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Nevada as Home to its Residents
The auto shaped residential Las Vegas just as extensively as it had shaped the Strip. Its predominance on the local scene made downtown obsolete as a community center for local inhabitants. The central district, laid out in 1905 as a close-knit townsite, simply had too few parking spaces to continue to suffice as a major local shopping district.
By the time that more parking lots were provided during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Las Vegas had already begun to patronize outlying shopping centers which were easily accessible to auto customers. The city no longer had a central focus for residents. The conversion of downtown Las Vegas from town site to tourist center symbolized the decentralization of residential society.
In addition to undermining the conventional downtown, the automobile enabled residents to migrate overland to the modern 'frontier' known as the subdivision. The new housing districts did not radiate out from the old city center, but rather appeared virtually full-blown during the 1950s. As scattered, noncontiguous tracts. The wide-open desert spaces between new addition demonstrated that the city had literally grown by leaps and bounds.
As with the Strip, many of the subdivisions lay outside the city limits, and early neighborhoods of as few as eight blocks each emerged, isolated from one another save for raw roads connecting the sprawling residential patches. Las Vegans only gradually began to fill in the gaps between neighborhoods, and even then they did it so sparsely that the city yet remained a low population.
Patterns of residential land use reiterated the automatic society of southern Nevada. Las Vegans pursued an individualistic and mobile system of living within each new subdivision. Construction trends showed a preference for single-family dwellings and owner-occupied homes grew to 57 percent, despite the large number of temporary residents in the vicinity.
More than 82 percent of all occupied dwellings were unattached units in 1960. Even though multiple-family buildings would have solved the housing shortage more quickly and inexpensively, people preferred to purchase or rent autonomous homes, just as they chose private autos over public transportation.
The preference for single-family dwellings, however, did not imply that a house was necessarily a home. Many Las Vegans regarded real estate as both a speculation and a commodity for domestic consumption. Whenever boosters depicted the prosperity of southern Nevada, they inevitably cited increases in local property values as a sure sign of economic health.
Parcels of land in residential districts were in some cases regarded not as a site on which to maintain a home and raise a family, but as an investment and a stepping stone to some better place. Whereas 50 percent of all Americans, and 40 percent of all Far Westerners, lived in the same house in 1960 that they occupied in 1955, fewer than 25 percent of the people of Clark County had not changed residences during that five-year span. Census-takers found that in 1960, that more than 60 percent of the people in greater Las Vegas had moved into their present dwellings since the beginning of 1957, slightly less than half of them from other addresses within the county.