updated May 29. 2023
Like Clark County's futile attempts to deal with the smut peddlers on the Strip, the city of Las Vegas has been trying to "deal with" the Fremont Street situation for years.
It's a long and involved history, but in short, the beggars, buskers, and so-called street performers are protected by no less than the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibits the abridging of the freedom of speech, among other freedoms (religion, the press, peaceful assembly, and redress of grievances).
The latest policy went into effect in November 2015. It confines performers, panhandlers, buskers, and other tip-seekers to six-foot-diameter "performance zones" originally painted to look like oversize poker chips (the paint has pretty much faded by now). A 40-foot buffer separates one busker from another; there’s also a 100-foot separation from Fremont Street concerts.
"Performers" enter a daily lottery for the privilege of two-hour intervals in the zones. Thus, buskers can’t congregate in crowded areas, nor can they hound passersby.
The policy has, for all intents and purposes, been successful. First, it's uncongested the Fremont Street mall, which can get 45,000-50,000 pedestrians on a weekend night. In the past, buskers –- sometimes as many as 100 -- tended to congregate around the nexus of Fremont Street and Casino Center Drive. This impeded pedestrian access to stores and some of the casinos. Now, with 38 defined performance zones (and comparably defined time slots), they’re not fighting over preferred positions, because they all have equal opportunity with the daily lottery for those 38 circles.
Feedback from the busker community has been mostly favorable. The ordinance provides a safer, more controlled atmosphere for them too. The main complaint has been the lack of choice of neighbors: A singer, for example, might have to compete with a saxophonist in the next zone.
We've heard from people for whom the latest measures still aren't good enough. If you're one of those, you can cut a wide swath around the buskers, since they can't move out of their circles. Or you can avoid downtown altogether. But the street people aren’t going away anytime soon.