THE CATACOMBS OF LAS VEGAS
Beneath the unrestrained city of casinos and slot machines, hundreds of homeless people live in tunnels dug sixty years ago to drain stormwater. A shelter from the sun that can become a dangerous trap
Las Vegas is a promise made of colored neon, jackpots, enormous hotels and rivers of money. But beneath its glittering surface lies an invisible city, populated by the defeated and the homeless: men and women Las Vegas would rather not see, people without a home or steady work. Many live in the tunnels built in the 1960s to drain the sudden desert rains that once flooded the city: an underground network stretching for hundreds of miles and sheltering around 1,500 of the nearly 9,000 homeless people living in the county. There is everything in the tunnels: lonely elderly people, depressed twenty-year-olds, young mothers without a dollar, the chronically ill, drug addicts, alcoholics, ruined gamblers, war veterans, laid-off waiters, working poor swallowed by rising rents.
Some have built makeshift shelters; others sleep directly on the concrete, in a darkness that protects them from the Nevada sun but can become a deadly trap. Las Vegas may be in the desert, but when it rains, the mountains can pour a violent mass of water into the drainage channels in a matter of minutes. “When it rains, we expect a small tsunami,” says Nenad, 33, of Polish origin. “And when it comes, you have thirty seconds to escape.” So while Sin City keeps shining with casinos, limousines and slot machines, beneath it, in its bowels, survive the ghosts of an American capitalism in which it is sometimes easy to lose everything — and end up living in a tunnel.
