Las Vegas neon streets: more people call them home

They arrived pushing their shopping carts full of meager belongings. A spattering of homeless people, wearing tattered clothes, recently showed up here at City Hall to protest the demolition of a makeshift tent city.

The encampment on the edge of downtown was the closest thing many of them had to a home - and the only shield from the Tabasco temperatures of the desert.

Their crusade - though unsuccessful - points up a little-known distinction about the nation's fastest-growing city: It also has one of the nation's fastest-growing populations of homeless.

Unlike some other cities, the indigent aren't congregating here because of an abundance of shelters and social services. In fact, Las Vegas is fairly stingy when it comes to offering beds or helping the poor find jobs.

Instead, many come looking for work in the prosperous local economy and end up out on the neon streets. As such, Las Vegas epitomizes the homeless problem that many booming Sun Belt cities are facing.

"They go there looking for work, not because life is easy for a homeless person," says Michael Stoops, community organizer for the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington. "They get there and realize it's not like they thought it would be, and they're stuck in the middle of the desert."

Recent city and county figures estimate that 12,000 to 18,000 homeless people are in the Vegas valley. Just a small percentage can be accommodated in the current handful of shelters, which are all in the downtown area.

With nowhere else to go, about 100 homeless had set up the makeshift tent city - which the city tore down in June. Officials defend the action, saying it was the only way to stay within code.

Police, who were on hand at the demolition, say they tried to make the situation easier for the displaced. "Our officers were out there helping the homeless, trying to find them some alternative places to stay," says Sgt. Christopher Darcy.

Since then the population has scattered, says Kendall Wiley, a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officer who oversees homeless issues. "We're finding more and more camps throughout the downtown area," he says.

Mr. Butterfield moved to Las Vegas in April with hopes of landing work. Word of such had reached him in Saginaw, Mich., where both jobs and homes were hard to come by.

But four months later, things aren't looking better here. "You end up getting exposed to the stuff you were trying to get away from, and in trouble with the law. You can't get work," he says at a shelter, where he stands in line, once again, trying to land a job.

And things may only become more turbulent for people like Butterfield, as Mayor Oscar Goodman moves ahead with plans to redevelop the downtown area. The project, encompassing a 10-block area, would replace seedy hotels with new commercial buildings and the first new apartment complex in decades.

Those plans have only given impetus to another aim of Mr. Goodman's: to move shelters away from the downtown area and make nearby municipalities more active in dealing with homelessness.

"The mayor's stance is that the homeless issue is a regional one, and that the city of Las Vegas shouldn't shoulder the responsibility alone," says city spokeswoman Andrea Smith.

Yet Goodman acknowledges challenges. "As hard as it has been at times, the brick-and-mortar improvements downtown are the easy part," he said at a recent news conference at City Hall. "The social issues are far more difficult to solve."

Such difficulty has been evident in still another clash involving the city's newest shelter, MASH Village. Built after a homeless man died on the steps of City Hall in 1992, the facility has been on the verge of closing for lack of funding - in part because the city is no longer offering financial assistance.

Goodman, furthermore, threatened to shut down MASH over a related contract dispute. But some last-minute private donations arrived, and the contract has been extended. Still, MASH is able to operate at only half capacity.

Stoops, meanwhile, offers his own solution. "Improve the services," he says, "not by just feeding and housing homeless people like they're animals in a zoo, but by improving social services and helping them out of their homelessness."