The reason nice places like SF and NYC are so expensive is that nobody is trying to make more nice places. Tony Hsieh is doing a great thing to trying to make a new nice place.<p>It's too bad the blocks in Vegas are so large (looks like 380x480) and the streets so wide. It'll be really hard to ever make that appealing, especially given the climate.
Paul Graham once wrote [1] that you need two kinds of people in order to create a startup hub: rich people and nerds.<p>Vegas has too few of both. First of all, it has very few nerds, because there aren't any schools nearby with strong technology programs, and the lack of nerds makes other nerds not interested in living there. In fact, the place has a reputation for being the hedonism capital of America. That's pretty much the opposite of a nerdy lifestyle.<p>As for rich people, while there are many in Vegas, most of them are there for gambling and entertainment, on temporary escapades from work and life, rather than permanent residents. So they have no vested interest in seeing the place develop.<p>The Downtown Project's efforts to revitalize the downtown area have been successful in terms of making the place safer and cleaner. However, the cultural improvements feel pretty shallow. Culture can't be forced or imitated: it comes into life as result of lots of interesting and diverse people interacting with each other in organic ways. So Tony and crew can build all the container parks and hip bars that they want. It will not make the place a hub for creative thinking and technical innovation.<p>I've also been reading articles and hearing from friends about the gross mismanagement of the Downtown Project as a whole. Apparently, Hsieh appointed a bunch of his friends and relatives to various leadership positions despite their lack of ability. This nepotism has resulted in serious issues in competence and accountability. Which is pretty surprising: Tony is supposedly a smart guy, and you'd think that someone that smart would also the brains to hire some professional leadership to manage a project worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Oh well.<p>--<p>[1]<a href="http://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html</a>
A couple months ago I spoke with a friend who is a city planner for a top firm and earned his master's from [one of] the top planning schools in the country. He knows some people involved with this project, and apparently those in charge decided to just wing it rather than hire a professional planning firm. Imagine all of the data you must consider when trying to develop a decent-sized city not only for today, but for 30 years into the future. It's a tremendous undertaking and to just skip out on planning sounded to me like it was a significant contributing factor to the demise of this urban renewal.<p><i>creating a tech hub that could drive the economy, much in the same way startups are now thriving in places such as Pittsburgh</i><p>This isn't even remotely true. Pittsburgh has very little in terms of successful startups. Do you want to program in Java and C++ in a cubicle? That's the nature of Pittsburgh's "tech hub." Pittsburgh's economy is driven by education, medicine, banking, steel/glass/aluminum/natgas.<p><i>Pittsburgh, for instance, has Carnegie Mellon, which has focused on turning campus ideas into new businesses</i><p>This is why I have to seriously question articles and stories about fields in which I'm not informed. This is absolutely not true. CMU is a joke with regard to startups. DuoLingo, Yinzcam, and Shoefitr are perhaps the only notable ones. There are some robotics startups no one has heard of, but a Stanford English major has a better likelihood of even creating a tech startup than a CMU CS grad.
<i>“One of the things he didn’t love about those campuses was that they were very exclusive,” Maria Phelan, a Downtown Project spokeswoman told me. “He liked the idea of more of a NYU-campus feeling—you don’t know for sure where the campus ends and begins.”</i><p>I can really appreciate this. I've never liked the tendency of the tech industry to create bubbles (2*entendre) and enclose their campuses and workers.
Sounds like they're hiring some of the wrong people.<p>“While some squandered the opportunity to ‘dent the universe,’” he wrote, “others never cared about doing so in the first place."
Interesting piece. The original "hub" of downtown was the Union Plaza train station. If you took a train through Las Vegas that was where it stopped, and it dropped you off right at the "top" of Fremont St. After the railroad pulled out the station was bulldozed into another tower for the Union Plaza hotel.<p>That said, if there is <i>anywhere</i> in Vegas that can be turned into a "walkable" area, it is that area of downtown. I give Tony tremendous props for having the vision to see it. And a few times my parents have urged me to move back and start a tech company there :-) It is still hot though, and it is still undeniably tacky as only Vegas can be. And that is a hard thing to get past.
Kind of hard to feel any remorse for their problems, their convention agency recently purchased the Riviera at the end of February and last I read it was to shut down by May displacing dozens of booked conferences and 150,000 booked room nights. If they were so worried about tourism you would think they would look to not pull stunts like that, but this quasi government agency really has no limits.
Over the long term, it's going to take a lot more than $350m to save Vegas. It might not be saveable at all.<p><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/07/lake_mead_before_and_after_colorado_river_basin_losing_water_at_shocking.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...</a>
Vegas was fine (somewhat great, even) back in the 60s and 70s, when I was growing up there.<p>The the military spending stopped, and a bunch of people moved in from the LA basin.
This failure reaffirms the most undercelebrated genius of the last century; George Phydias Mitchell — father of fracking, savior of the alpha magnetic spectrometer[edit], pioneer of the particle accelerator, and developer of the most successful master planned community in America; The Woodlands.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P._Mitchell" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P._Mitchell</a>