Developers are putting up subdivisions, apartments, retail centers and other projects across Las Vegas. But the local construction industry is still nowhere near as big as it was during the bubble years of the mid-2000s. 63,900 people work in construction in Southern Nevada. Employment has nearly doubled since early 2012 but is still far below the peak of 112,000 in mid-2006. It’s hard for me to imagine such a surge of population that you would need to build housing, retail, schools and other things on the scale that was happening in 2005. — Ken Simonson, chief economist, Associated General Contractors of America