Many Betting on Vegas in Migration Out of California : Exodus: Some say they feel the state has let them down. But Nevada job market, schools struggle under the influx.

The best place to observe the West’s newest historic migration-- out of California, for the first time--is in the arid geometry of this desert-ringed city, where new hotel towers and acres of red tile roofs change the parallel lines of mountain, Strip and suburb almost daily.

Forty-one percent of the new drivers registered in Clark County in 1993 surrendered California driver’s licenses. At the employment office for the soon-to-open MGM Grand, Californians numbered just behind Nevada residents in the winding ranks of job-seekers waiting in the hot sun last week for one of 8,000 opportunities at the world’s biggest hotel.

Ex-Californians get the keys to an estimated 25% of all homes sold in southern Nevada these days; their children crowd the 54 new schools that have opened in the past four years.

Las Vegas is where Sullivan Richardson--formerly of Laguna Niguel--is looking for the opportunities of late 1980s Orange County, when he was helping to build a real estate development company, not dismantle it.

Where Beverly Antoine--formerly of West Hollywood--is searching for a place that feels like home and thinks, for the first time, that she has found it. In Los Angeles, she said, “I felt like I was at university: working, getting things together eventually, so I could leave and have a life.”

And Las Vegas is also where Ellen Haldeman, a self-professed “100% California girl,” is seeking the life she had in Santa Barbara in the 1950s, when the air was clean, the city was beginning to grow and she felt “comfortable and safe.”

In the past year, when more Californians left the state than ever, at least 31,000 headed for Nevada with their families, based on a recent study of driver’s licenses by the California Department of Finance. California life “is like a love affair gone bad,” said Kelly Peterson, a senior account executive at Bank of America who moved to Las Vegas in June. “California was good to me. It was a beautiful place. I liked it once, but enough’s enough.”

These new Nevadans say they were pushed by crime, smog and traffic and wooed by the promise of opportunity lacking these days in California. Some feel betrayed, but some also feel guilty and say they would never have left if their home state had not let them down.

For Haldeman, 68, who just bought a home in the mammoth Green Valley master-planned community southeast of Las Vegas, California means fragility, Nevada strength and safety, the ability to go out alone at night--or even during the day.

“The one thing I have is a feeling of guilt, of disloyalty or something to California,” she said. “I went to USC, everything California. I feel a little disloyal. But I feel I’ll be at home (in the Las Vegas area) forever.”

Like many transplants, her frame of reference remains distinctly Californian. She likens Green Valley to early Mission Viejo--the Orange County city where she is trying to sell a home.

“Does this look all that different from a new community in Thousand Oaks?” asked Jay Moss, the Encino-bred president of Kaufman and Broad of Las Vegas, as he surveys the scene in Summerlin, a vast master-planned community northwest of the city.

“Las Vegas has been influenced by California more than any other city,” Moss said. “Except for the heat, it feels like Southern California here. It’s not that foreign. I just don’t feel it.”

Indeed, for ex-Southern Californians the Las Vegas landscape has familiar touches. For some the storefronts and parking lots that line Sahara Avenue here are a dead ringer for Sepulveda Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley or Bristol Street in Costa Mesa. The local cable company beams in Los Angeles broadcasts of Lakers and Kings games.

The expatriates moving here are part of a historic trend--after more than a century as a receiver for the dreamers and strivers from other states, California lost a net 150,000 residents to other states last year. Most stayed in the West, in Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

When Richardson moved to Las Vegas in June, he left a job as the chief financial officer of an Orange County commercial real estate development company for a similar job at American Nevada Corp., which is developing the 8,004-acre Green Valley community.

At the Orange County company, “for the last two years we were restructuring our debt,” Richardson said. “Several of our properties were in bankruptcy. . . . I dealt with a lot of creditors. Cash flow was a major issue. There was no new activity.”

But here he is working with a master-planned community where 901 homes were sold in 1992, a 32% increase over the year before. “We had a big increase this year,” said Richardson, who had never expected to leave California. “We expect to sell 1,200 units in 1993. California is moving up here.”

Three major hotel-casinos--Treasure Island, Luxor and the MGM Grand--will open on the Las Vegas Strip by December, bringing an estimated 18,000 new jobs to the city. Compared to California’s 9.8% July unemployment rate, Nevada had 6.2% unemployment.

But work in Nevada, while plentiful, can also have a downside. Many of the new casino and hotel jobs are in housekeeping and other maintenance services. And the MGM Grand expects to get 100,000 applications for the 8,000 positions it needs to fill, said Cynthia Kiser Murphey, vice president for human resources.

Sandee Schur--recently of Studio City--wants a job as a medical assistant in the hotel clinic. She picked up an application last week and is optimistic, but also wary.

She spent upward of a decade at each of two jobs in Southern California before leaving the state in disgust a year ago, and she has had four jobs in Las Vegas.

“Employment-wise, Las Vegas is not a great place,” she said. “The wages are low. If you work in a casino, you’re very expendable. For every job you won’t do there are hundreds who will. It’s pushing pay down.”

Gene Meltzer, who splits his time between Chatsworth and Las Vegas, sees things a bit differently. Showing typical Las Vegas excess, on a recent Tuesday he was standing in line for his third MGM interview, not really because he has to, but because he thinks it’s fun.

“I’ll be more than happy to work for the MGM in any capacity on any shift,” he insisted. “If you’ve been to Disneyland, this’ll be better than Disneyland.”

But does Nevada make sense for everyone? It depends on who you are.

Beverly Antoine, who lives in Las Vegas four days a week and commutes to her Westwood therapy office the rest of the time, is a Las Vegas-at-all-costs kind of person. Living in Southern California for 11 years, she has been mugged, had her apartment burglarized and had an assailant try to steal her car at gunpoint.

As a black professional woman, she said she has found greater cohesiveness in Las Vegas’ black business community than in Los Angeles, where “when (blacks) move ahead, they leave others behind.”

“California is a great place to get your education, make your money and get the hell out,” she said.

But if you have not done those things, life in Las Vegas can be a bit tenuous. For starters, as Kaufman and Broad’s Moss notes, unless a transplant has the assurances of a job and home before arriving here, this arid New California--fast growing but still transitory in nature--is no guarantee of happiness. A growing number of homeless people is testament to that.

The fast growth in itself is a concern. The Clark County School District figures it will need 100 more schools in the next decade to absorb the influx, but has no assurances that voters will approve the $1-billion bond measure necessary for construction.

Water availability is a question mark. Traffic and crime are already on the rise. Old-timers are beginning to grumble about how their city is changing. No municipal welcome mat--even one as visible as that of Las Vegas--can last forever. That a warmly receptive Las Vegas could turn into chilly Seattle is always a possibility.

“Can Las Vegas continue to grow?” Moss asked. “You drive through the city and everything’s under construction: the streets, the houses, the hotels. . . . It’s exploding here. The problem is whether infrastructure can keep up with growth.”

Also, the economies of the Silver and Golden states are intertwined enough so that, when the California real estate market hit the skids, the Nevada market slowed also. If you cannot sell your West Coast home, you are probably not going to move east, no matter how much equity you have.

With $700,000 in equity in their Rancho Palos Verdes home and retirement creeping closer, a California couple who requested their last names not be used--call them Herbert and Irene--have been scoping out Las Vegas houses for the past 18 months. The idea, Herbert said, is to sell the California home with the views of ocean and city, buy a grand replacement here in the $450,000 range and bank the rest. If that’s possible.

So Labor Day weekend found them touring a nearly 6,000-square-foot custom home with six bedrooms, 5 1/2 baths, a $699,990 asking price and over-active air conditioning on a private cul-de-sac in the gated community of Coyote Creek.

“Our best friends of 45 years already bought here two years ago,” said Herbert, giving the atrium and SubZero refrigerator a lingering glance. “If I can convince my wife, we’re definitely going to move here.”

There, of course, is the rub. Even if they can sell their home in the Southland, leaving behind the crime, riots and unemployment that Irene fears, what will they end up with? The trade of a beloved home in a temperate climate for the uncertainty of a new and sweat-soaked life.

“I’m the holdup,” Irene admitted. “I’m the one who would like to stay. . . . It is very difficult to leave Rancho Palos Verdes. The weather you can’t beat. You sleep with blankets all summer. Every summer here in Vegas I will miss Palos Verdes.”