Columnist Hal Rothman: Senior power

Hal Rothman

Saturday, Oct. 15, 2005 | 10:05 a.m.

Hal Rothman, a history professor at UNLV, is a columnist for the Las Vegas Sun.

Editor's note: Today's column is the seventh in an eight-part series on the consequences of growth in the Las Vegas Valley

The pace of growth here has dulled our ability to see its effects on us.

Even though the cost of housing appears to be slowing the increase in population, we've added approximately 70,000 people a year for the last 15 years. This has provided consistent growth at a declining percentage rate as the Las Vegas Valley has grown larger.

We've done less well in figuring out who is coming here and assessing the impact of the needs of different constituencies on the community at large.

But there's an elephant in our living room, and we need to acknowledge it. The valley is fast approaching the dreaded peak-valley-peak population distribution, where a diminishing number of workers in the middle sustain a sizable young population and an equally large cohort of seniors.

It may come as a shock to many to realize that the valley is 25 percent retired and 25 percent Spanish-surnamed. Of course, they're not the same percent.

Retirees are and remain overwhelmingly white, with a sprinkling of blacks that is substantial enough to have made Las Vegas the most integrated black-white city in the nation in the 2000 Census.

Las Vegas has become the first post-integration city in the United States, the first city to experience its growth after legal desegregation removed formal barriers to where people live. Statistical integration belies a far more complicated and less pleasant racial history.

Retirees who lived their working lives in the valley are still rare. In this we resemble Florida or Phoenix, places where people go to retire and where they build communities that are not part of the existing structure.

What we call "age-segregated living," a code for keeping children and teenagers out, follows. This kind of living is obviously appealing or so many people wouldn't do it, but it also isolates an enormous segment of the population from the issues that the valley faces.

Seniors in the United States are the best-organized and most heavily represented group in the electoral process. They vote in great numbers and exert influence greater than their numbers on public policy.

The increase in the cost of living in Clark County has changed who the new retirees are. Unlike the middle-class retirees of a decade ago -- a combination of Rust Belt workers, lower middle-class Southern Californians, federal employees and those who had served in the military -- we've seen a much more white-collar retirement community of late. Skyrocketing housing costs, coupled with the growing desirability of the valley, promises to increase its influence.

But the prominence of the new retirees sets up two potential dilemmas. The first stems from the tendency of retirees of all kinds to vote their interests, which is to say against anything that costs more than they pay right now.

Henderson experienced this in 2002 when voters by a 57 percent to 43 percent majority scuttled a plan to add as many as six new libraries. An owner of a $100,000 home, for example, would have seen his annual tax rate increase from about $18 a year to $32 under the plan. Voting against libraries within walking distance of your home? Seniors are the biggest consumers of library services.

As the population grays, it will become impossible over time for municipalities, counties and states to raise money by referendum.

Seniors will vote their interests, and they will vote down, it appears, almost any kind of expenditure, even ones that serve their own needs, such as hospitals, police and fire protection.

The schools show the other side of the equation. Already, children with Spanish surnames make up more than 40 percent of the population. In the lower grades the numbers are higher. This is the middle class of the future, the people whose prosperity will allow the workers of today to enjoy their own retirement.

Along with seniors, the needs of the young already strain the resources available. Both rightfully demand resources, but as their segments of the population grow, the people who pay most of the bills diminish as a percentage of the community. Where will the dollars come from?

We've seen the consequences of this volatile situation in Japan, where the stagnation that ruined the economic miracle of the rising sun coincided with the aging of the population.

Japan's economic growth has been stymied in the past decade as much by its need to care for its post-work population as by any other single factor.

The same thing is true in Western Europe, where an aging population that receives marvelous social welfare benefits is set up over time to strangle economic productivity.

Despite the vitality of the local economy, this demographic issue poses a long-term threat. Growing populations of seniors and young people increase the pressure on the people in the middle at the same time the weak institutions of Nevada crumple in response to heightened demand.

This won't tear our ship in half and send it to the bottom in a heartbeat. Instead, we'll gradually take on water from little cracks and then larger ones until the weight of population finally sinks us.

In Sunday's Sun: A look at what can be done to make Las Vegas a better place to work and live.