
$350M Might Not Be Enough to Save Las Vegas - neilc
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/350-million-might-not-be-enough-to-save-las-vegas/386213/?single_page=true
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snowwrestler
Over the long term, it's going to take a lot more than $350m to save Vegas. It
might not be saveable at all.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/07/lake_mead_before_and_after_colorado_river_basin_losing_water_at_shocking.html)

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ChuckMcM
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.

That said, if there is _anywhere_ 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.

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michaelchisari
_“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 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.

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gonzo
Vegas was fine (somewhat great, even) back in the 60s and 70s, when I was
growing up there.

The the military spending stopped, and a bunch of people moved in from the LA
basin.

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Shivetya
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.

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enraged_camel
Paul Graham once wrote [1] that you need two kinds of people in order to
create a startup hub: rich people and nerds.

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.

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.

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.

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.

\--

[1][http://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html](http://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html)

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iamleppert
Nobody wants to live in that heat. I wouldn't move there, and I work in tech.

~~~
brandon272
I love the heat! I'd love to live there.

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melling
Sounds like they're hiring some of the wrong people.

“While some squandered the opportunity to ‘dent the universe,’” he wrote,
“others never cared about doing so in the first place."

~~~
mey
“While some squandered the opportunity to ‘dent the universe,’” he wrote,
“others never cared about doing so in the first place. There were heroes among
us, however, and it is for them that my soul weeps.”

That quote is pretty powerful and damning.

~~~
WillPostForFood
And completely unsubstantiated with any details. I went and read the original
letter, and it said nothing informative.

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threefifty
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.

 _creating a tech hub that could drive the economy, much in the same way
startups are now thriving in places such as Pittsburgh_

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.

 _Pittsburgh, for instance, has Carnegie Mellon, which has focused on turning
campus ideas into new businesses_

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.

~~~
bsder
> This isn't even remotely true. Pittsburgh has very little in terms of
> successful startups.

This wasn't always true in the past.

Sadly, the demise of Westinghouse hurt badly. In addition, the upper managers
of companies want to be in Cranberry Township, but that's too far away from
the colleges.

One thing that seems to be common about tech hubs is having the schools and
the businesses close to each other. Stanford is buried in Silicon Valley. UT
Austin is a quick bus ride from downtown. Boston universities are all over,
and it has a very good subway system.

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thomasmarriott
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.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P._Mitchell](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_P._Mitchell)

~~~
privong
> savior of the Hubble, pioneer of the particle accelerator

I am skeptical that either of those "titles" are supportable. What I could
find in a quick search is that Mitchell gave Texas A&M money to be a founding
partner in the Giant Magellan Telescope Consortium[0], which is building a
30m-class telescope in Chile. The particle accelerator you're presumably
referencing is the Superconducting Super Collider—canceled in the 90s after
massive cost overruns—which he had apparently supported in some fashion[1].
Financial support is obviously necessary, but neither of those make him a
"savior" of something he didn't actually finance (Hubble), or a "pioneer" for
an experimental technique that had been developed in the 1930s–1960s[2].

[0]
[http://www.science.tamu.edu/news/story.php?story_ID=806](http://www.science.tamu.edu/news/story.php?story_ID=806)

[1] [http://www.chron.com/news/houston-
texas/article/Mitchell-s-3...](http://www.chron.com/news/houston-
texas/article/Mitchell-s-35-million-a-gift-to-A-M-physics-1580309.php)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accelerators_in_partic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accelerators_in_particle_physics)

Edit: I am not saying that he Mitchell did not make significant contributions
to the things listed, merely that the titles may be exaggerated.

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chrismealy
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.

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.

~~~
michaelchisari
SF and NYC aren't near the nicest places in the US. The reason NYC and SF are
so expensive is because of an inability to develop outward (or even upward in
SF's case).

Chicago is a fantastic city, with plenty that those cities have, and plenty
more that they don't. And yet, a good portion of the neighborhoods have
reasonable rent.

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bluedino
Chicago is far too 'midwestern' and has worse weather than New York.

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acheron
Unless you're moving to the South Sandwich Islands or Greenland, who cares
about weather? The idea of selecting a place to move based on weather is
completely strange to me.

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socrates2016
Look at average highs in Las Vegas:
[http://www.vegas.com/weather/averages.html](http://www.vegas.com/weather/averages.html)

June - September is pretty damn hot. I wouldn't want to be caught outside
during the day.

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ghaff
The desert southwest is very hot during the summer. Yes, it is a dry heat. But
if it's 110 degrees F, I don't care if it's dry. That said, a lot of people
are fine with Vegas, Phoenix, and so forth. They don't get a lot of _bad_
weather (aside from the summer heat), they can play golf year round, and they
just tend to stay somewhere air conditioned during the middle of the day. Not
my thing but it is for a lot of people. (And while I don't like Vegas, there
are lots of nice locations relatively nearby during the cooler parts of the
year.)

