Boulder City: The Nevada City That Banned Gambling

Boulder City is the only incorporated city in Nevada without a casino. This is not an accident. It is the result of federal policy, a planned community built from nothing in nineteen thirty-one to house the workers building Hoover Dam, and administered for decades as a federal company town where the rules were made in Washington, not at a city council meeting, because there was no city council.

The Bureau of Reclamation designed the town grid, appointed its manager, set the ordinances, and banned gambling and alcohol, the two industries that defined Nevada's economy, because the bureau believed a construction workforce of that scale needed to be controlled and that gambling and liquor were incompatible with the production schedule. Workers lived in Bureau-owned housing. They could not own property until nineteen fifty-nine. They could not vote on local ordinances. The man who decided whether the town had a park was appointed, not elected.

The gambling ban was retained when Boulder City incorporated as an independent municipality in nineteen sixty. It has remained in place ever since, through every wave of Nevada gaming expansion, through the opening of the Mirage and Bellagio and the proliferation of casinos across every neighboring jurisdiction. Boulder City has about fifteen thousand residents and no slot machines.

The result is one of the most unusual towns in Nevada: small, stable, planned, tree-lined in a way the desert towns around it are not, still carrying the physical bones of its nineteen thirties federal construction. The streets were laid out by federal architects. The buildings were built to last. They did.