What’s really going on in downtown Vegas?

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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!

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.

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