LAS VEGAS — Tony Hsieh didn’t look much like a modern-day Bugsy Siegel. Wearing backpack, T-shirt and jeans, standing outside a downtown bar, he patrolled his future empire along East Fremont Street here one sweltering morning.
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But the flamboyant Siegel changed this city for good when he built the Flamingo Hotel, the first luxury casino on the Strip. Now Mr. Hsieh, a soft-spoken 39-year-old Internet billionaire who runs Zappos, the online clothing store, plans to do something as transformative. It’s a classic American dream: a Western-scale roll of the dice in a city that suddenly conjured up Belle Époque Paris and ancient Rome out of the desert. The idea this time is to build a version of the Mission district in San Francisco or the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in downtown Vegas.
Mr. Hsieh (pronounced shay) is relocating Zappos headquarters from Henderson, Nev., about 16 miles away, and investing hundreds of millions of his own dollars to retrofit downtown with, well, a downtown, in line with the latest trends.
I came to check out the progress. There’s not much to see yet, but his $350 million Downtown Project — a mix of investments, acquisitions and loans — envisions blocks and blocks of community-based, pedestrian-friendly, small-business-oriented, high-density, high-tech urbanism in long-depressed and troubled neighborhoods. Zappos will take over the decrepit old City Hall. That gesture alone, salvaging a local landmark, has endeared Mr. Hsieh to many in Las Vegas.
We spoke briefly the other night in the Gold Spike, a former casino near City Hall whose gambling room he stripped and converted into a chic slots-free bar and chill space. He took me to the empty motel he bought next-door, where, he speculated, a modeling agency and photography studio could take over what used to be a few of the poolside guest rooms.
On nearby blocks, which he has also gobbled up, the Downtown Project would seed tech start-ups, boutiques, mom-and-pop restaurants and bars; the world’s largest Airstream trailer park; a playground and geodesic dome; a complex of recording studios; a charter school; a doggy day care; a bike share program, even a Tesla electric car share, along with theaters for TED Talk-like lecturers and music festivals.
There’s no designer-led master plan, no single billion-dollar construction project, no star architect. The concept is top-down but preaches piecemeal, bottom-up development and reuse. It exploits a picturesque supply of abandoned flop houses, vacant offices and collapsing warehouses, capitalizing on a growing desire among young Americans for urban life: an anti-Strip vision of America.
Out on the Strip, MGM opened CityCenter in 2009, a $7.8 billion luxury development and celebrity-architect petting zoo, which in a sense is the same concept, but pegged as a theme park for tourists. I got a peek the other day. It’s a smart and sleek attraction; business has been improving. CityCenter and the Downtown Project are both visions for evolving the same city.
But unlike MGM’s development, which opened in the midst of the housing collapse, Mr. Hsieh’s timing could hardly have been better. The local economy, devastated when the bubble burst, is limping back. The population (increasingly young Asians and Hispanics) keeps rising, and wealthy out-of-towners prop up the high end of the housing market. Most properties are still under water, and the city is down 100,000 construction jobs from pre-recession highs, but the picture isn’t as bleak, or straightforward, as four years ago.
At the same time, Las Vegas suffers the pitfalls of being a one-industry town. Baked into its economy are minimal taxes and a state government inclined to ship much of what Las Vegas contributes to the rest of Nevada, which, among other consequences, insures the school system is perennially poor. Casino moguls, needing a steady supply of parking attendants, hotel maids and blackjack dealers, not college-educated workers, were once fine with that. But times are changing. Now the lack of good public schools and downtown amenities — demanded by those mobile and educated young Americans other cities are competing to attract — has become a liability.
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