LV No. 5 on list of places where we’d like to live

Monday, Sept. 18, 2006 | 7:13 a.m.

In a recent Harris online poll, Las Vegas placed fifth as the city people would most like to live in or near, just behind Seattle. But Las Vegas is very different from every other city in the Top 10. People actually do move here.

The populations of San Francisco (No. 2), Chicago (No. 9) and Boston (No. 10) are all shrinking. In fact, of the top 10 cities in the Harris Poll, only Las Vegas is growing faster than the rest of the state it's located in.

At first glance, it looks like people and their feet have different opinions, a phenomenon previously only observed in women's shoes. Or maybe the country is massively ignorant of geography, because while everyone wants to live in Las Vegas, Nevada doesn't even crack the top 15 on the list of states people would like to live in.

A closer look at the poll, though, suggests it measures nothing so much as name recognition, in which we do very well thanks to our starring role in two television dramas and our hefty advertising budget. (Nevada's advertising budget is minuscule by comparison.)

The Harris poll asked 3,685 people (all of whom had already signed up to answer polls online) a series of questions, only two of which had to do with where they wanted to live.

First, it asked them what state they would like to live in, other than the one they currently live in. Then it asked them what city they would like to live in or near. Since state was asked before city, they weren't thinking about the location of the city when they were asked which state they would like to live in. And the absence of any other questions meant both responses were not preceded by thoughts of job opportunities, home prices, school quality and crime rates.

"That's what we call a non-sampling error," says Doug Rivers, a polling expert at Stanford University. "There's a question that's kind of vague, so what does it measure?" (Disclosure: Rivers and another Stanford professor run a polling company that competes with Harris Interactive.)

Interestingly, Las Vegas also comes in at No. 5 in a very different poll. In this one, we rank behind iPods, Google, Oprah Winfrey and eBay. It's a survey by two marketing firms measuring the hottest brands (including celebrities and cities) in America.

Why are we so hot? Is it our fabulous TV stardom? Probably not.

"I can't imagine any American that didn't know something about Las Vegas long before 'CSI' premiered, even if all they could say was gambling and bright flashy lights," says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. "Las Vegas was by no means a national secret before 'CSI' came along."

Also, "CSI" premiered in 2000, when Las Vegas ranked No. 6 on the Harris Poll. But in 1997, we weren't on the list at all.

What has changed in the last 10 years is our advertising budget.

The 1997 advertising budget was, adjusted for inflation, about $20 million less than the 2007 budget of $84.7 million. That buys a lot of name recognition. (Nevada's ad budget is $5.5 million. So, the state spends about 6 cents on every dollar spent by Las Vegas.)

So does "CSI" do anything for us, anything at all?

Well, Thompson does say that it makes Las Vegas a world-class city like New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco, in certain respects.

"People always makes jokes that you couldn't do, 'CSI: Peoria,' " Thompson says. "The show says this must be an important city or there wouldn't be so many dead people in it."