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especially if you're used to the southwestern kind of city. By that I mean that, away from the unique madness of the Strip and Downtown, this is essentially a boring SoCal suburb with cookie-cutter beige condos and gated communities (this is not inherently a great thing but I do have to say that, after a day of working in the tourist realm, retreating back to the lifeless suburbs is a very welcome break...if you can find your house, that is, among all the lookalikes). The whole state sucks in some ways, notably in that the rules were and are made by casinos for the benefit of casinos. Generally, everything favors employees, landlords, and other capitalist lackey oppressors of the proletariat. It's the first place I've lived where I heard the "right to work" thing (in a fine example of bureaucratic doublespeak, it seems that "right to work" really means "right of your employer to fire you at any time for any reason, or for no reason"). Still, it's not a bad place to live for a while. I initially came here because Los Angeles was proving prohibitively expensive and Vegas seemed to offer many of LA's benefits at a more reasonable price and was afflicted less with congestion, pollution, and other ills that tend to be pretty severe out there in the City of the Angels.
Yes, the Strip and other touristy bits offer never-ending options for entertainment, if you want them, and there's always music available. Big names from the past can be cheap to go see, too, at off-Strip sites such as less-prestigious, less-touristy casinos. The reality seems to be, though (as in most resort areas, in my experience), that Las Vegans rarely go to the Strip unless they work there, and tend to visit it only when they've got visitors from out of town. Obviously, locals with a gambling problem are pretty much doomed...this may be very much like a SoCal suburb beyond the very condensed tourist areas, but one notable difference is the prevalence of slot machines and so on in supermarkets, convenience stores, etc. You can't get away from them in this city. The good part about that is that, if you have no particular addiction to gambling, you can curb the temptation to overindulge in games of chance because -- unlike tourists here for a short time -- you can always go back to the tables or machines the next day or next week.
The temperatures get pretty extreme here. Right now they're perfect. Soon they will be anything but perfect, up to the 120°F mark or so, but the dryness (though, thanks to golf courses and artificial beaches and lakes, etc, Vegas is more humid than the high desert should naturally be) really does make a huge difference as long as you stay hydrated and watch yourself for signs of heat exhaustion.
This city is really not yet THAT big, despite an extreme growth rate, and most of it is fairly new. Before the late '80s, there was not a lot of suburban area around the center of the city, because the town mainly existed to serve the hospitality and gaming industries. Since the late '80s, helped in large part by a flood of people coming in from LA, the city's grown immensely and soon took on a legitimacy of its own, independent of the Strip et. al, and now Vegas is home to a lot of different ventures that have nothing to do with gambling. The place has definitely become a 'real' city, though many parts of it are very new -- most of Henderson, for example, just wasn't there twenty years ago.
One problem with the newness of much of Vegas is that there seems little alternative, especially for renters, to condos or apartments, or new houses that are just as cookie-cutter and often rather small and sometimes shoddily thrown-up by contractors more interested in speed than finesse. I'd love to find an older house to rent, for example, but the odds are against me and there are definitely some neighborhoods it'd be better not to call home -- serious violence is not rampant in Vegas (North Las Vegas, an attached city, tends to have more of it, and some of it is not even perpetrated by the police) but property crime can be pretty bad here.
As for areas in which to live, my experience is somewhat limited (I tend to just go to the same few places in the course of my errands and work and have not yet had a good look at the entire Valley) but I really like Henderson and when I lived there I found that everything I needed (including Costco and Trader Joe's, and a great library) was handy. Now I live on the far west side of town, where most of the land was bare desert a year ago (it's filling in quickly, but right around me I still have buffering expanses of desert, which is nice and helps keep the place very quiet), and I still tend to do my shopping and other errands in Henderson because I know where everything is there and because there's as yet very little around where I live. I don't so much like the feeling of the east side of Vegas, north of Henderson. Boulder City is really nice, and no gambling's allowed there, but I turned down a really, really perfect rental there a few years ago because it's just too much of a commute to the Strip, though nothing by the standards of many parts of the US, especially in the West.
On that subject, you definitely need a car (or motorcycle) here. This place is, out in the stuccoed boonies, not made for walkers and I sure wouldn't be in a hurry to bike here. Drivers tend to be not so good, even away from the tourist areas (where taxi drivers routinely prove themselves even worse than the considerable number of drunk drivers), and are certainly nowhere near as technically competent as people from Southern California (who, themselves, often tend to make up for ability with terrible, aggressive driving attitudes, especially when they come to Vegas). Where I used to live, in Henderson, I usually walked to one of a couple of grocery stores near me. One store was perhaps a mile and a half or so each way and the other was at least two or three miles each way. On this side of town, though, the two nearest stores would have to each be about five or six miles from me and, though I'm not averse to a ten-mile walk each night, carrying any worthwhile amount of groceries that far is not likely. You pretty much have to have a car, or whatever, to get around here. And on this side of town, anyway (Henderson is different), they've followed the LA/San Diego model of not having sidewalks in many areas, which is particularly bogus for those of us who like to walk at night.
Oh...one really cool thing about Vegas: its location. Most of the tourists who come here seem to totally miss it, perhaps because the hotels on the Strip obscure all else, but this is quite a beautiful part of the country and the mountains around Vegas, especially on its western side, are beautiful. I didn't grow up with desert but it sure appealed to me when I first encountered it and I've loved the American deserts ever since. This is a small enough place that you can pretty much be out of town, from most places, within a half hour or so, and there're some beautiful desert spots hereabouts. One very handy one, and a great place to walk through the desert, is Red Rock Canyon. Arizona's close, as is the receding Lake Mead and Hoover Dam, and just driving through the desert (one example is the road south of Searchlight that meets I-40) is kind of magical and really gives a sense of the scale of it all. It's easy to imagine that you're out there a hundred or more years ago, and you really don't have to go far before you're out of Vegas and there's nothing (by which I mean there's a decidedly unVegas thing going on...the desert is far from barren and devoid of life, but you've got to get out of that air-conditioned car to see that and many, sadly, never do and come away with the erroneous impression that the desert is just "lots of nothing"). And then there're the mountains -- again, most tourists seem to not even notice them, but they're quite something and, at 12000 ft high, Mt Charleston would probably be a much ballyhooed landmark anywhere else in the southwest. But, hey, let those glassy-eyed feeders of slot machines go about their robotic business (oh, yeah, baby, reflexively pumping those dollar coins in to slot machines just looks like so much fun!) because we're off to face the thorns and wonder of the fringes of the Mojave Desert. As unnatural as Vegas is, the areas it offers immediate entry to are natural wonderlands. If you're into outdoors activities, or just love nature, this is -- somewhat surprisingly -- not a bad base to have for your explorations.
Anyway, that's about all I can think of to tell you right now. If you have any questions, please just ask...I really don't get out much here, at all (working on the Strip just does me in and the last thing I want to do is go anywhere afterward), but maybe I can add something useful.
Good luck!!
And drink a lot of water, while you're visiting, please...
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