As a food runner at a Las Vegas hotel and casino, Brian Torres Suazo makes about $56,000 a year.
He’s in his late 20s and a dues-paying union member, but he can’t afford to buy a home. He needs roommates to help pay the rent.
“Empty, sluggish, slow,” Torres Suazo said when asked what the economy feels like to him. “I still know a lot of people who just have no hope to ever own a home.”
Torres Suazo is part of a legion of Las Vegas workers propping up the city’s multi-billion-dollar hotel and gaming industry who can hardly afford to live here. Near the end of last year, the median home price in Southern Nevada reached record highs close to $490,000.
“We are a blue-collar town with white-collar house prices,” said Nicholas Irwin, research director at the Lied Center for Real Estate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Across the U.S., home prices surged during the pandemic, and Las Vegas was no exception. But for a fast-growing city that has long enjoyed a reputation for affordable living, the sudden price increases have been jarring.
Irwin said wages haven’t kept pace with housing prices. A typical Las Vegas family would need to make $120,000 dollars a year to reasonably afford a home, but “that’s not the median wage in town for a household,” he said. “It would be a huge change if we started to see a decrease in population, or at least a smaller increase year over year, because affordability starts to bite into people.”
According to 2024 census data, the median household income in Las Vegas is about $78,000.
Nevada lawmakers are well aware of the problem. In 2022, the state channeled $500 million of federal pandemic relief money into housing.
And last year at the state capital, the legislature approved a housing initiative from Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo, who is running for reelection in November
“That was the single largest state investment ever into housing,” said Steve Aichroth, administrator of the Nevada Housing Division.
The new law expands the definition of affordable housing, provides loans and grants for new construction and gives first responders, teachers and other essential workers up to $20,000 for a down payment. In an era of divided politics, it passed the Nevada assembly 42-0.
But the state still hasn’t worked out some issues. In Nevada, the federal government owns about 85% of the land, and there’s been an ongoing debate about whether more of it should be sold for housing.
Meanwhile, in an effort to rein in home prices, President Trump is pushing Congress to pass a bill that would limit Wall Street investors from buying up houses.
At last month’s State of the Union address, Trump blamed corporate owners for driving up prices. “We want homes for people, not corporations,” he said.
State Sen. Dina Neal has been saying this for years. The Nevada Democrat has tried unsuccessfully to put a cap on corporate homeownership. Gov. Lombardo vetoed one of her bills in 2023, and another effort failed last session. With Trump’s new attention on the issue, Neal said it will have a better chance next time she brings it to the legislature.
“I have no interest in being aligned with President Trump’s policy,” Neal said. “It’s just this weird thing in the universe that allowed this to occur.”
Neal said there’s an investor-owned neighborhood in her North Las Vegas district that epitomizes the problem of rising home prices. On one block of about a dozen tidy new houses, every one was built as a rental.
“The average rent is about $2,500 for these homes,” she said. “How will you save for the down payment assistance if you’re paying for the rental property? You’re not going to be able to.”
More than a quarter of the homes in Las Vegas are owned by an investor, according to the real estate statistics firm BatchData. That’s one of the highest rates of corporate ownership in the country.
Housing economists are not convinced a cap on investor housing will do much to lower prices. The only way out of this problem is to increase supply by building more homes, said UNLV’s Nicholas Irwin. “More housing of all types,” he added. “Everything from low-income housing all the way up to high-end housing.”
And you have to build a lot of it. The state needs 200,000 more homes to meet demand, Irwin said.
“I’ve been doing this for 18 years. I have never seen such a desperate cry for help for housing,” said Michelle Merced, CEO of Neighborhood Housing Services of Southern Nevada.
Her group manages and builds affordable housing, and is working on a project now to build eight new homes designed for working families that make too much money to qualify for affordable housing but not enough to afford market rates.
She calls those frustrated homebuyers “the murky middle.”
“It’s the person that stocks the groceries, it’s the firefighter. Everybody’s got different circumstances,” said Merced. “None of us are here to judge.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2026 WBUR
