Thursday, August 13, 2009

Home? In Vegas?

Honestly, I'm still getting used to it. It's such a strange concept, especially for all of us "newbies" who move in after experiencing Las Vegas mainly as the tourist trap that we lovingly call The Strip. The Strip is always lively, always lit up to the hilt, always full of crazy drunk people doing wildly irresponsible things. How is that home?

But then I come to my lovely corner of Green Valley in Henderson, and everything changes. It's a sea of red-tiled roofs. It's full of families raising kids, quietly paying the bills, doing everything possible to avoid foreclosure, basically doing their best to be responsible citizens. Oddly enough, it's a community and it feels like home.

Stacy Willis explores the concept of calling Las Vegas home in this week's Las Vegas Weekly, though she comes at it from a slightly different perspective. With all these people losing their homes, where do they go? The homeless population has surged, and public and private agencies are scrambling to figure out what to do about it. Where can they go home? Do we have a responsibility in our home community to do something?

I feel blessed to call my home just that. But sometimes, I also feel a little fear as I wonder how close I may be to losing it and how close some of the people I know are to losing their homes. Is there a chance this will make us realize that so many of us actually want to call this place home and treat this great valley as such?

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