At the 2010 census, about 70 percent of the population of Nevada lived in the greater Las Vegas metro area. The comparable Phoenix/Arizona percentage is something on the order of 68 percent.

“The west” as a conceptual framework for thinking about those lands beyond the hundredth meridian has some utility. But rather than probing John Wesley Powell’s notions of life in this arid land or Frederick Jackson Turner’s ideas about the frontier, maybe the salient reference point today is the Case-Shiller Home Price Index:

Case-Shiller Home Price Index