Revised and expanded: Reflections on Tony Hsieh and what it means to have a vision for your community
The first part of this essay is a segment of one I published last week, called “
Reflections and gratitude for Tony Hsieh, vision, and persistence.” Given the accounts of his last year that have come out since I published that, I wrote a coda, as it were, that tried to put those earlier statements in the context of what appears to be a more tragic story. In the process, I also reconnected with a crucial part of what makes the Downtown Project — and most of the successful community revitalization efforts I’ve seen actually effective. Hint: it’s not a Great Man.
Since Medium sort of penalizes you for going too long form, I’m going to direct you to the earlier article, and then come back and read this one as it was intended, a follow-up to what I wrote before. Thanks.
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….
{Read the rest of that essay here }
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.
____
Additional edit, December 9:
As more information about Tony’s last few months has come out, I’m finding myself trying to reconcile the tragedy of his experience with what I wrote above. I don’t like to edit my writing after it has been published — I feel like that’s dishonest, in some sense — but I need to add a few things.
First, it’s hard now not to see the Project and Tony’s vision as at least in part the product of his… whatever it was. His need for people, or for distraction, or for a Something that transcends our usual communites. I’m no psychologist. And some of the trappings of the Project — the drinking/party culture — wasn’t my gig, as a middle-aged Midwesterner with two kids and a pretty traditional life back home that I wasn’t trying to escape from. What I resonated to was the energy, the intent that lay under the EDM and the Giant Beer Pong and the party scene. Those were’t the community activities that I personally would have been looking for, but the intensive effort to build a real community, a different, more intensively-interrelated community…that was something that I didn’t see in the dozens or hundreds of efforts to indirectly, ineffectively, “build community” through fancy streetscapes and parks and incentive programs.
Second, Tony’s death rightly or wrongly now becomes linked with the handful of suicides that took place within and adjacent to the Downtown Project’s tech startup world during the first five years of the Project. We have learned a lot more about the mental health of entrepreneurs since then, due in part to the bravery and honesty of people like Brad Feld. And I learned since then myself about how dark those periods feel when you are in them. It’s pointless, and yet also necessary, to say that self-destructive behavior, intentional or unintentional, is horrific and necessitates soul-searching. How does one build honest care for others’ mental health into a community, a network? Into startups and entrepreneurship? We understand more than ever how crucial that is, how peoples’ mental and emotional state affects everything else (thank you 2020, I think). But we have to ask ourselves next: what does that look like in a resilient community?
Finally, I was uncomfortable with “love” and “quasi-family” in the conclusion I published before, even as I was writing it. At the time I chalked my reaction up to Gen X cynicism and decided I was going to push myself in that direction (part of my ongoing personal struggle to write in Non-Geek.) Now I think I was reacting to the fact that those are actually not the right words. A family can be a dysfunctional mess of baggage, and “love” is too vague, too blurry, too many meanings. What’s the better way to describe this?
At one tough point in the DTP’s history, leadership shifted the language they used from talking about “community” to “connectedness” — I and others were told that this was because the general public was regarding them as government, asking them to install garbage cans and fix public infrastructure problems. I think “connectedness” was the better term — the term that better fit what all of these people were working to build. The point was to create an environment — physical and social alike — that enabled people to find and build connection with people that they might not encounter otherwise. Tony articulated that in his book, Delivering Happiness, and that was clearly a guiding principle. The result: even an outlier like me could come into the community and be welcomed, connect, be energized, build relationships. If you’re from the eastern US, you know how incredibly hard it can be to enter and be immediately welcomed in most environments. And our nice streetscapes and parks don’t necessarily make that easier. Downtown Las Vegas was the first place in all of my life where I felt like people geniunely welcomed me, wanted to get to know me at a level beyond how my business might help theirs. And I will never stop being thankful for that.
But here’s most important part that was missing in what I wrote before. Although Tony was the face, the spearhead, much of the money and perhaps even the wellspring of the Downtown Project Vision, it wasn’t his vision alone. Hundreds of people bought into it, invested their time and hearts and, yes, money into building it. Some of those people are still there, some have moved on to other places. But I can tell you from my own experience elsewhere that being part of a shared vision remakes your way of living, changes how you interact with the world from then on. And I’ve seen that in the people who passed through the Downtown Project.
My consistent message in all of the years that I wrote and talked about the Downtown Project was that if we were looking at Tony, we were missing the bigger and (from my perspective) the much more interesting part of the story: how those hundreds of people shaped the community — and the Vision, as it played out in reality — by their own actions.
We too often talk about community revitalization, urban planning, grand visions and big projects, according to the Great Man theory of history. Dan Gilbert in Detroit. Richard M. Daley in Chicago. Frederick Olmstead in Central Park. We make it about Them, as though they had single-handedly wrought the iron and carved the stone. That not only makes the story boring, but it makes it false.
A community vision is profoundly different from a personal vision. Even if the vision for the community starts with one person, it will pass through hundreds of hands, most of whom will add a shape or a flavor or a new element or a nuance along the way. And if the first person, through whatever control they have, insists on the vision staying under glass, exactly the way they conceived it, those are the visions that become fossilized relics.
So, ironically, perhaps Tony’s greatest gift was to place his vision, the one that he cared for so much, in the hands of the community that surrounded it. And by doing that, giving up control over it, opening the possibility that it would not go where he intended. Maybe he didn’t imagine it turning out as it has. Maybe he didn’t realize all of the ways it could go awry. But when we make a gift, we don’t really know what the recipient is going to do with it anyways. And often the people to whom we gave the gift don’t use it the way we intended.
But sometimes, sometimes, the gifts we give echo far beyond where we imagined.
I think that will be the case for the Downtown Project, and indeed, for many people, it already has.
So, thanks Tony. Godspeed.
