Tourists may have deserted the gambling capital of the world but the number of homeless has skyrocketed. Among them are the ‘Mole People’ who dwell in the decaying tunnels below the Las Vegas Strip.
A petite blonde-haired woman in a red sundress, who goes by Natasha, emerges from her home under the Sahara Hotel and Casino on a sweltering late September day.
She is just one of an estimated 1,500 people, many of whom are drug, alcohol or gambling addicts, who live underneath the glittering Strip in a vast 600-mile system of storm drain tunnels built in the early 1990s.
At first glance she could be mistaken for an average tourist in town to play blackjack or see a show.
It’s not until she makes her way through the piles of garbage, including discarded shoes, a broken stroller, used syringes, old pizza boxes, dirty blankets, torn-open pillows, and leftover bags of junk food, and comes closer that you can see she’s missing a front tooth and has sores all over her legs that are a telltale sign of fentanyl abuse.
Natasha, from Anchorage, Alaska, admits she’s high but is also lucid enough to explain her situation and describe life in the tunnels because, she says, many who live alongside her cannot.
She has been underground on and off for two years.
‘When I first came on the Strip – I’ve been here for a year – I was living in a truck,’ she told Daily Mail.
‘Then my boyfriend died [of an overdose] and so I’ve been down here off and on for weeks. I never knew how bad the whole [homeless] situation was here.
‘People are sleeping in alleyways and living by dumpsters or they’re in shelters. The people in the tunnels don’t want to stop using drugs. It makes them happy.
‘They can’t do that with a normal lifestyle or any place where they have to follow rules.’
Since 2022, homelessness in Las Vegas (and the wider Southern Nevada/Clark County area) has risen sharply, according to federal Point-in-Time counts.
In 2022, there were just over 6,000 people counted as homeless on a single night. By 2023 that number grew to 6,566, and by 2024 it had jumped to about 7,906 — an increase of 20 percent in one year and about 36 percent over two years.
By contrast, Vegas has seen a sharp decline in tourism through 2025, with visitor numbers down more than 11 percent year-over-year in June and about 7 percent for the first half of the year.
Analysts say rising prices – bottled water can cost as much as $12 or $14 in hotels along the Strip and resort fees, parking and food costs have increased exponentially – along with weaker foreign currencies and a slump in international visitors have caused Vegas to be a city currently down on its luck.
International tourism has suffered the steepest drop: visitors were down by more than 13 percent in June alone.
Homeless people in Vegas do not have to live in the tunnels. They have the option of going to what locals call The Courtyard, the primary hub for unhoused people in the city.
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