I worked as a homeless outreach worker in Las Vegas from September 2015 to April 2016, and during that time I had the opportunity to interact with homelessness on the front line. There were many hours spent with “clients” of our small non-profit as we performed a sort of concierge service, working our asses off trying to connect them with services like housing, food, getting identification, and meeting any other need we could. It was a great privilege and a humbling experience to hear firsthand the stories people shared about their lives, and many nights after work were spent pacing around nervously in my apartment trying to process the events of the day. It’s not an easy job, and it takes a certain skill set of patience, humility, compassion, assertiveness, fearlessness, and tirelessness to face individuals who for very complex reasons live outside the margins of society.

One theme I heard repeated from many different individuals is that the streets of Las Vegas are harder than just about anywhere else. I even had three or four long time felons for things like manslaughter, sexual crimes, and aggravated assault tell me that prison was easy compared to the streets here. If federal prison is hard time, being homeless in Las Vegas is harder time.

And there are a lot of reasons that could explain why the homeless in Las Vegas experience such harsh conditions.

Casino Homeless Group

Casino Homeless House

• Struggling Economy: I know, everywhere is struggling most of the time. But Las Vegas has performed especially poorly compared to the national average. In 2008, after the subprime mortgage bubble fiasco, Nevada was one of the top 3 (bottom 3?) states in terms of home foreclosures. At that time, about 1 in 14 homes received a foreclosure notice and many families simply walked away from their properties. Currently we rank 42nd in the country on unemployment rates. And all of this seems peculiar considering we have these money printing factories on the world famous Las Vegas Strip that bring in cash to the tune of $500 million a month. Maybe “mismanaged economy” is a more accurate title than “struggling”. The fact that we have a 0% corporate income tax and no state income tax might have something to do with it.
• Lack of Mental Health Services: Nevada ranks basically dead last in the nation on almost every indicator of mental and behavioral health. Worse, studies show that our poor mental health statistics correlate with all kinds of other negative outcomes like unemployment, low graduation rates, high rates of homelessness, and high violent crime rates. The suicide rate in Nevada is consistently double the national average, and before you say “well that’s just tourists offing themselves in hotel rooms after gambling away all their money”… yeah, that happens a lot too, I feel sorry for the cleaning staff in this town… Our youth suicide statistics are equally tragic, and they they aren’t allowed into casinos to gamble.
• Overly Bureaucratic System: I’m going to write a follow-up post in a few days on the politics of homelessness in Las Vegas. For now, suffice it to say that we have a system that is not designed to “end homelessness”, as if that were a realistic goal to begin with. The vast majority of funding for housing Nevada’s homeless comes from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and tied to that money is a mind-boggling set of restrictions, rules, and regulations (the 3 R’s of real life). HUD flaunts their science-based methodology as being the gold standard of efficiency for identifying, classifying, and in theory housing a city’s homeless population. Well, that is certainly up for debate.

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I have personally witnessed and experienced the frustration of trying to connect homeless individuals with social services they desperately need. At some point, homelessness becomes a world of Catch-22’s. Was your ID lost or stolen? Well that means you can’t go to the DMV to get a new one because you have no way to prove your identity. Are you disabled and trying to apply for disability benefits? Well you can’t because you haven’t been seeing a doctor and have no evidence of your condition. Do you need to see a doctor? Well you can’t because you have no ID, remember?

Homeless outreach can be a deeply rewarding job, but the feelings of progress can be few and far between and you have to be ready for many, many gut-wrenching setbacks. But the setbacks have to be anticipated. It’s hard out there on the streets. Unrelentingly hard. If you can suspend judgment about how a homeless individual got into the mess they’re in, it’s a lot easier to appreciate that the homeless, especially in Las Vegas, are in a near impossible struggle against themselves, and other people, and our system. Compassion is the only way I can see out of this problem, and it’s in very short supply in our city. As long as we remain hard in our attitudes and actions towards homelessness, life on the streets will remain harder.

• Outside the gleaming casinos, the desolate streets are littered with homeless, drug addicts and prostitutes. Pawn shops, pay-day lenders and soup kitchens abound, save for a couple block stretch of.
• Certain Atlantic City hotels are being forced to reopen on state orders and take in homeless people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Atlantic City is nearly a ghost town, but homeless people might.
• ASHEVILLE - City government has signed off on using Harrah's Cherokee Center Asheville as a shelter for about 50 people living in homelessness amid the coronavirus pandemic.
• Mar 31, 2020 Officials in Nevada have not proposed putting the homeless in vacant hotels, including the famous casino resorts of the Las Vegas Strip, which began emptying two weeks ago when Gov.

Homeless people have been living in the Las Vegas tunnels for years. Although they provide relief from the scorching desert heat, the tunnels pose a flooding risk during storms that can fill them.