The burgeoning population, during and after World War II, consisted primarily of newcomers. The metropolis served as a magnet for those who equated a better life with a real chance for personal prosperity.
Thousands upon thousands migrated to the Las Vegas Valley, drawn by the resort boom and by Nevada's comparatively low rates of taxation. Throughout the postwar period, the per capita personal income of Nevadans ranked among the highest in the nation.
Newcomers discerned the opportunities most readily in Las Vegas, the fastest growing city in the state, where periodic shortages of labor and a relative immunity from recession kept the economy expanding at a rapid pace. Las Vegans enjoyed one of the highest average annual family incomes of any city in the country. The influx to southern Nevada included people from all walks of life.
Construction workers employed on a never-ending series of projects, attorneys attracted by a lucrative trade in marriage and divorce, the elderly devoted to retiring in a warm climate, gamblers and dealers interested in practicing their professions legally, and service workers recruited for the opening of every major hotel, stood most noticeably among the crowds that flocked to the city during the 1940s and 1950s. In Las Vegas, they found not only the 'elbowroom and broadly tolerant freedom' that supposedly typified a last frontier town, but also the likely prospect of upward mobility.
In one sense, the new resident came for somewhat the same reason as the betting tourist. Like gambling, Las Vegas offered a chance to get ahead, if one did not mind taking a few risks. Newcomers tended to come to the desert metropolis from the same places as tourists. As in other parts of the state, few Las Vegans, only 19 percent in 1960, had been born in Nevada.
Most came from nearby states, particularly California, Utah, Texas. Of the 42,000 migrants to Clark County between 1955 and 1960, a group that accounted for fully one-third of the area's population, 12,000 came from the Golden State, and 8,6000 hailed from the ties that held Las Vegas tightly in orbit around Los Angeles. Many newcomers from Southern California of course, had uprooted themselves at least once before prior to migrating to southern Nevada.
Perhaps they saw no future for the desert valley, or perhaps they intended to earn enough money in the resort to stake them to a future in places they preferred to regard as home. No matter what the case, they left in nearly as large numbers as they came; between 1955 and 1960 about forty-two thousand people moved into the Las Vegas metropolitan area while more than twenty-eight thousand departed.
A high rate of population turnover, typical of boom-town growth throughout the westward migration, continued to typify urban society on the twentieth-century Pacific slope.
