What Happens in Brooklyn Moves to Vegas

Brian Finke for The New York TimesTony Hsieh, the chief executive of Zappos, on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas.

The mountain-lodge gathering felt like an annual shareholders’ meeting, with department heads offering optimistic forecasts backed by charts, graphs and photos. Except that the 50 or so attendees wore jeans and sneakers and sat at round tables in a faux log cabin 7,700 feet above sea level and at least 20 degrees cooler than the Nevada desert below. And what they were discussing was not a corporation but a very unusual project.

Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas.

Tony Hsieh, the 38-year-old chief executive of Zappos, had called the 24-hour retreat as a debriefing of sorts. It was almost a year into the Downtown Project, his $350 million urban experiment to build “the most community-focused large city in the world” in downtown Las Vegas — an area dominated by bare lots and check-cashing stores about an hour’s drive away. An icebreaker kicked off the event with whoops and hollers as each attendee stood up to share personal anecdotes or facts, like “I’ve tried chicken-fried steak in more than 30 states.” One woman announced that she had been a salsa dancing champion. Hsieh (pronounced shay) shared how to write his last name in Morse code.

A jammed schedule was handed out, with most of the dozen or so presentations lasting less than 10 minutes. The schedule featured updates from a number of Hsieh’s deputies on how they were spending the project’s money, including: Andrew Donner, a veteran of the 1990s Vegas real estate boom, on the $200 million that the project is investing in land and buildings; Don Welch, a former Citigroup banker, on the $50 million the project is spending on small businesses; and Andy White, a former start-up founder, on the $50 million going to tech companies. Hsieh’s cousin Connie was scheduled to discuss the remaining $50 million, which is to be used for education. A woman sat off to the side with a digital timer, ready to yank anyone offstage who went over his or her allotted time.

The Downtown Project got its unofficial start several years ago when Hsieh realized that Zappos, the online shoe-and-apparel company that he built to $1 billion in annual sales in less than a decade, would soon outgrow its offices in nearby Henderson, Nev. Though Amazon bought Zappos in 2009 for $1.2 billion, Hsieh still runs the company, and he has endeavored to keep alive its zany corporate culture. This includes a workplace where everyone sits in the same open space and employees switch desks every few months in order to get to know one another better. “I first thought I would buy a piece of land and build our own Disneyland,” he told the group. But he worried that the company would be too cut off from the outside world and ultimately decided “it was better to interact with the community.”

Around the same time, the Las Vegas city government was also about to move, and Hsieh saw his opportunity. He leased the former City Hall — smack in the middle of downtown Vegas — for 15 years. Then he got to thinking: If he was going to move at least 1,200 employees, why not make it possible for them to live nearby? And if they could live nearby, why not create an urban community aligned with the culture of Zappos, which encourages the kind of “serendipitous interactions” that happen in offices without walls? As Zach Ware, Hsieh’s right-hand man in the move, put it, “We wanted the new campus to benefit from interaction with downtown, and downtown to benefit from interaction with Zappos.” The only hitch was that it would require transforming the derelict core of a major city.

For Hsieh, though, this was part of the appeal. Transforming downtown Vegas would “ultimately help us attract and retain more employees for Zappos.” For the city itself, it would “help revitalize the economy.” More important, it would “inspire,” a word Hsieh uses often. Hsieh closed his presentation at the faux log cabin high above the desert with the sort of fact he seems to always have on hand: up to 75 percent of the world’s population will call cities home in our lifetime. “So,” he concluded, “if you fix cities, you kind of fix the world.”

A Brooklyn High School Takes a New Approach to Vocational Education

The building and its surroundings in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, may look run-down, but inside 150 Albany Avenue may sit the future of the country’s vocational education: The first 230 pupils of a new style of school that weaves high school and college curriculums into a six-year program tailored for a job in the technology industry.

By 2017, the first wave of students of P-Tech — Pathways in Technology Early College High School — is expected to emerge with associate’s degrees in applied science in computer information systems or electromechanical engineering technology, following a course of studies developed in consultation with I.B.M.

“I mean, in 10th grade, doing college work?” said Monesia McKnight, 15, as she sat in an introduction to computer systems course taught by a college professor. “How great is that?”

The United States has the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. Yet many with four-year degrees are facing a transforming economy where jobs require less generalized types of education and more of the skills that many college graduates lack, in science, technology, engineering or math.

Into this breach, school systems around the country have been aiming to start new high schools like P-Tech. Officials in Chicago were so taken by New York’s school that they opened five similar schools this year with corporate partners in telecommunications and technology. Besides New York and Illinois, education officials in Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, North Carolina and Tennessee have committed to creating such schools, and the Obama administration has recommended that Congress provide more money for vocational education — the preferred name is career and technical education, or C.T.E. — to promote this approach.

A year from now, New York City plans to open two more schools just like P-Tech, focusing on other growing industries in the city, possibly including health care. A fourth one is planned to open in September 2014. The State Board of Regents is also trying to develop assessment exams for this type of school, perhaps one that could be substituted for one of the usual Regents tests.

“When we view high-quality C.T.E. programs, we see how engaged those students are and what clear aspirations they have for their future,” said John B. King Jr., the state education commissioner. “Unfortunately, that’s not always present in some of our struggling schools.”

P-Tech, which began last year with a ninth grade and now has a 10th grade, is inside Paul Robeson High School, which is being phased out because of poor performance. Students attend from 8:35 a.m. to 4:06 p.m., in 10-period days that intersperse traditional classes like math and English with technology and business-centric courses like “workplace learning,” which teaches networking, critical thinking and presentation skills. Second-year students are offered physics and global studies as well as the business courses and college-level courses in speech or logic and problem solving — or both. There is also a six-week summer academy for geometry.

The objective is to prepare students for entry-level technology jobs paying around $40,000 a year, like software specialists who answer questions from I.B.M.’s business customers or “deskside support” workers who answer calls from PC users, with opportunities for advancement.

Stanley S. Litow, the president of I.B.M.’s International Foundation, the company’s philanthropic arm, and a former deputy schools chancellor in New York, said that the P-Tech curriculum was mapped backward: I.B.M.’s own employees were analyzed to learn what skills a student would need.

Each student also is paired with a mentor from the company, as is the principal, Rashid F. Davis; students take trips to I.B.M. facilities to learn such things as how computer chips are made; the company helped train the school’s 18 teachers, and it provides a full-time liaison based at the school to work with faculty from the New York City College of Technology and the City University of New York, which also helped develop the course work. Mr. Litow said that while no positions at I.B.M. could be guaranteed six years in the future, the company would give P-Tech students preference for openings. They would also be well-trained for other information technology jobs, Mr. Litow said.

“Because that is the problem,” he said. “Too few kids have these skills.”

What Happens in Brooklyn Moves to Vegas

Brian Finke for The New York TimesTony Hsieh, the chief executive of Zappos, on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas.

The mountain-lodge gathering felt like an annual shareholders’ meeting, with department heads offering optimistic forecasts backed by charts, graphs and photos. Except that the 50 or so attendees wore jeans and sneakers and sat at round tables in a faux log cabin 7,700 feet above sea level and at least 20 degrees cooler than the Nevada desert below. And what they were discussing was not a corporation but a very unusual project.

Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas.

Tony Hsieh, the 38-year-old chief executive of Zappos, had called the 24-hour retreat as a debriefing of sorts. It was almost a year into the Downtown Project, his $350 million urban experiment to build “the most community-focused large city in the world” in downtown Las Vegas — an area dominated by bare lots and check-cashing stores about an hour’s drive away. An icebreaker kicked off the event with whoops and hollers as each attendee stood up to share personal anecdotes or facts, like “I’ve tried chicken-fried steak in more than 30 states.” One woman announced that she had been a salsa dancing champion. Hsieh (pronounced shay) shared how to write his last name in Morse code.

A jammed schedule was handed out, with most of the dozen or so presentations lasting less than 10 minutes. The schedule featured updates from a number of Hsieh’s deputies on how they were spending the project’s money, including: Andrew Donner, a veteran of the 1990s Vegas real estate boom, on the $200 million that the project is investing in land and buildings; Don Welch, a former Citigroup banker, on the $50 million the project is spending on small businesses; and Andy White, a former start-up founder, on the $50 million going to tech companies. Hsieh’s cousin Connie was scheduled to discuss the remaining $50 million, which is to be used for education. A woman sat off to the side with a digital timer, ready to yank anyone offstage who went over his or her allotted time.

The Downtown Project got its unofficial start several years ago when Hsieh realized that Zappos, the online shoe-and-apparel company that he built to $1 billion in annual sales in less than a decade, would soon outgrow its offices in nearby Henderson, Nev. Though Amazon bought Zappos in 2009 for $1.2 billion, Hsieh still runs the company, and he has endeavored to keep alive its zany corporate culture. This includes a workplace where everyone sits in the same open space and employees switch desks every few months in order to get to know one another better. “I first thought I would buy a piece of land and build our own Disneyland,” he told the group. But he worried that the company would be too cut off from the outside world and ultimately decided “it was better to interact with the community.”

Around the same time, the Las Vegas city government was also about to move, and Hsieh saw his opportunity. He leased the former City Hall — smack in the middle of downtown Vegas — for 15 years. Then he got to thinking: If he was going to move at least 1,200 employees, why not make it possible for them to live nearby? And if they could live nearby, why not create an urban community aligned with the culture of Zappos, which encourages the kind of “serendipitous interactions” that happen in offices without walls? As Zach Ware, Hsieh’s right-hand man in the move, put it, “We wanted the new campus to benefit from interaction with downtown, and downtown to benefit from interaction with Zappos.” The only hitch was that it would require transforming the derelict core of a major city.

For Hsieh, though, this was part of the appeal. Transforming downtown Vegas would “ultimately help us attract and retain more employees for Zappos.” For the city itself, it would “help revitalize the economy.” More important, it would “inspire,” a word Hsieh uses often. Hsieh closed his presentation at the faux log cabin high above the desert with the sort of fact he seems to always have on hand: up to 75 percent of the world’s population will call cities home in our lifetime. “So,” he concluded, “if you fix cities, you kind of fix the world.”