Best or worst?

Sunday, Jan. 9, 2000 | 8:52 a.m.

Southern Nevada was the best of places or the worst of places to be last year depending on who is doing the studying, ranking or rating.

Generally speaking, the ratings Southern Nevada snared show it's a good place to open a business, find a job or visit.

They also showed that it's not such a good place for raising children and that it has among the nation's highest rates for smoking, high school dropouts, teen pregnancy and suicide.

Ratings released last year show Las Vegas made at least 20 lists or ratings in topics ranging from the health of its population to the health of its economy to whether it's a good place to ride a bike or walk.

And the rankings already have started this year. Earlier this week Ladies' Home Journal announced its list of the 200 best cities for women to live.

Las Vegas ranked 83rd in evaluating qualities of life, pay scales, job markets, schools, child care, health care and the number of women in government.

The city has become one of the most-ranked, rated and studied places in the country.

"When I first started working here I was inundated by studies, indicators, rankings, lists," said Robert Parker, a UNLV sociology professor who has lived here almost 10 years.

"And it seemed like every trend was some lifestyle thing where we are worst," Parker said.

Claudia Collins, a sociologist who works with the Clark County Extension Service, says that's a sure sign Southern Nevada is growing and prospering. Marketing machines can't wait to put it on some list and pick at its feats and foibles.

And most of the ratings are poorly researched bunk, she said.

"It's not scientific study. It's skimming across the top. They're jealous," said Collins, who is co-author of a newly released book called "Las Vegas: The Social Production of an All-American City."

Deciding whether a particular ranking is good can be like trying to answer that question about the glass being half full or half empty.

For example, in a tourism study released last year Las Vegas ranked second nationally as a town people said they would most enjoy visiting.

Good news for the tourism industry. Bad news for residents who don't want another single two-legged beast with a pulse to "discover" Las Vegas -- even for a couple of days.

That's the trouble with surveys and polls. They can mean totally different things to different people, Collins said.

"Any time you have numbers you can interpret them a number of different ways," she said.

It's important to look behind the numbers and see where the information came from, how it was gathered and how it was divided, she said.

For instance Nevada has long been accused of having the nation's highest suicide rate. But in her book, Collins says at least 14 percent of the suicides attributed to Nevada are the deaths of nonresidents who are visiting or have lived here a very short time.

If those deaths were deleted, she said, Nevada's rate would be closer to that of other Western states. Collins says she isn't trying to minimize the problem of suicide. Western states still lead the nation in suicide rates.

She simply wants people to understand where they come from. In her book Collins writes that one local counselor said people tend to see Las Vegas as a promised land and become despondent when they discover their internal problems followed them here. The reason for the higher rate may have nothing to do with living here a long time.

Even U.S. Census Bureau figures can show different pictures of the Las Vegas Valley's population growth depending on how federal demographers slice the map.

Census figures released in the middle of last year rated Henderson as the fastest-growing town of 100,000 or more. Also earning fastest-growing honors was the Las Vegas metropolitan area, which according to the census bureau includes parts of Nye County and northern Arizona.

Clark County, however, was listed as the nation's fifth fastest-growing county.

From a policy standpoint it can matter which area ranks where, said Jeff Hardcastle, a Clark County senior planner who takes the helm as Nevada's state demographer later this month.

Population distribution helps local government officials figure out who picks up the tab for roads, dust mitigation or other infrastructure costs, Hardcastle said.

And it matters for another, more visceral reason.

"People tend to take some civic pride in their sense of place," he said.

Still, it seems like picky parsing when the dust cloud created by construction settles over the whole valley or the line of traffic looks like it stretches to Mexico, Collins and Parker agreed. Most urban planning is done regionally, they said.

Still, there is merit to looking at sections of the valley rather than lumping it as a single region, Parker said.

For instance a study that shows the Las Vegas Valley has gained more than a dozen parks and museum-quality public libraries doesn't give the whole picture. It also must show that the new parks were built only in the newest, upscale neighborhoods -- not in the city of Las Vegas -- and that many of the new libraries are understaffed and understocked, Parker said.

That kind of information is more significant than whether Las Vegas ranked first or 10th or 21st in building parks.

"That's very important to the quality of life for people who live here -- to go out and get the city off their backs in a park," he said.

If anything, ratings and rankings can help Nevadans decide how they want to grow. A study by the Progressive Policy Institute, a private think tank based in Washington, D.C., said the state was among the best in creating new jobs last year. But the same study also points out that very few of those jobs were in highly skilled areas.

According to the institute, Nevada is near or at the bottom nationally when it comes to the amount of technology in schools, the number of civilian scientists and engineers and the numbers of managers, professionals and technicians in the work force.

Parker said rankings like that should be a wake-up call.

"We have mostly low-wage, service, low-skilled jobs here," he said.

Discrepancies in surveys about similar topics show many ratings are more about marketing Las Vegas than fixing what's wrong with it, the sociologists said.

The half-dozen rankings that named Southern Nevada one of the country's top retirement spots in the past couple of years can be directly connected to its having the fastest-growing aging population.

"They reinforce the people who are thinking of moving here and it reinforces to the one who already moved here that it was a good decision," said Collins, who specializes in the area of aging studies. "It's marketing, and we're the best at it," she said. "We marketed ourselves when there was nothing to market. We had a tourism population revolving around the Hoover Dam. They'd go out there in the dust and the desert.

"It was 1930," Collins said. "We didn't even have sidewalks."

But what the rankings are selling is a facade, said Parker, who has done in-depth study on the effects of the gambling culture on youth.

Being economically viable still doesn't make Las Vegas a great place to live. What's being built here won't last, he said.

"It's very superficial, very on the surface," he said. "There are lots of other things we should be paying attention to. It's the quality of life for the people who live here."

In December the Health Network and Public Health Resource Group said Las Vegas was 11th worst in the nation in its percentage of unhealthy people. Nearly one in three residents has some kind of health problem such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes or chronic disease, the survey says.

And the Nevada Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey says Nevada's population has one of the nation's highest smoking rates, is above the national obesity rate and is more sedentary than average, said Jeanne Palmer, health education manager for the Clark County Health District.

But Palmer said that same survey shows Nevada's infant mortality rate is lower than the national average and that women here are better about getting their scheduled mammograms, she added.

She said people need to consider where the numbers come from and make their own decision on what's best or worst.

Studies and the rankings that come from them don't always use the most recent information, Palmer said. Current per capita rates of diseases often are based on population figures that are two to three years old.

Even local officials can hardly keep track of how many people are moving here, she said, and that makes it tough to come up with rates of anything that are totally accurate for national purposes.

"I'm not saying we don't have any health problems because we do, and they're some serious ones," Palmer said. "We do have high rates of coronary heart disease and diabetes."

But high rates of coronary heart disease and diabetes are typical in older populations, she added. Considering Southern Nevada has the nation's fastest-growing population of people 60 and older, that's not surprising.

Yet in the long run it really doesn't matter whether a region is 11th worst, fifth worst or the very worst. Palmer says such ratings are useful in showing trends and problems.

And in the Las Vegas Valley, people might want to think about adopting healthier lifestyles in 2000.

"Quit smoking. That's probably the No. 1 thing people could do," Palmer said.

Parker and Collins agree that Las Vegas is being listed and studied more because it is growing so fast. But while Collins says the added attention shows Las Vegas is growing up, Parker said it shows Las Vegas is just growing out.

No matter how many subdivisions it builds or retirees it attracts, Las Vegas can never be truly compared to other metropolitan areas, he said.

The gaming and entertainment culture that created and sustains Las Vegas does not exist in other cities. They may have legalized gambling, but not to the extent Las Vegas does. That alone makes ratings that toss Las Vegas into the regular mix suspect, Parker said.

"If there were some common denominator, that would make sense," he said. "But there's no other city really like this."

If anything, he said, Las Vegas is most closely aligned with New Orleans, which has a huge emphasis on service jobs, indulgent behavior and "a great distinction between the haves and have-nots."

"But how many New Orleanses and Las Vegases do we need in this country?" he said.

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