

What’s really going on in downtown Vegas?  - flippyhead
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/nov/20/downtown-and-out-the-truth-about-tony-hsiehs-350m-las-vegas-project

======
vogt
Eh. I just moved to work at a Downtown startup. I absolutely love it. Folks
love complaining about cities that don't have character - downtown has it like
pretty much no other. Container park, as a poster before me mentioned is
bustling. Grab tacos at Pinches if you're ever by there, they're amazing.
Most, if not all of the startups here seem to be doing very well. The author
paints a picture that Downtown is being gentrified by the Tony show,
displacing things like punk rock bars in exchange for organic farmer's
markets. I find this to be pretty much completely false. There's as much punk
rock in the area as there is farmer's market right now.

I don't want to call this article a hatchet job because I don't know Hsieh and
have nothing to do with him or Zappos or anything, but that's how it came
across to me. Downtown Vegas seems like it's going nowhere but up, even
despite the glaring little pockets of yesterday that line some of the more run
down streets.

Calling the Gold Spike a frat house is pretty on point though.

~~~
plaguuuuuu
The article seems to portray the area as insular and pretty homogenous, is
that the case?

I'd hate to live and work in an area where everyone was doing pretty much the
same thing with their lives. Would be weird.. and probably unstimulating.

~~~
vogt
Could not disagree more. You get people from all walks of life, half due to
tourism and half due to the residents and workers of the area. It just so
happens that only a couple blocks from where the author speaks of is the
highest concentration of law firms in the Las Vegas area. So you're got
homeless people, service industry people, lawyers, startup guys, and tourists
of all walks of life all mingling in the same area.

In fact, since Downtown/Fremont is by all measures a cheaper tourism area than
The Strip, the diversity even in all the people just hanging out patronizing
the businesses, hotels, and restaurants in the area is much higher than your
typical tourist area.

I have no complaints. On any given walk from work to lunch in
Downtown/Fremont, I can rub shoulders with poverty, the upper class, and
everything in between. Half the people are on vacation and love to talk to
you, the other half are people who winded up there in the first place
specifically BECAUSE they're most likely from a unique mindset compared to
most other Americans.

If you're looking for consistency and seeing the same thing day in and day
out, Downtown LV is not the place.

------
caseysoftware
I was in Las Vegas for Future Insights Live just a couple weeks ago and a
friend - Frank Gruber of TechCocktail - gave me a tour.

First of all, it is nothing like the Strip. While there are casinos and
hotels, etc, they're a fraction of the size of the main chaos. As a result, it
feels closer to somewhere you could actually live.

We went to Container Park* (and numerous other places) and they're bustling. I
don't know how many are locals vs tourists but the sheer number of people
(families, couples, etc) hanging out made me think locals.

I moved to Austin in 2010 and it feels like a more embryonic version of that.
But in five years, Austin has had a handful of IPOs, a few major acquisitions,
and most major SF companies are setting up shop. If Las Vegas got a similar
cycle going - either by starting companies or importing people - it could get
some great things going. Either way, it needs to be thought of as a 5, 10 or
even 20 year plan. Not something to do in three years.

* By the way, the fire-breathing praying mantis alone almost makes it worth the trip. Even at 20-30 feet away, you can feel the heat when it shoots. It's amazing.

~~~
geomark
Is anyone in Vegas giving odds on the lack of water in the southwest U.S.
curtailing any 10 or 20 year plan?

~~~
velodrome
Nevada has 4% water rights to the Colorado river. The rest goes to Arizona and
California (majority of it goes to farming in desert areas).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Colorado_River_Compact](https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Colorado_River_Compact)

Nevada plans on getting water from the north and transporting it south...

[http://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/sep/12/water-authority-
gets...](http://lasvegassun.com/news/2012/sep/12/water-authority-gets-state-
agencys-backing-pipelin/)

Regardless, it will be irresponsible to grow a city without access to water.

------
geophile
I visited Container Park in April, after having read a few articles about the
Downtown project. I really wanted to like this place, and architecturally I
thought it was pretty interesting. But the place didn't make sense to me.

Container Park has a bunch of very narrowly focused businesses, in a small,
2-story space with insufficient traffic to support them. There was nothing
resembling an "anchor" store to draw crowds and get this place going. As a
result, it just seemed dead, lackluster.

Downtown LV is quite far from the strip, so tourists aren't going to stumble
on it. And it's not even in the heart of downtown LV. To get there, you have
to make a point of going there. And of course, LV makes it very tempting to
stay in the big hotels and not venture all that far.

Some examples of the businesses: There was one store devoted entirely (I
think) to socks. Another sold groceries, locally produced art, and art
supplies. One store sold used designer bags and shoes. There were a few bars
and restaurants, but nothing I'd go out of my way to patronize. In general: an
odd collection of niche stores, with a few places to eat and drink.

~~~
arfliw
>Downtown LV is quite far from the strip, so tourists aren't going to stumble
on it

Downtown Vegas is a tourist destination on it's own, regardless of the
Downtown Project. Fremont East is a popular spot, all of those bars, the
Cortez etc. Container Park is in a good location. You want to see isolated, go
checkout Switch.

------
deckar01
I stopped in Las Vegas for a couple nights as I was making my exodus from San
Francisco back to Oklahoma. I wish I would have known this existed. When I was
looking for things to do all I could find was the overpriced shows and resorts
on the strip. Seems to be a marketing failure, because I'm definitely their
target audience. How do most people find these developments organically?

Although I was passing through with my car, I tried to venture off the strip
on foot and take the bus around town. Walk any direction perpendicular to the
strip and you start to feel like you are in an empty wasteland. Next time...

------
caseyf7
The thing you have to remember is this is a real estate play, not a tech play.
We may soon have more CEOs buying tracts of land with their personal money and
then moving the corporate headquarters nearby if this works out.

~~~
applecore
It may have already paid off; the annualized return on downtown Las Vegas real
estate over the past three years is probably around 15–20%.

------
jchin
This article is from November 2014, quite some time ago.

------
nugget
Tony invested in the wrong companies. Instead of trying for standalone valley
style tech companies, he should have focused on small division style
incubations that could be sold into larger parent companies who would use the
acquisitions to establish and grow a meaningful presence in Vegas. That
strategy could have brought a lot of growth to the area and begun seeding the
ecosystem with stable employers, talent, and infrastructure. Vegas would make
an awesome home base for a lot of QA, customer service and support, and
similar corporate functions that are now being priced out of LA, SF and NYC. I
give him a huge amount of credit for trying, regardless of the outcome.

------
8ig8
Mods: How about a 2014 note in the post title?

------
wolfico
I really would like to move to Vegas but a few people who have lived there
have told me that Zappos is realistically (but not literally) the only game in
town for tech. Does anyone with boots on the ground there know if this is the
case or not? How does it compare to the LA/DFW/AUS scene?

~~~
vogt
Zappos is not the only game in town, but yes, the relative amount of tech jobs
is much lower than a lot of big cities. You have Zappos, companies like the
UFC who hire engineers and designers, the gaming companies have tech teams and
now all the startups moving in around the Downtown project. Still, the number
is low.

I just moved here from DFW. The tech scene feels a lot smaller here than
Dallas, but I'm still getting to know people after 3 years of making
connections in Dallas so YMMV.

For what it's worth I'm absolutely loving Vegas so far.

~~~
wolfico
Interesting. What do you like or dislike compared to Dallas? What made you
move? I'm in LA right now but am probably moving to Dallas in a month or two.

------
lscore720
I'm a tech recruiter that lived in Vegas for 6 months in 2012. Downtown was a
bizarre, tiny pocket of tech startup angst that was struggling to establish an
identity. There was ONE main coffee shop where seemingly everyone was pitching
investors, ONE main apartment building that housed all of the Zappos frat boy
engineers, and ONE main hipster bar appealing to this element (not including
the little hip spot where you could "always" spot Tony grabbing a drink).
There was this feeling of limitless potential, but little actual practical
work happening to sustain downtown for the long-term.

Interesting to hear the latest there, but figured I would add my two cents
too!

------
dangero
On first glance this article seemed negative, but by the time I finished I
couldn't remember what they were complaining about and I really wanted to
check it out. Almost seems like intentional reverse psychology.

------
mistermann
This article makes it seem a lot more interesting and substantial than
actually being there.

~~~
Animats
Most travel articles are like that.

