Let's see how this BILLIONAIRE can make Las Vegas green (???!)
Zappos billionaire wants to turn a dusty Las Vegas wasteland into a thriving urban hub
By
Greg Hanscom
"Hsieh, the billionaire founder of Zappos shoes, apparently has a thing for unicorns. They’re all over the apartment building, called the Ogden, where he and dozens of his associates live.
If they succeed, Hsieh and his compatriots will have created a thriving, dare I say sustainable, urban core in a neglected corner of a sprawling desert city. That is, a unicorn.
There does seem to be one gaping hole in the Downtown Project’s vision, however: housing. Just about everyone I talked to during my visit — many of them Hsieh’s employees or the beneficiaries of his largess — expressed dismay over the lack of affordable, and family-suitable, housing. Downtown Las Vegas seems to be missing the “live” portion of the promised “live-work-walk-play-eat space.”
Even the Pixie herself, who compares living in the Ogden to life in a college dorm, acknowledges that housing is “one of our biggest — I don’t want to say concerns — our biggest challenges.”
Hsieh, for his part, is reportedly not interested in building housing. He apparently figures that if he seeds enough businesses, and attracts enough starry-eyed young urbanites, a housing developer will materialize.
He’s wagering that he can attract enough young people, from a generation that
spurns cars,
adores dense, urban neighborhoods, and is increasingly priced out of the tech centers on the coast, to turn this dusty wasteland into a thriving urban hub."
http://grist.org/cit..._campaign=daily
Las Vegas needs to return to the desert. Ruins, a testament to man's fallibility. IMHO
When will they realize that development is and has not been sustainable?
2
Shortpoet-GTD, on 20 May 2012 - 03:25 AM, said:
