$350M Might Not Be Enough to Save Las Vegas | Hacker News Reader

$350M Might Not Be Enough to Save Las Vegas

theatlantic.com

52 pointsneilc53 comments

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.

I think the problem is, no matter how nice you make new places, people are still going to want to be in those existing nice places.

Megacities are the best example of the network effect.

> nobody is trying to make more nice places.

One of the things I learned from an open-ended road trip around half the United States a while back is that there are lots of nice places... maybe more than there's actually time to see, apparently more than the number of slots most US citizens have in their head for Nice Places(TM). And I'm glad some of my favorites are off the mainstream map, because it means I can better afford real estate there (though for most of these the locals and local developers are making it more expensive anyway).

It's arguable that some places offer unique levels of specific opportunities, and if SF and NY are like that for you, there's nothing wrong with choosing them. But there's a whole country of nice places between the two.

> It's too bad the blocks in Vegas are so large (looks like 380x480) and the streets so wide.

This is far from LV's biggest problem; well-subdivided blocks interspersed with good paths suitable for pedestrians and light vehicles could work out fine, keeping auto traffic proper at the periphery, maybe something people don't even have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

The "380x480" blocks comment reminds me of this talk by an urban planner on why people want to live in (European-like) cities, the grid layout seems to be a problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rUH63c1n0c&t=5m24s

that talk is fascinating for the illustration of employment density too, and this factoid: 43% of new yorkers live within 400m of a subway station

Great perspective. I'm curious... would you mind indulging us in a couple of said favorites that are off the mainstream radar?

Well, there are lots of Nice Places(TM) in the US but they're nice across an incredibly wide range of attributes. And the Nice Places I'd want to live in (to say nothing of be likely to get a job in or near) are a pretty subset of the Nice Places I enjoy visiting.

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.

NYC is needlessly expensive but not by as much as you think. Building very dense cities is a thing that costs money, and if you look at very dense well-developed cities with good economies, only Hong Kong and Singapore come in as slightly cheaper.

Most of the parts of NYC near the city center are so dense you need to build n-story mid-rise or high-rise condos if you want to add more people. That is expensive even if there were no political barriers.

nyc is also helped once you realize you can get by with zero cars. Your transport cost is $112/mo for an unlimited metro card plus perhaps $100/mo for the odd cab. That replaces car payment, insurance, parking, gas, and repairs -- easily $400+/mo.

Edit: and, distinctly contrary to sf, you won't miss a car. There is a food delivery culture: you may assume the vast majority of restaurants deliver. Seamless web is amazing. Groceries, gyms, dry cleaners, wash-and-folds, restaurants, and delis are so close to the majority of places you can live that you have no need for a vehicle.

> nyc is also helped once you realize you can get by with zero cars. Your transport cost is $112/mo for an unlimited metro card plus perhaps $100/mo for the odd cab. That replaces car payment, insurance, parking, gas, and repairs -- easily $400+/mo.

Now consider the rent differential between NYC and any other "cars required" city in the US. There goes your $400 and then some...

Um, duh? parent of my comment's thesis:

   NYC is needlessly expensive but not by as much as you think.

me: mentions supporting fact

   nyc costs are comparatively helped by not needing a car!

No one claimed nyc is cheaper, merely that just looking at rent doesn't accurately account for the real price differences. Note also that is a $200-$300 cost savings per person, so double it for a couple. And there is a QOL improvement: taking the train and either reading a book or merely being half-zoned out and sipping coffee is much better than driving.

I do know people who by choice live in SF without a car and are mostly fine with it. They also use Zipcar and rentals as needed. That said, NYC (esp. Manhattan) is probably unique in the US in the degree to which not owning a car is just part of the culture. Some do own cars of course--not sure the %--but it's not the norm.

You mean apart from Tokyo?

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...

> You mean apart from Tokyo?

Average Monthly Disposable Salary (After Tax) Tokyo New York 312,241.52 ¥ 464,589.78 ¥

Everything appears "cheaper" up until that point, but that's never the whole picture. You could also assert that you're likely to be paid less living in Tokyo, and the costs of living reflect this. Property is the major difference there.

When I said "well-developed cities with good economies" the intent of the 'good economies' bit was specifically to exclude Tokyo. A bad economy will make anywhere cheap and Japan's had two decades of that.

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

far too 'midwestern'

I don't know what that means.

worse weather than New York.

Much worse, no argument there. That said, it's nice to be able to go into a building in the winter and have it be nice and warm, unlike SF, where everything is perpetually chilly.

Have you spent much time in the midwest?

Yes. I'm from Chicago.

Then have you spent much time outside the midwest? (fish, water, etc)

I put 180,000 miles on my first car, traveling the country, and I'm on my fifth vehicle. I've lived on both coasts. The only mid-sized+ city I haven't been to, weirdly enough, is New Orleans. It's on my list.

And you?

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.

Have you lived through a Chicago winter?

Look at average highs in Las Vegas: http://www.vegas.com/weather/averages.html

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

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.)

I can see why you might not mind the Chicago weather, but how is moving somewhere based on weather "strange"? I grew up in Minneapolis but now live in Texas, and the warmer weather has dramatically improved my quality of life. I wouldn't move back to the north midwest even for a massive increase in pay.

What does 'midwestern' mean?

It's a region of the United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States).

I know that - but the user used it as a sarcastic term that could have 100 different connotations.

I was asking him to clarify.

Think of all the bad stereotypes of white lower middle class suburbanites. They are based on the people of the midwest.

San Diego is fantastic as well. But would hate to see the tech world impregnate it like SF.

Agreed.

I don't see that happening here anytime soon though.

Chicago is fantastic. But the winters are brutal.

> It'll be really hard to ever make that appealing

How about folks drinking beer on the street, the ceaseless outside speakers, and totally shameless flaunting of the sex trade on every corner? I'm not a prude, but there is something to be said for a little class. I didn't even notice the block/street size when I was there.

Nothing wrong with drinking outdoors (though Vegas probably brings out the worst in it), but I agree with you on the rest.

I didn't find the sex trade particularly off-putting my only time in Vegas; what I did find awful was the constant hustle and hard sell. The public transport actually seemed pretty good, and I would have been quite comfortable walking about if it weren't for people constantly, constantly in my face, trying to sell me something.

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

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.

> 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.

That's absolutely false. To take one example, ModCloth came out of CMU. Way back in the past, Lycos came out of CMU (a multi-billion $ exit back in the old days). More recently, something like Anki is a bunch of CMU engineers; GroupMe's co-founder was a CMU grad.

Also, Google has a big hub there, Uber just opened a robotics research facility,

Steel is a legacy of Pittsurgh's past, not its current. You're free to complain about Pittsburgh, but some data would be nice.

“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.

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."

“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.

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

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.

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.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...

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

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

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.

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

> 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

[1] http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Mitchell-s-3...

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

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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