Columnist Hal Rothman: Pointing out one thing Las Vegas could learn from Santa Fe

Hal Rothman

Sunday, Jan. 22, 2006 | 7:51 a.m.

Hal Rothman is a professor of History at UNLV. His column appears Sunday.

The tumult about cost of living in the Las Vegas Valley continues, with complaints about a lack of low-cost housing and the ongoing shortage of workers becoming more acute. No one here seems to have a plan, much less a solution. But other communities that grapple with similar problems have begun to pursue remedies.

In the West, Santa Fe, N.M., has gone farthest in that direction. For my money, Santa Fe is the most fraudulent tourist town in America. Its fabricated version of the historic past plays on the American love affair with individualism and the romance of national expansion and conquest.

On its famous plaza, with Indians selling jewelry on blankets under the facade of the old Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe smooths the rough edges off of the Spanish, Native, Mexican and American experiences in the West, repackaging them as kitsch and art for a high-tone, free-spending crowd.

The differences between Las Vegas and Santa Fe are real. Las Vegas knows what it is. Santa Fe has pretensions. Even though Santa Fe represents history and culture to its visitors and we offer entertainment, so malleable that we change what we are to meet every whim, Las Vegas is a lot more real than Santa Fe will ever be.

Still, tourist economies share all kinds of characteristics. A decade ago, Santa Fe's average annual income in tourist service jobs was $12,000 while the average house cost $220,000. That's simply not doable. Since then, housing costs have risen to a mean of $278,233 in 2005. As in Las Vegas, the service industry wage has not kept pace.

To solve this, Santa Fe has tried something unprecedented: The city has enacted its own minimum wage, $9.50 an hour in 2006 and $10.50 an hour in 2008. The decision ripped into the core of this little town, pitting the different versions of hipness that the community harbors against one another. It also puts the small mountain town in league with 14 other states and the District of Columbia, all of which have enacted their own minimum wage that is higher than the federal base of $5.15 an hour.

Nevada voters joined this parade, passing our own version in 2004. If voters in 2006 again ratify the 2004 vote, the minimum wage in this state will rise to $6.15.

Turns out that even such action might be futile. The impact of higher wages at the bottom end of the scale has only a limited effect on the overall economy. Economists now believe that small increases in the minimum wage do not hinder economic growth. Only about 7 percent of the workforce is affected and none of the 14 states with a higher minimum wage lost jobs.

In all, lower-income people live better. One single mother, an assistant hotel housekeeper in Santa Fe named Manuela Soto, told The New York Times Magazine that the two-dollar-an-hour increase would allow her to pay bills faster, cover increasing gasoline prices and purchase more school supplies for her sons.

It's hard not to see in Santa Fe's action a harbinger of the future of tourist communities in the West. Every such community faces this very problem. The cost of living has spiraled out of control so dramatically that, in most places, wages and housing prices have no relationship to one another. Santa Fe's remedy is likely the first such measure at the community level, not the last.

Thanks to the high level of unionization in our workplace and the consistent shortage of labor, our wage scale is high enough that trying to solve cost-of-living problems with an increase in the minimum wage at the local level makes little sense.

Like Santa Fe, our problem remains the difference between wages and the cost of home ownership. An increase in the minimum wage alone won't solve that.

But Santa Fe's new law should be a wake-up call. It is another stick in the eye, another warning that we can't continue like this. If working people cannot live decently on the wages they receive, something will give.

A higher minimum wage might not be the remedy for the Las Vegas Valley, but the 2004 vote suggests that such grass-roots issues are in play in 2006. Whether they influence local and state politics remains unclear, but if Santa Fe's experience is typical, local leaders especially should expect grass-roots pressure this year and in the future.