It may have seen better days, but the Las Vegas Strip remains a bustling hub for high-rollers and hustlers to drop big bucks on the baize tables of the Bellagio and guzzle supersize mimosas at Caesars Palace.
Yet that’s a distant reality for many of the city’s 661,000 residents, including the croupiers, cocktail waiters and kitchen staff who work three casino jobs and eat at food banks to keep up with fast-rising living costs.
For others, Las Vegas is darker still, a place where out-of-luck gamblers and drop-outs with mental health and addiction problems fester in storm drains under the Strip – the ‘mole people’ beneath the buzzing metro.
The city’s new mayor, Shelley Berkley, a veteran Democratic politician who’s dogged by allegations of corruption about her husband’s business interests, says she wants to tackle the crisis and help families make ends meet.
But DailyMail.com spoke with Las Vegas residents and non-profit managers who were worried that ‘Sin City,’ as it is known, is headed in the wrong direction and its volatile, tourism-reliant economy was unravelling.
The numbers are ugly. Last year, Las Vegas’ poverty rate jumped to 14.7 percent, well above the 11.1 percent national average.
Casino workers typically earn less than $3,000 a month, and more than half of that is needed to rent a one-bedroom apartment.
No wonder, then, that homeless numbers are flying off the charts. The surrounding Clark County had nearly 8,000 unhoused people in 2024, a 10-year high for the area and a staggering 36 percent increase from 2022.
‘Las Vegas is a great destination. We’ve got something for everyone, who can come and take photos and take memories away with them,’ says Sara Ramirez, CEO of the Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada.
Las Vegas is known as the ‘Sin City’ retreat for high-rolling wild times at fancy hotels and casinos
But in the shadow of the Strip are thousands of people who struggle against a rising cost of living
Casino cleaners are among those earning close to the minimum wage of $12 an hour
‘But there’s a flip side to the coin and an underbelly of generational poverty, and we need to do a lot more to take care of our working poor.’
Ramirez told DailyMail.com that her food pantry and dine-in charity meal service has seen a 20 percent spike in demand this past year, with more elderly people and low-paid workers showing up hungry.
‘The minimum wage in Las Vegas is $12 an hour, but the actual living wage is $24.10,’ she said.
‘It’s the working poor that’s coming to us. Sometimes they’re working two or three full-time jobs just to make ends meet for them and their family.’
Las Vegas was barely a stop on the railroad when it was incorporated in 1911. In the 1930s, it exploded into a hub of theaters, mafia-run casinos and prostitution to cater to the construction men building the nearby Hoover Dam.
It developed a family appeal in the 1960s and ballooned into a mega-resort. But economic headwinds from the mortgage crisis and the pandemic shuttered businesses, even as people continued to move there, pushing up rents and living costs further.
The population has tripled since 1990, with a metro area now home to some 3million people. They endure above-average crime rates, water shortages, and a cash-strapped school system hamstrung by a lack of teachers.
Las Vegas has also been marred by tragedy – a Tesla Cybertruck exploding on New Year’s Day, and in, October 2017, the worst ever US mass shooting by a lone gunman, who fired from the Mandalay Bay casino hotel onto festival-goers below, killing 60 and injuring more than 860.
Dennys Salinas, who works at a hotel-casino near the Strip, is struggling amid fast-rising housing costs that forced many others to move out of the city and battle an hour of traffic to just to get to work on time.
‘Everybody right now is working three jobs just to maintain an apartment,’ he told FOX5.
Visitors flock from across the US and overseas to take photos at the fabled Fabulous Las Vegas sign
Hotel guests cool off at Temple Pool, one of seven pools at the Caesars Palace Garden of the Gods Pool Oasis
Meanwhile, the homeless are left eking out an existence in the flood control tunnels under the city
Those living in the secret subterranean world are known as the ‘mole people’ of Las Vegas
‘The price has changed a lot drastically. It used to be cheap.’
Roughly 15 percent of Las Vegans struggle to put a decent meal on the table, according to the Three Square Food Bank, and many more of them live in ‘food deserts’ where it is hard to shop for fresh groceries.
Last month, the group gave out 1,200 eggs to hard-up families at Grace City Church, where recipients were described as ‘literally in awe’ at their cartons, one of the most-inflation hit grocery items.
Some have it even worse, and have joined Sin City’s roughly 1,500 ‘mole people’, who reside in a network of concrete tunnels below the resorts, originally built in the aftermath of a flash flood in 1975.
There, they fashioned ramshackle ‘rooms’ in the secret subterranean city for themselves, using discarded scraps collected from landfills. Some describe a camaraderie among sewer-dwellers, but tales of violence, abuse, and robbery are more common.
An eye-opening 2024 documentary lifted the lid on the tunnels and their occupants, including an unnamed chef who was earning $87,000 a year at the fancy Wynn Hotel before his life unraveled.
‘I wasn’t like a regular [chef], I used to cook for Mr Wynn… he just likes mozzarella omelet with burnt onions,’ said the man, from O’ahu, Hawaii.
When quizzed about how he ended up underground, he said it was to ‘be away from the cops’.
While the conditions in the tunnels are squalid, the man says he is fairly happy with his living situation and the only thing he ‘really misses’ is his car, his ‘huge bathroom’ and ‘bada** kitchen.’
A Las Vegas chef who wound up homeless and now lives in the city’s dirty labyrinth of flood tunnels features in a new documentary in which his heart-wrenching story is laid bare
Struggling, single dad Johnathan and Nohemy, four, collect free groceries from a Catholic-run food bank
A homeless man sleeps on a sidewalk in downtown Las Vegas amid a rapid rise in the number of unhoused people
Diana Thomas, a guest room attendant at Flamingo hotel and casino, marches with other union members for better pay and conditions
Casino and hotel workers typically earn $17 an hour, and many have to work two or three jobs to get by
Mayor Shelley Berkley, pictured here with Las Vegas performers, says she wants to tackle the homelessness and affordability crisis
Newcomers to Las Vegas have been shocked to see a mole person climbing up to street level through a manhole – and posted about it on social media.
Clark County’s homeless rate is high and rising.
Researchers at the Princeton Eviction Lab recently showed that landlords are kicking more people out of their homes in January 2025 than before the pandemic, with 3,911 notices filed.
Since taking office in December, Mayor Berkley has said she’s tackling the city’s homelessness crisis, and that she supports a new state law making it a misdemeanor to sleep, camp, or store personal property in a public place.
Her spokesman, Jace Radke, says Las Vegas spends more than $16million a year on a shelter and a medical unit for the homeless, but that there are limits on how much social services can intervene.
‘The city conducts outreach daily to connect those on the streets to services, but it is up to the individual to accept that help,’ Radke told DailyMail.com.
