where appropriate, we distinguish between Las Vegas the “Strip” and Las Vegas’ downtown.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

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“Las Vegas”. The Strip is located to the east of the I-15 in the area roughly between Allegiant Stadium to the south and the Las Vegas Convention Center to the north.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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