LAS VEGAS (AP) – This is not just a place people are born and live. Las Vegas is an enterprise.

It is a deal people enter, a set of givens agreed upon: More is better. Biggest is best.

To live in Las Vegas is to stake your future on this enterprise – for better or worse.

For the past 20 years, it has been for better. The unemployment rate was minuscule. Gleaming new casinos were built on “old” casinos like so many sandcastles on a beach. Hundreds of neat stucco houses promised a palm tree or a pool or both for nearly everyone with a paycheck.

And so, it has been a shock as, quietly and slowly, everything has changed.

For the first time in decades, the population has stopped growing. Casino projects are on hold. Planes full of free-spending tourists are landing with less frequency. Long the embodiment of American confidence, the city is now in limbo.

In Las Vegas, the economic mess is also an identity crisis.

A young Elvis

“Jackpot Town!” the headline read.

And above it was the smiling face of Jesse Grice. He was just 27, six years into his career as an Elvis impersonator. A young Elvis Presley. A fit, fresh, gold lame Elvis, on the cover of Time Magazine.

As he tells it now, even then in November 1998, he could not believe his luck. He’d loved this town since he was a teenager in Dallas, when his father, a salesman, sold enough Tropicana orange juice to win a trip to Sin City, then returned with tales of the fantasy land in the desert.

By the time Grice arrived in 1993, the fantasy had grown larger.

“I thought I was in heaven, man,” he says in a voice that echoes The King’s every inflection, only an octave higher. “Fifteen years ago, if you was going to struggle, this was the town to struggle in.”

Grice became a character like the city itself. He held nothing back. He was hungry. He made friends easily and promoted himself with charm. He made lots of money, fast, calling himself Jesse Garon, the name of Elvis’ stillborn twin brother. In 1996, Grice bought a Graceland – a 4,000 square-foot rambling ranch with a squat palm tree out front and a kidney bean-shaped pool in back. He paid an ironworker to recreate the gates of Elvis’ Memphis mansion.

But the gates of Graceland couldn’t keep out a developing national recession.

The bank took it back in October. Grice sold his collection of memorabilia on the front lawn. He put the Graceland gates in storage and moved away.

Now, in a city that’s also changed, an older, rounder, jumpsuit-era Elvis sips a midday martini in his condominium.

“I think it’s become an unforgiving town. I feel sorry for the fool who comes here to try to make it as an Elvis impersonator or anything else. It’s just a tough town all round.

“Look how many years we were up, up, up, and the ride had to end at some point. Well, it just ended.”

Illusion of prosperity

Michael Green, a history professor at the College of Southern Nevada and a longtime resident, agrees Las Vegas has never been like this.

Previous economic dips, one in the late 1990s and another after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were brief and largely confined to the tourism industry. In a very Las Vegas way, they were forgotten once the money began flowing again.

This one may be harder to forget.

This downturn already is longer and more pervasive, and it appears open-ended. It’s devastated not just the tourism industry, but the state’s only other major economic driver – construction and development.

“This recession destroys the illusion of prosperity,” Green says. “And I believe some of our prosperity was an illusion.”

What happens here

There are plenty of men and women trying to revive the enterprise.

They include a handful of casino executives who spent the past decade consolidating and expanding their reach to Macau, Bahamas, Singapore but have recently been stopped cold by the economic freeze.

They are a small group of public officials who for years worked to enable growth in the desert, acquire the water needed to sustain it and green-light the developments that created jobs and profits. Today they figure out what budgets to cut.

And there are the guardians of Las Vegas’ image, the ad execs tasked with making sure tourists still want to come here.

Among those is Terry Jicinsky, the senior vice president of marketing for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which has a budget of nearly $220 million, funded by room taxes, and operates the nation’s third largest convention center. The authority developed the “What happens here, stays here” ad campaign.

But as smaller numbers of visitors come – off 10 percent in October, from a year earlier – the marketers keep adjusting their pitch: casting Las Vegas as an easy last-minute destination, then as affordable, then as an escape for “crazy times.”

But bad times? No one here planned for that.

“Because our growth cycle has been going on for 20 years, you know, for many people, myself included, that’s a career. That is the entire length of your experience,” Jicinsky says from his office above the convention center floor. “We have casino executives that started working in their 20s and 30s that are now in their 40s and 50s, where all they knew was double-digit growth year after year after year.”

Jicinsky says he doesn’t believe “What happens here” – a seductive nudge toward indulgence during indulgent times – is outdated. It will continue to define Las Vegas, he says. “Everyone could see themselves in a Las Vegas story.”