Reflections and gratitude for Tony Hsieh, vision, and persistence
I never met Tony Hseih. That was on purpose.
The Downtown Project in Las Vegas crossed my conscience at a moment when I had become frustrated, embittered by the failures of my professions. As an urban planner and economic developer with a long history in downtown and community revitalization, I had hit a dead end, concluding that the tools I had learned and used to make communities better, healthier, more resilient, had failed. My professional belief system, as it were, was falling apart. And I had nothing to replace it.
When you have mastered a way of doing things, you find that that way has tangled itself so tightly into your brain and heart and assumptions that you cannot cut yourself free. I knew my way wasn’t working, but I could not for the life of me see my way out.
My first visit to the future Downtown Project was my first visit to Las Vegas, with a planning conference in 2007 when I worked for a national firm and most of western downtown was a wasteland of derelict motels, vacant lots and destitution. My second visit was in 2012, when the Downtown Project was just starting and the only sights to see were an upended shipping container and a geodesic dome on a dirt lot.
In the five years after that, I visited every chance I could.
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Tony built belief. He gathered believers. He let you see beyond where you could see. He sold an astonishing vision from the confines of a tour of his apartment. A friend told me that being part of this community allowed her to be part of something bigger than herself. That it fed a piece of her that she had not realized she was missing. And filling that missing piece made her able to do what she never expected.
Tony was everywhere, even when he wasn’t there. Sometimes I thought he must be behind that pillar in the corner of the bar (basically every pillar in every bar). Sometimes I thought of him as like a spirit in a seance, passing through walls and thoughts and permeating conversations. Except that this was a spirit that made you feel warm, not cold.
Mutual friends who have been part of the Downtown Project have written about Tony’s ability to create connection, his approachability, his fearlessness. They way in which he led, encouraged, even funded them to do something new, impactful, groundbreaking. Watching that from the outside always raised a question for me:
Am I being fearless in my own world? Am I fearless enough?
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I found out when he died that Tony was only 4 years younger than me. I thought he was a lot younger. He never seemed to age, he just became more lean, more minimalism personified. While I found myself adding pounds, chins, hurts, uncertainties.
From my distant observation platform, he never seemed to lose faith, only move from one leading edge to the next, the way he moved to the newest living facility developed by the Downtown Project every few years. A personified, personal stake in the ground for every expansion of the core of his vision. No matter how the execution of that vision had changed, or perhaps bent, or perhaps diluted.
That’s probably overstated, too hagiographic. Everyone has insecurities and hurts and setbacks, and usually a double chin from the right angle. But part of what we mean to the world isn’t just the facts of our story. It’s about what we project, what we in our simplified public form end up meaning and teaching other people.
What does it mean to love a place, to love a community? What does it mean to love and fight your vision for a place and a community into being?
What does it mean to do that and then have it become something different, something warped in another direction by forces that you didn’t anticipate, or didn’t account for, or perhaps couldn’t change with the tools that became tangled so tightly into your brain and heart and assumptions that you could not cut yourself free?
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I decided long ago that I wanted to work on community improvement because communities were the most complex organizations I knew of — the edge of the known world in figuring out how to improve human lives. Too new to scientific thought to have progressed as far as biology; too complex and indeterminate and messy to untangle like chemistry.
I have studied, critiqued and even occasionally worked with most of the urban thinkers of the late 20th and 21st centuries. I have argued publicly for the merits of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin over Venice, Italy; fought for the importance of everyday voices in the face of quietly elitist design principles; insisted on the incremental, the human scale, the “economically sound” in the face of lovely balloon-funded pipe dreams.
More than any other human that I have encountered in my wanders through the forests of urban design, planning, downtown revitalization and more, Tony understood — deeply, profoundly, humanistically — that the life of the people who live in a place, the relationships, the shared language, the shared love of a place and its potential, create the kind of places that can have resilience, health, staying power.
The kind of places that I had been trying to figure out, trying to build, trying to will into being for as long as I could remember.
I never actually met Tony, despite sharing spaces and conferences and friends with him, because I wanted to maintain the reporter’s distance, the arm’s-length detachment necessary for analysis and critique. I knew what a pied piper he could be. I still have a book in manuscript form that I never finished, as DTLV and I both changed over years. And you can find my written and spoken voice analyzing, proselytizing, advocating for the Downtown Project in various corners of the internet. Especially in response to the voices who said Tony’s vision was a sham, or a failure, or a thing that didn’t work.
It didn’t fully work. But it didn’t not work, either.
I don’t know if I regret maintaining that distance. But part of me now regrets not telling him that he influenced me, although I don’t know if I would have been able to make it make sense. I’ve learned over the years not to wait to tell people things like that, because sometimes you miss the chance.
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For a lifelong Midwesterner, accustomed to embodied, looming memories of the Rust Belt and the decades of failed rebirths that closed the last century and opened this one, the Downtown Project was my first inkling that Things Could Be Different. In the end, one can argue that the Downtown Project didn’t end up being so different from other city revitalization schemes, as real estate (albeit creative real estate) came to drive change. As that happened, DTP left behind much of the plan for the culture development and small business investment. And over time, I think that eroded that something that had captivated me about this little community when I first met them during a podcast in a bare converted apartment in the Ogden with a PBR (yuck) sho ved into my hand. What I saw was an embryo, but I could see a glimpse there of possibility, of thinking put into action, of a holistic vision of what a community is for and what a community should be.
I don’t know if I really understood what Tony taught me, an occasional face on the fringe of his universe, until I wrote those last couple of sentences just now.
Perhaps the lesson I take from my arm’s length relationship with Tony Hseih’s vision is the centrality of genuine love of people in community, love that is framed and formed by how you house and serve it. Beyond the containers and the Burning Man artifacts and the new/old architecture and the llamas. Perhaps the most compelling thing about Tony’s vision for DTLV was the love, the quasi-family, the connectedness, that I think he tried to embed in it.
Perhaps that’s the challenge of the next DTLV: fully building and integrating that community of love within places that enable that kind of community, perhaps a new/old type of community, to happen.
Thanks, Tony. Godspeed.
