Aleph, UCLA Undergraduate Research Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Las Vegas’ residential terrain has often been overlooked beyond the city’s history of extreme spatial and economic segregation in the mid-1900s due to its development as a tourist city. This research reflects that history in the 21st century through the lens of population geography, which demonstrates that heavy in-migration to Nevada after 1990 flooded a landscape of severe segregation and thus reshaped the city’s racial and ethnic boundaries. A comparison between patterns of racial and ethnic distribution with access to quality education as well as the distribution of gated communities reveals that historical barriers to minority mobility persisted in new, more fluid forms after these waves of immigration. Namely, the overall geographical tendency of Las Vegas subregions with the highest proportions of gated communities and high-quality educational institutions to be areas with majority white populations demonstrates that systems of community and educational privatization may represent a new era of white flight. As such, this research introduces Las Vegas’ 20th and 21st century residential geography as a significant example of how racial barriers and tools of segregation transfigure over time, especially in environments undergoing immense demographic reorganization.