Greg Beato

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“Where Abandoned Liquor Stores Now Fester, Yoga Studios Shall One Day Bloom”

December 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I posted something a couple months back about Zappos founder Tony Hsieh spearheading a reimagining of raffish Downtown Las Vegas as a Jane Jacobs-ish walkable community for the Information Age. It’s a tall order. Here’s an excerpt from another piece about Hsieh and his master plan, this time from Greg Beato at Reason:

“In December 2010, Hsieh announced that Zappos.com was planning to move its thousand-plus employees from an office park in Henderson, Nevada, to the old Las Vegas City Hall, a transition that will happen sometime later this year. When it does, Hsieh won’t be commuting. In 2011, he leased 50 units in a luxury high-rise in the neighborhood, and he and some of his Zappos.com co-workers moved in. He’s hoping more will follow—Zappos.com employees and anyone else who wants to live in a lively, community-oriented urban neighborhood near his eight-acre worksite. It’s something he calls The Downtown Project. 

Primarily bankrolled by Hsieh, The Downtown Project plans to invest $350 million in up to 200 small businesses, dozens of tech start-ups, and a diverse mix of other public resources and amenities. The ultimate goal: To create the sort of dense, walkable, mixed-used Shangri-La championed by the urban theorist Jane Jacobs in her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 

Put another way, Hsieh would like to make downtown Las Vegas a more compelling social network, a feature-rich platform that encourages frequent chance encounters, fruitful knowledge exchange, and over the long term, greater innovation and productivity. Where abandoned liquor stores now fester, yoga studios shall one day bloom. 

In a town where development typically takes the form of another massive casino resort, Hsieh’s dream is a fairly radical vision. But Las Vegas has already replicated Egyptian pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and the New York skyline, so why not thriving urban neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Mission District or Brooklyn’s Williamsburg?

Call it a venture-capital take on urban locavorism.”

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“As The Number Of Afterlife Options Expands, Prices Are Dropping”

April 9, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The good news: You can get a lot of bang for your buck these days, really wonderful amenities you could never have afforded in the past. The bad news: It would be really helpful if you were dead. In Raymond Carver terms: Can you please be dead, please? From Greg Beato’s new Reason article, “Better Off Dead: The Cheap, Exciting Afterlife Of Modern Mortal Remains“:

“But if the intervening 50 years have taught us anything, it’s that 1963’s corpses were woefully underserved. Sure, the ‘1 percent’ of that era could afford stunning crypts and mausoleums that were far more lavish and better appointed than the homes most of us spend our lives in. For everyone else, however, death was a homogenizing force more ruthless than any communist regime. Everyone who died got an overpriced casket, an awful post-mortem makeover, and a bland grave marker immortalizing them in the same conventionally abstract fashion as everyone else who had died that century.

Now, we’ve got caskets that look like beer cans, headstones shaped like teddy bears, companies that will provision your loved ones with white doves to release graveside. Major League Baseball teams, many colleges, and the rock band KISS, among others, license their logos for use on caskets.

As the number of afterlife options expands, prices are dropping. For years only licensed funeral directors could sell caskets, a practice that kept prices artificially high. According to a 1988 FTC study, the average price of a casket in 1981 was $1,010, or $2,513 in 2011 dollars. In 1984, however, Congress passed the Funeral Rule, which in part requires that funeral homes accept a casket purchased from a third-party provider without charging any additional fees.” (Thanks Browser.)

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