Beneath the glitz, glamour and gambling that is synonymous with the Las Vegas strip, hundreds of downtrodden beings live in a series of storm drains that run under the city and its suburbs.
The tunnels are dark but the residents are not rats, they are the homeless in need of a place to rest, somewhere to stay out of sight and away from the hustle and bustle of the casino city.
About 300 people call this bleak environment home, venturing out only to scavenge for food or beg.
Usually it is warm and dry, but five freak days of rain that flooded the city also washed away their cardboard-box homes, bringing into stark relief an increasingly dark side to the neon-lit Las Vegas.
Outreach workers say poverty and homelessness are two of the city's biggest social problems, caused by financial disparities and the continuing US recession.
Despite the billions of dollars that go through the hands of croupiers and cashiers along the strip, many Vegas citizens feel no benefits.
The city's most recent homeless census, conducted a year ago, found that 13,338 people slept rough in Las Vegas, up from 11,417 two years earlier.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the area's two homeless shelters have just 552 beds between them.
Statistics from the US Census Bureau show that 11.9 per cent of the city's 550,000 residents live below the poverty line. This rises to 14.8 per cent in the old downtown area, north of the strip.
There, the signs of poverty are obvious. On a street corner, not far from where the wedding chapel scene in the 2009 film The Hangover was shot, stands a rundown pawn shop with rickety metal shutters and a blacked-out front door.
Outside the pawn shop, a 20-strong queue is waiting to hock unwanted gold and silver.
"I need to change in my old wedding ring," says Sandra, a local divorcee in her 50s who has been out of work for five years.
Walking along the line, the stories are all the same; people selling heirlooms and personal possessions to pay for basic needs.
Estimates from charities put the number of Las Vegas locals struggling with hunger at one in eight. Just over 45 per cent of school children in the Clark County area, the county in which Vegas sits, are enrolled to receive free school meals because their families have low incomes.
As a result, local food banks are starting to run out. The Three Square Food Bank served $US30million ($34 million) worth of food last year and is doing everything it can to keep the charities it serves stocked.
The whole situation is aggravated by the area's unemployment rate – close to 13 per cent – which has been worsened not only by recession but the area's tourist-related problems.
Delores Witherspoon, a middle-aged single mother of one, lost her job at Southwest Gas in February last year. "Some days I ate, some days I didn't," she says, stressing her main aim was to put food on the table for her daughter and her ill grandmother.
Even though her income halved after she lost her job, Ms Witherspoon managed to keep making the payments on her mortgage. As a former employee of MGM Mirage's Bellagio casino, she received a call about available jobs at the company's soon-to-open $8.5billion CityCenter complex.
Six days before her grandmother died, in August last year, she got a job as a security guard at the development's Vdara hotel. "It was like she was holding on to make sure I was OK," Ms Witherspoon says.
Now living in a small apartment in east Las Vegas, while she waits for the bank to foreclose on her former home, she says she is happy to be busy and working.
If only the same could be said for the rest of the city's residents who fall on hard times.
Website Network
Media Man International
Media Man
Media Man Australia
American Casino News
American Gaming News
Global Gaming Directory
Global Gaming Directory.net
Casino Travel Media
Casino News Media
