![\"Tony](\"https:\/\/www.casino.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/footwear-news-858x536.jpg\")
Casino.org<\/em> spoke with Brian \u201cPaco\u201d Alvarez — who worked with Hsieh for Zappos from 2013 to 2017 — about the actual impact of Hsieh’s downtown Las Vegas investment company and revitalization efforts. Alvarez, a Las Vegas native and 18-year downtown resident, was something akin to the online shoe giant’s art and culture curator. (Zappos didn\u2019t confer formal titles.) He now runs his own art consultancy and is a doctoral student at UNLV.<\/p>\n In 2013, Hsieh vowed to build \u201cthe most community-focused large city in the world\u201d around Zappos’ new headquarters downtown. He formed a venture company called the Downtown Project (later known as DTP) to invest $350 million of his personal fortune, which Hsieh made by selling Zappos to Amazon for $1.2 billion in 2009.<\/p>\n Ten years later, Hsieh is gone and vacant lots and empty buildings still dot the Fremont East neighborhood where his investment focused. Much of the 45 acres DTP purchased there were never developed.<\/p>\n It’s a bit of a ghost town during the day,” Alvarez told Casino.org.<\/em> “I was in Fremont East two weeks ago with some tour guests from Europe, and there was a shooting in front of one of the bars down there.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Most of the 300 entrepreneurs participating in the DTP experiment are out of business and out of Las Vegas. They left when the money dried up. Three committed suicide when their ventures failed.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t to say that Hsieh didn\u2019t improve the area. Container Park, the outdoor retail mall, playground, and concert venue assembled from stacked shipping containers and guarded by a 40-foot, fire-breathing Mantis created for Burning Man, is now a thriving tourist attraction, and Fergusons Downtown, a converted old motel, is now a focal point for local music and art.<\/p>\n According to a 2017 Applied Analysis report, DTP created more than $200 million in economic output and 1,500 jobs, resulting in roughly $70 million in salaries.<\/p>\n But while downtown is no longer the shell of a neighborhood it once was, it’s not the community-focused cultural utopia Hsieh wanted it to be, either.<\/strong><\/p>\n And now, the majority of the real estate DTP purchased is for sale by Hsieh’s family,<\/a> presumably to anyone with any kind of vision whatsoever.\u00a0This includes Container Park; Fergusons; the historic Atomic Liquors building; and the former Las Vegas City Hall that Hsieh transformed into Zappos\u2019 headquarters.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the troubling things I saw was just how out of touch DTP and Zappos employees were with the general downtown ecosystem,\u201d Alvarez said. \u201cThey put people in charge of building downtown relationships who just didn\u2019t know anything about downtown, let alone the politics of the neighborhood. They would go on saying, \u2018Oh, we\u2019re gonna bring art to downtown, we\u2019re gonna bring culture to downtown.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cAll of that already existed<\/em> downtown,\u201d Alvarez said, citing the Downtown Cocktail Lounge, Griffin, Commonwealth, Insert Coins, Vanguard, and Beauty Bar lounges, and Henri & Odette art gallery.<\/p>\n At first, DTP\u2019s investment stoked excitement and a media frenzy. It brought residents in from the Vegas suburbs who hadn\u2019t been downtown in decades, to share tables at Natalie Young\u2019s Eat and the late Kerry Simon\u2019s Carson Kitchen with Zappos\u2019 young tech crowd.<\/p>\n But millions of DTP\u2019s money — such as the $11 million spent on a car-sharing program in an area without ample parking or enough residents to support it — was indefensibly thrown away.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cTony put the wrong people in place,\u201d Alvarez said. \u201cAnybody who had an idea and put it on a Post-It note got funding. I tried to whisper quietly from the inside. But man, you have to be really careful criticizing anybody in a culture like that, because then they will accuse you of not being part of the culture and not a good culture fit.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Alvarez, what downtown has needed for decades is more housing for low- and medium-income families, and transitional housing for the unhoused. Instead, DTP bought buildings, sometimes for about twice their value, and transformed them into expensive studio apartments.<\/p>\n The best thing that could have happened to downtown is to let things continue to happen organically,\u201d Alvarez said. \u201cDon’t force it. We need more people down here. We need a mix of incomes. That attracts smaller businesses that can service those people that live in these neighborhoods. Things have to happen slowly.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As an example of how revitalization is supposed to work, Alvarez — who previously served on the City of Las Vegas Arts Commission — cited downtown\u2019s art district, a formerly downtrodden neighborhood on the rise for the last 20 years, which he said is like \u201cthe race between the turtle and the hare and we all know who won that race.\u201d<\/p>\n In speeding up what should be the organic process of city planning, Silicon Valley style, DTP blew up a bubble that could self-sustain only as long as more capital kept pouring into it.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cCharging $13 for a fruit smoothie in a neighborhood where the average income is $32,000 a year was tone-deaf,\u201d Alvarez said. \u201cInstead of investing in businesses that were already down here, like the little flower shops on East Charleston or some of the art galleries or bars in the arts district, they started building their own stuff. But it wasn\u2019t the right stuff for the neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n Gritty but beloved punk clubs and watering holes were replaced with artisanal doughnuts, craft beer, and Bikram yoga. The Beat Coffeehouse & Records — opened in 2009 by Jennifer and Michael Cornthwaite — was downtown\u2019s brightest pre-Hsieh light. But it was extinguished by market forces created by DTP in 2016 and replaced by exactly the type of California-based chain Hsieh despised.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter we lost The Beat, which was the heart and soul of Fremont Street, Fremont Street never recovered,\u201d Alvarez said.<\/p>\n Hsieh became less involved in DTP in 2014, the year it laid off a third of its 100-member staff. Six years later, he was forced out of Zappos by Amazon and decided to relocate to Park City, Utah, with a sycophantic core of followers. Here, Hsieh repeated the pattern of gobbling up real estate for more than market value.<\/p>\n According to friends and associates, Hsieh exhibited increasingly erratic behavior<\/a> fueled by habitual huffing from nitrous oxide canisters. On Nov. 27, 2020, he died, emaciated, of smoke inhalation from a fire he started in a shed attached to an ex-girlfriend\u2019s house in Connecticut. He was 46.<\/p>\n How many people in downtown and all around used Tony for his millions on ill-conceived business projects and overpriced land purchases?\u201d Alvarez asked. \u201cIt was sickening, absolutely sickening.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Though remembering Tony Hsieh as the face of downtown\u2019s revival makes for a good story, it’s not exactly what happened.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can thank Tony for helping to invigorate a lot more of Fremont Street,\u201d Alvarez said, \u201cbut he wasn\u2019t the savior of downtown. Downtown would have come back up on its own.\u201d<\/p>\n Look for \u201cVegas Myths Busted\u201d every Monday — its new day<\/em> — on <\/strong>Casino.org.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>Click here<\/a>\u00a0to read previously busted Vegas myths. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email\u00a0corey@casino.org<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The legacy of Tony Hsieh includes his single-handed transformation of downtown Las Vegas from a depressed neighborhood into the safe, walkable, and thriving cultural hub it hadn’t been since the 1950s. But downtown, two miles north of the Strip, was already on the upswing long before the late former Zappos CEO arrived on the scene. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":78,"featured_media":272131,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[81896,81886,88494,82353,1,84511],"tags":[86090,86084,86085,86089,86091,86083,23,86087,86086,86088,83433,83434],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Real-Life Sim City<\/b><\/h2>\n
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Good Was Done<\/b><\/h2>\n
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Dot-Community Bubble<\/b><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.casino.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/beat-rj-858x563.jpg\")
Tony Has Left the Buildings<\/b><\/h2>\n