If New York and Chicago are losers in the convention center space race, how can your city hope to compete? Unless, of course, your city is Las Vegas.

Hardly a week goes by without some municipality embarking upon a new, ambitious public works construction project, usually featuring or including a convention center, designed to pack them in. Particularly instructive in the space race is who has won, and who has lost.

In 1991, New York City held 30 of the 200 biggest trade shows, as defined by Tradeshow Week magazine. Chicago held 28, and Las Vegas, 22.

In terms of exhibit space use, Chicago accounted for 20%, Las Vegas for a little more than 14%, and New York City, 13%.

Since then, Las Vegas has exploded in winning the top shows. In 2004 it held 38 of the top 200 shows, and accounted for almost a third of exhibit space use in the nation. In 2001, 40 of the top 200 shows were held in Las Vegas.

As for Chicago and New York in 2004, Chicago was host to just 18 of the top shows, a decrease of 36%. And for New York, the fall was even more precipitous. The city held 14 of the top 200 shows, a decline of more than half from its 1991 performance.

“It is striking how Las Vegas has triumphed,” says Heywood Sanders, a professor of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio, who has tracked convention centers and their impact on economic development for the past quarter century.

“Both New York and Chicago will be hard-pressed to simply get back to where they were in terms of convention and tradeshow performance a few years ago – if they can manage that,” says Sanders.

“Fueled by more than $150 million in annual hotel room tax revenue, the public Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority can out-build and out-market pretty much everyone else,” Sanders said.

The tale was summed up by Moody’s Investors Service earlier this year, when it upgraded the Las Vegas authority to Aa3 from A1.

“The Las Vegas metropolitan area features an incredible 125,000 hotel rooms and an additional 4,110 are expected to come on-line in 2005, including the Wynn Las Vegas with 2,716 rooms,” Moody’s said.

Rating companies don’t use adjectives like “incredible” very much.

Hotel rooms are the most important factor in convention planners’ choice of location, according to a feasibility study done earlier this year for the city of San Antonio, which sold bonds to build a new convention center hotel.

So this is what Chicago and New York – and every other city – is up against in their pursuit of the convention center business. Las Vegas leads the way. The nearest city in terms of so-called committable hotel rooms is Orlando, Fla., with 80,000. Chicago has 60,000, at no. 3. New York is 10th on the list, with 25,000 committable rooms. Las Vegas is in a dominant position.

Chicago and New York have taken different tacks in countering the Las Vegas juggernaut. Chicago has steadily expanded McCormick Place, which is still the nation’s largest convention center, at 2.2 million square feet.

New York City, on the other hand, has dithered, and is only now planning to embark upon a five-year, $1.4 billion plan to double the size of its Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, to 1.4 million square feet.

Yet as Sanders points out, “Even as Javits is expanding in New York, and Chicago’s McCormick Place is adding almost 500,000 more square feet of exhibit space, Las Vegas is also spending $400 million to upgrade and expand its center.”

The Las Vegas convention center has 1.98 million square feet of exhibit hall space; there is another 1 million square feet at the private Sands Expo and 935,000 more at Mandalay Bay, said Sanders. “You’ve also got great air access, and the monorail linking the hotels.”

There’s also the weather. Warm winters count for a lot in attracting conventions.

And, of course, there are all of those existing hotel rooms, Las Vegas’s “financial engine,” as Sanders describes it.

Sanders made his comments just before he was scheduled to go to Cleveland, where he was going to discuss a proposed $400 million convention center.

“Heartbreaking,” is how Sanders, who has long opposed cities’ infatuation with financing and building “nonperforming investments” like convention centers, describes the Cleveland plan.

Mr. Mysak is a columnist for Bloomberg News.