doc_text: "Las Vegas is an accident waiting to happen," says David Shulman, a Salomon Brothers economist who tracks real estate markets.
  "The only reason Las Vegas has been booming is because it was on the periphery of Southern California.
  Now, that's stopped and things are bound to change."
  Exciting new projects and aggressive marketing could help the casinos goose their gambling numbers for a while -- barring a shooting war in the Mideast that plays havoc with fuel supplies.
  But the same can't be said in the housing industry, where out-of-state wealth has fueled growth over the past decade.
  As a city that thrived on the free-spending ways of others, Las Vegas was made for the 1980s.
  It grew up during those years from a purely gambling town to a destination resort attracting families and conventioneers.
  While gamblers spent money wildly, builders transformed the Las Vegas valley's dirt roads, rock and sand into a carpet of housing developments, man-made ponds and golf courses.
  Jobs, crisp desert air and the cheap cost of living lured immigrants from around the country, and the population nearly doubled, to 780,000 residents from fewer than 450,000.
  "We are now a mature and diverse community that just doesn't have the same reliance on casino gaming as it once did," boasts Don Haze, a commercial real estate broker who opened a Coldwell Banker commercial leasing office in 1981.
  But a lengthy downturn could undo some of the image-building that Las Vegas underwent in the 1980s.
  "You must remember that the people who have been successful in this town have always had their feet on the gas pedal," says R. Keith Schwer, of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas's Center for Business and Economic Research.
  When the city was hit by the recession of 1981, tourism spending grew a little less than 1%, though visitor volume posted a slight decline.
  "The movers and shakers have not been conditioned to deal with great economic downturns," Mr. Schwer says.
  The recession in the early '80s spurred city leaders to mount a campaign to help Las Vegas break out of its dependency on the casino industry.
  In 1983, the Nevada state Legislature passed a law permitting interstate banking that led Citibank to move its credit card distribution center to Las Vegas.
  Today, 2,000 people work there.
  By contrast, the city's huge new Mirage casino employs about 7,000.
  But almost no major companies have followed Citibank's lead.
  The Nevada Development Authority estimates that in the past two years only 3,103 new jobs were created by private sector firms either expanding or moving into Nevada.
  As a result, experts say, the economy still lacks the diversity that would help it weather another prolonged downturn.
  Still, Las Vegas isn't Phoenix, and there haven't been any billion-dollar thrift seizures or distressed land sales yet.
  Even the most pessimistic economists expect Nevada's population growth to remain healthy.
  What's more, the national credit crunch has saved developers from building projects with no prospect of success.
  "What we need to do now is take a few deep breaths," says Donald Snyder, chairman and chief executive of First Interstate Bank of Nevada, a unit of First Interstate Bancorp and Nevada's biggest bank.
  Las Vegas does have excesses that are uniquely its own.
  Huge new Disney-like facilities such as the 3,000-room Mirage and the 4,000-room Excalibur have forced the industry into a Darwinian struggle in which older, undercapitalized facilities are falling behind more modern competitors.
  "The strong will survive," says Golden Nugget's chairman, Stephen Wynn, whose $710 million Mirage continues to lure crowds from neighboring casinos.
  "But I am worried about some of our competitors.
  You can't just build boxes, rent out the rooms and get by anymore."
  Size is no indicator of success, either.
  Bally Manufacturing Corp., one of the nation's biggest gambling companies, has defaulted on its casino debt, and it has trimmed its staff by 600 workers.
  Other big names have also hit cold streaks.
  At Hilton Hotels Corp., high-roller competition from the Mirage and Caesars Palace has cut into operating profit, which fell 50% in the third quarter.
  Now Hilton, Nevada's biggest employer, plans to trim operating costs -- and staff -- in Las Vegas by about 8%.
  Altogether, that means layoffs of more than 500.
  Other once-proud Las Vegas names have been tarnished by closings and bankruptcy filings.
  The Landmark hotel and casino shut its doors earlier this year; the Aladdin has filed for bankruptcy protection and is slated for auction.
  Meanwhile, aging casinos like the Dunes and the Stardust have struggled to keep pace.
  And even before the town has recovered from the one-two punch of the Excalibur and Mirage, the industry faces another challenge from MGM Grand Inc.'s Kirk Kerkorian, who has vowed to forge ahead with plans for a 5,000-room megafacility.
  Add to that the Riviera's 1,600-room new wing, the Stardust's additional 1,200 rooms and dozens of other projects on the boards, and further fallout appears certain.
  "It's what I call the rule of 500," says Alan Pomerantz, a real estate attorney with Weil, Gotshal &amp; Manges in New York City.
  "If a city projects a need for 500 hotel rooms, then 500 developers will build 500 hotels each with 500 rooms."
  The rule of 500 appears to apply to residential developers, as well.
  While the twin engines of Las Vegas's housing growth -- the casino industry and the spillover from the California market -- are beginning to sputter, housing starts continue to climb.
  Over the next year, builders have applied for permits to put up more than 49,000 housing units in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas.
  Tight credit could keep as many as 30% from being built, says Glen Barton of the Meyers Group, a market research company based in Los Angeles.
  But that would still leave 34,000 new homes and apartments to absorb.
  Economists cite another disturbing trend in Las Vegas's growth pattern: A full 8.1% of all payroll workers are in the construction sector, suggesting that there aren't enough indigenous industries to pick up the slack once things quiet down.
  And home buying has begun to taper off.
  According to the Meyers Group, the number of home sales in the third quarter dropped 27.3% from a year earlier, while the inventory of unsold homes was up 15.4%.
  Consider the case of Leon Cohen, a 75-year-old former real estate broker from Encino, Calif.
  He cashed in on the California real estate boom last year and moved to the serenity of the Nevada desert, where he lives in Del Webb Corp.'s Sun City, a planned community.
  As a retiree and former Californian, Mr. Cohen is the type of resident Las Vegas planners dreamed of when they imagined an economy freed from the cyclical whims of the gambling industry.
  But there may not be many Leon Cohens left.
  "With the California real estate market going down, I'm sure I couldn't have made my deal today," he says.
  "I was lucky things went so well in California when they did."
  Some development companies are betting that any slowdown will be brief and are plunging ahead with ambitious projects.
  One is a 25-village city-within-a-city called Summerlin, developed by Howard Hughes Properties.
  Designed on 39 square miles of property, the project won't be completed until early next century.
  Construction has already begun on Lake Las Vegas, a $3.5 billion project bankrolled by the Bass brothers on 2,200 desert acres.
  "We all know there'll be a slowdown here, just like there's going to be one everywhere," says Coldwell Banker's Mr. Haze.
  "But they used to say that when California got a cold, Las Vegas got pneumonia.
  Now I think when California gets its cold, we just might only get a case of sniffles."
summary_text: Las Vegas grew up in the 1980s from a purely gambling town to a destination resort attracting families and conventioneers.
  While the gambling industry boomed, builders transformed the Las Vegas valley into housing developments attracting residents from around the country almost doubling the population.
  Now the regional economy is beginning to slow.
  Many casinos have been laying off workers while thousands of new hotel rooms are being constructed.
  David Shulman, a Solomon Brothers economist said that "Las Vegas is an accident waiting to happen."
  Efforts have been made to keep Las Vegas from depending so heavily on the gambling industry by permitting interstate banking but those efforts have not been too successful.