In establishing the first states to vote in the Democratic presidential nomination campaign, the party selected four states representing each U.S. region. These events are almost like a preseason before the big contests in March such as Super Tuesday when California and Texas cast ballots. The four early states that select delegates in February start in the Midwest with the Iowa caucuses, move to the Northeast and the New Hampshire primary, head to the West and the Nevada caucuses, and end in the South with the South Carolina primary.

The first two contests—Iowa and New Hampshire—are in rurally oriented states that are mostly white, before shifting to more diverse states—Nevada and South Carolina. However, unlike South Carolina with an electorate that primarily is Black and white, Nevada features diversity within its diversity owning to large Asian, Black, and Latino populations; a demographic profile that better reflects the U.S. as a whole. Today, Clark County, home to Las Vegas and nearly three out of four Nevadans, matches the diversity projections for the U.S. as a whole in 2060.

Nevada is the most urban of the four February primary and caucus states, ranking third in the U.S. in the percent of its population living in metropolitan areas behind California and New Jersey. Las Vegas, with 2.25 million residents, is the 28^th most populous region in the U.S., and is by far the largest urban center to vote in February. The biggest metros in the other early voting states are 61^st ranked Greenville, SC with just over 900,000 residents, 88^th ranked Des Moines, IA with 655,000 residents, and 130^th ranked Manchester, NH with 415,000 people. The three metro regions combined are less populous than greater Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is also the first metro to vote with a significant foreign-born population and it is a global city with nonstop international flight connections to Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The world-famous Las Vegas Strip surpasses the skylines in Boston and Dallas, and Las Vegas is the first place to vote that is home to NFL and NHL professional sport franchises.

Even Las Vegas’ major suburban centers such as the City of Henderson are now large-scale and urbanized. Consider that Henderson incorporated in 1953, now with 310,000 residents, is the 62^nd largest U.S. city, and recently surpassed in population St. Louis (303,000), Cincinnati (303,000), and Pittsburg (301,000). And unlike those cities, Henderson has a significant share of residents born outside of the U.S., and grew by more than 20 percent since 2010.

Our research shows that booming and urbanizing suburbs around the U.S., but especially in the Sunbelt, are key battlegrounds in the contest for the presidency and majority control of the U.S. Senate. Our forthcoming Brookings Institution Press book, Blue Metros, Red States: The Shifting Urban/Rural Divide in America’s Swing States, tracks 13 states that have metros with more than one million people and fell within a 10 percent voting margin in the 2016 presidential election. The book highlights the dynamic between urban and rural regions and shows how these differences affect state election outcomes and policymaking.

Our analysis suggests that suburbs such as Henderson are among the most contested spaces in the U.S. Winning in places such as Henderson, Arlington, TX, Aurora, CO, Cary, NC, or Scottsdale, AZ means winning the White House in 2020 and possibly majority control of the U.S. Senate. Thus, while the outcomes of the Nevada caucuses may only yield a handful of delegates to the winning candidates, those who perform strongly in diverse, urban Las Vegas are well positioned to gain the nomination and to compete in battleground suburbs come November.

       

“The Next Chapter: Las Vegas Becomes a Global City” originally appeared in the Las Vegas Sun.

As Las Vegas and Southern Nevada continue to emerge from the Great Recession, our regional leaders are engaging in a concerted effort to acquire the basic urban infrastructure needs essential for our growth. The opportunity is here to promote economic diversification while gauging infrastructure assets and deficits. On the plus side, Las Vegas possesses a high-capacity and globally connected airport and a world-class performing arts center, and a major downtown redevelopment effort is underway. Our region is, of course, home to the largest convention and hotel complex in the U.S.

Most importantly, Southern Nevada has a habit of getting things done on its own. For example, with virtually no help from our state and federal governments, we constructed the $1.7 billion 215 Beltway.

So what is Southern Nevada missing? Here is a preliminary list of four assets we can and should secure (or at least begin constructing) by the end of this decade. Funding for these projects assumes a mixture of public-private partnerships, tax increment financing and local bond money. Limited federal resources are also available in the form of grants, tax credits and direct investment. Our state government can also provide partial funding, especially if the Southern Nevada delegation to the Legislature is able to rally around the projects and direct a fair share of state spending to our region.

• Build Interstate 11 from Las Vegas to Phoenix. Phoenix and Las Vegas remain the two largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. within 300 miles of one another not directly linked by an interstate highway. I-11 would help Las Vegas connect to a large and growing tourist market — the Arizona “Sun Corridor” from Phoenix to Tucson (with 9 million more residents projected by 2040). I-11 can help Las Vegas diversify its economy by improving the region’s position as a logistics center. The good news is that Arizona is building the vast share of this highway. Las Vegas needs only find the resources to connect the 515 freeway to the bridge over the Colorado River. The plan to index the fuel tax to inflation would pay for this improvement and help fund the completion of the 215 beltway.

• Establish an allopathic medical school in Las Vegas. Las Vegas is by far the largest U.S. metro area without an allopathic (as opposed to osteopathic) medical school. In fact, no other U.S. region with more than 1 million residents lacks a medical school. The 2011 Brookings-SRI Nevada economic development study showed that Las Vegas provides less than two-thirds of the medical services that are predicted for a region its size. Brookings Mountain West published a study that shows Las Vegas has the smallest medical services economy of any top 100 U.S. metro area.

Nearly 6 percent of regional output is lost by purchasing medical services from nearby states or by forgoing treatment. To put that number in perspective, consider that the construction industry now accounts for about 5 percent of the regional economy. The first step in diversifying Southern Nevada’s economy is simply getting its medicine to scale — which would add over 40,000 direct jobs and fill millions of square feet in commercial real estate.

How would a medical school help? A key conclusion from the Brookings-SRI study is that a medical school would anchor medicine in Las Vegas and build more confidence in all medical and health services. Also, an allopathic medical school would help the region secure a modest biotech sector, draw in more federal research grant money, advance graduate medical education and train more physicians. The Lincy Institute at UNLV commissioned a study to be released later this fall that examines the feasibility and return-on-investment for a Las Vegas-based allopathic medical school. The results of the study may surprise those who see an insurmountable challenge to building such a facility. Cities such as El Paso, Texas, and Roanoke, Va., recently built new medical schools. If Roanoke, a region with roughly a ninth of the residents of Las Vegas, can establish a medical school, Southern Nevada can, as well.

• Construct an event center. Las Vegas has the best tourist infrastructure in the U.S. but lacks one key facility — a large-scale event center. In fact, Las Vegas is the largest U.S. metro area without an event space exceeding 40,000 seats. The 2011 Brookings-SRI report indicated that Las Vegas can grow its tourist economy, with the single best prospect being large, events-driven tourism. This niche tourist sector suffered the least decline during the recent economic downturn and holds the prospect of doubling over the next decade. An event center would dovetail with the Las Vegas convention and trade show business by providing an essential venue for tie-in programs. In essence, the event center is a convention space with an athletic field. The event center should contain at least 50,000 seats and be located near the Strip. Financing could include a mixture of tax districts, private partnerships, naming rights and pass-through charges on tourists.

• Start a light rail system. Denver, Salt Lake City and Phoenix — the major peer regions to Las Vegas in the Mountain West — all have light rail systems that include an airport connection. Voters approved these systems, and all have expanded from their original track mileage. Most importantly, light rail has transformed urban development patterns in the West. Las Vegas would see the same benefits. The system would relieve growing congestion in the tourist core area. Light rail can redirect the region’s housing development from water-consuming single family homes to multifamily, mixed-use projects, and save thousands of acre-feet in water consumed per year, conserve land and reduce air pollution. Las Vegas needs to adapt to changing times and consumer habits. The Millennial Generation has shown a clear preference for transit alternatives and less reliance on automobiles. Other Mountain West metro areas use light rail to drive economic development with nonpartisan political and business partnerships.

So how would Las Vegas begin a light rail system? By following lessons learned in the Mountain West. This includes getting buy-in from voters, key industries and civic leaders. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and leaders in Clark County, Las Vegas, Henderson and North Las Vegas need to be part of this effort. The Las Vegas Strip, UNLV and downtown Las Vegas will provide essential commuters. The financing of this system includes the usual mix of tax districts, bonding, fees and capital project grants from the federal government (including a redirect of some money intended for highways). Finally, our region could request a modification of the 1992 land act that sent money from sale of federal lands to open-space preservation projects throughout Nevada. What better purpose can this money go to than a rail system that saves open space, improves air quality and conserves water?

A region of more than 2 million people — one that has created an unique urban metropolis in the American West — is poised to embark on an amazing new chapter in its history.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

       

The latest S&P Case-Shiller home price index numbers indicate an upswing in the Las Vegas housing market. Rob Lang speaks with NPR’s “All Things Considered” about the cause of this development and what it means for the future of the housing market. Click here to hear the interview.

SIEGEL: Well, what does this feel like to you? Is it just that Las Vegas real estate is cheap and hardly anything is a great investment these days, so why not buy some? Or are people showing confidence in the economy of the city and buying for that reason? What’s going on?

LANG: Consumer confidence is up. And the other thing is that these are very attractive homes for the price to this point still. I mean, you were in a house and it was just over 200,000, maybe it’s 250,000, and it’s maybe $112 a square foot.

We’re talking houses that have pools and spas in them and, you know, and amenities that in the rest of the country would be considered luxurious. This is part of the equation, I think, people were missing when they imagine that these Phoenixes and Las Vegases were done for all time. That they’re still attractive to retire in and the climate is mild, you know, the taxes are low. It’s an easy place to have fairly modest assets and buy a nice house and live a high-quality life.

       

The Brookings Mountain West Initiative, a partnership between UNLV and the Brookings Institution, brings Brookings’ high-quality, independent research to the issues facing the dynamic and fast-growing Intermountain West region. The new initiative builds upon the work of Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program, which focuses on helping metropolitan areas grow in robust, inclusive, and sustainable ways.

In this speech at the Las Vegas roll-out of the project, Mark Muro and nonresident senior fellow Robert Lang argue that Las Vegas presents an exaggerated version of America’s economic quandary. Muro declares that Las Vegas presents in extreme form some of the fundamental questions facing the whole country as it faces a major economic “reset” while Lang contends it can still emerge as America’s next true world city.

       

A glance at a list of America’s fastest growing “cities” reveals quite a surprise: most are really overgrown suburbs. Places such as Anaheim, California, Coral Springs, Florida, Naperville, Illinois, North Las Vegas, Nevada, and Plano, Texas, have swelled to big-city size with few people really noticing—including many of their ten million residents. These “boomburbs” are large, rapidly growing, incorporated communities of more than 100,000 residents that are not the biggest city in their region. Here, Robert E. Lang and Jennifer B. LeFurgy explain who lives in them, what they look like, how they are governed, and why their rise calls into question the definition of urban.

Located in over twenty-five major metro areas throughout the United States, numerous boomburbs have doubled, tripled, even quadrupled in size between census reports. Some are now more populated than traditional big cities. The population of the biggest boomburb—Mesa, Arizona—recently surpassed that of Minneapolis and Miami.

Typically large and sprawling, boomburbs are “accidental cities,” but not because they lack planning. Many are made up of master-planned communities that have grown into one another. Few anticipated becoming big cities and unintentionally arrived at their status. Although boomburbs possess elements found in cities such as housing, retailing, offices, and entertainment, they lack large downtowns. But they can contain high-profile industries and entertainment venues: the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and Arizona Cardinals are among over a dozen major-league sports teams who play in the boomburbs.

Urban in fact but not in feel, these drive-by cities of highways, office parks, and shopping malls are much more horizontally built and less pedestrian friendly than most older suburbs. And, contrary to common perceptions of suburbia, they are not rich and elitist. Poverty is often seen in boomburb communities of small single-family homes, neighborhoods that once represented the American dream.

Boomburbs are a quintessential American landscape, embodying much of the nation’s complexity, expansiveness, and ambiguity. This fascinating look at the often contradictory world of boomburbs examines why America’s suburbs are thriving and how they are shaping the lives of millions of residents.

       

Each year Colorado College holds the State of the Rockies Symposium to release an impressive report card grading the Intermountain West region on a variety of attributes. This year the event focused on megapolitan areas—combinations of two or more regions into a single economic, social, and urban system. Headlining the event was the Brookings Blueprint for American Prosperity paper, “Mountain Megas: America’s Newest Metropolitan Places and Federal Partnership to Help them Prosper.” Amy Liu and Mark Muro of the Metro Program, and Robert Lang of Virginia Tech delivered keynote addresses on how Colorado’s Pike’s Peak region relates to the Front Range “mega”.

Download PowerPoint presentation » (PDF)

       

Washington — You know times have gotten really bad when a convention trip to Las Vegas becomes an object of scorn.

President Barack Obama might not have intended to knock Las Vegas by admonishing Wall Streeters recently that “you can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers’ dime,” but Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman sure took it that way when he branded the comment “outrageous.”

Why the sensitivity to what in the past might have seemed a pretty bland observation? The main reason is a simple one: According to Steve Friess, who writes for The New York Times, some 30,000 hotel room nights booked for conferences have been canceled in the past month at an estimated loss of $20 million to Las Vegas.

But there is also at work here the play of cultural signifiers and subtexts. In our new age of austerity, Sin City “appears” to be too fun and superficial a place for businesses to gather.

And yet we find this is a serious misreading of the essential role that Las Vegas plays as the leading venue for face-to-face business exchanges in the United States, given our research for a recent major report on the major Intermountain West megalopolises called “Mountain Megas.”

Part of the city’s problem may be its recent reimaging, as epitomized by its now-famous slogan, “What happens here, stays here.” The inward-turning line comes from a Las Vegas ad campaign signaling that the city was returning to its roots by emphasizing sin after having tried to lure families.

But Las Vegas’ most recent Rat Pack-inspired image as an inward-focused party town masks the major outward effect Las Vegas has on the U.S. and world economies.

Las Vegas, best known for its gambling and entertainment, has also emerged as a deal-making center of world importance. Because Las Vegas is such a “fun” place and has a large tourist capacity in terms of hotel rooms and meeting space, it attracts the nation’s largest trade shows.

These shows form ad hoc market exchanges that gather whole industries to a common space to make deals. The irony is that what happens in Las Vegas arguably reaches well beyond the city in terms of business activity. The city’s reputation for discretion in personal matters has enhanced its attractiveness as a public space.

As a place for business networking, Las Vegas is, in this sense, a leading world city of great importance to the American economy. The city has not reached this status by traditional means, and conventional data measuring economic activity do not easily capture its form of exchange.

In a world where face-to-face interaction still matters — and may be even more important than ever — Las Vegas offers world-class venues for people to meet and do business. To get a sense of this, consider the variety and size of some of the trade shows that have recently convened in Las Vegas, including the National Association of Broadcasters (110,000 attendees), the World of Concrete Exposition (85,000 attendees), and International Consumer Electronics Show (150,000 attendees).

Some organizations now have annual meetings that have grown so large that Las Vegas is the only venue big enough to hold their major annual trade shows. A good example is CTIA — The Wireless Association. This Washington, D.C.-based trade group could hold its largest exhibition in Orange County, Calif., as recently as 2007.

But as the cell phone industry took off, attendance shot up and future annual conventions are now scheduled for Las Vegas. Although to outsiders a trade show can seem trivial for a rapidly evolving technology such as wireless, these are make-or-break events for many start-up firms. Their ability to have access to the entire industry — if just for several days a year — can provide the basis for key contacts that lead to everything from patent licensing to venture capital deals.

Ironically, wireless is one of the most space liberating technologies ever devised. Give many high-end white collar workers a 3G iPhone or BlackBerry and they can pretty much do their entire job from anywhere in the world. But in the end, business is all about trust, and that still requires face-to-face encounters.

Las Vegas now plays the highly critical role of gathering all the firms in key industries in one place where they can exchange ideas in person. The fact that Las Vegas is especially fun and frivolous — an adult Disneyland — creates even more incentive for people to attend its conferences, which is how it became the nation’s preeminent convention destination in the first place.

To all the killjoys who now want to shame people out of a Las Vegas convention visit, we say that a major stimulus for the country remains the social lubricant that Sin City provides business contacts.

As for the moral of the story, yes, there is one. Sure, we need a new era of responsibility, but we shouldn’t push austerity so hard that it is ultimately self-defeating. Sometimes junkets are junkets, but sometimes they are assemblies that make the world go ’round and provide the truest form of economic stimulus.

       

For several years, we and others at Arizona State University have been describing the rise of the Sun Corridor – the vast swath of urban space that sweeps from Prescott through Phoenix and Pinal County and down through Tucson to Nogales.

Now, it’s time to take the next step.

With a new president and Congress set to take office, it’s time for Sun Corridor leaders to talk federal policy. In short, it’s time to get in the game.

Which is why the Brookings Institution and Morrison Institute of Public Policy are bringing together some of the state’s top leaders Friday at ASU’s downtown Phoenix campus to consider how to amplify the Sun Corridor’s voice in national affairs.

Grounding the discussion will be a review of the big report we released last summer “Mountain Megas,” which notes that each of the five southern intermountain states is dominated by a megalopolis – Arizona’s Sun Corridor, the Front Range along Colorado’s Interstate 25, Wasatch Front along Utah’s Interstate 15, Greater Las Vegas and northern New Mexico.

Our work confirms that for all of its dynamism, the Sun Corridor is grappling with huge infrastructure, economic-development, education and sustainability challenges.

These challenges involve the very fundamentals of metro- and megapolitan health, as we at Brookings argue in our national Blueprint for American Prosperity initiative of which “Mountain Megas” is a part. Moreover, the sheer scale of the challenges in many cases transcends local and state problem-solving capacity and will require federal engagement, whether to help fill intercity rail gaps, maintain basic science research, repair the nation’s broken immigration system or develop a framework for climate-change responses.

And yet the Sun Corridor is by no means alone or without options. Even if securing the right kind of federal engagement remains a tall order, our work shows that each state in the intermountain “flyover zone” is now anchored by a major “megapolitan” area like the Sun Corridor that is contending with similar plus-sized urban challenges.

What’s more, the Southwestern states’ prominence in the recent election boosted their clout, as has the deep involvement in national politics of strong leaders like Gov. Janet Napolitano, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

In short, neither the Sun Corridor nor Arizona need to “go it alone” as they seek the limited but substantive federal engagements to craft the future.

Hence the question of the moment: Shouldn’t the five Mountain Megas – and their states – seek common cause as they insist on a new, more productive arrangement with Washington?

Sun Corridor leaders have only to note the extraordinary push of Midwestern lawmakers to secure a $25 billion federal bailout of the auto industry to recognize that multistate teamwork is crucial in federal relations.

In sum, Sun Corridor leaders should consider whether they can afford to watch the massive change of governance going on in Washington without forging ties with their colleagues in the other Mountain Megas to place a full mega-oriented team on the field.

We would suggest they dare not.