‘Sitting there rotting’: Tony Hsieh’s boarded-up motels still blight downtown Las Vegas

With its broken windows, plywood coverings and visible charring, this abandoned motel in downtown Las Vegas is not an inviting place.

But at least one person made themselves at home.

The boarded-up former Alicia Motel is trashed inside, with a mattress, glass shards and mounds of debris and other garbage blanketing the floor of its former convenience store.

The building, less than a mile east of downtown’s tourist-packed casino corridor, is one of several shuttered and blighted motel properties clustered along Fremont Street.

They also are part of the late tech mogul Tony Hsieh’s legacy. And now, after a history of fires, squatters and other problems, the rundown buildings are slated to be demolished.

Hsieh, the former CEO of online shoe seller Zappos and face of downtown Las Vegas’ economic revival, died on Nov. 27, 2020, at age 46 from injuries suffered in a Connecticut house fire. He left behind a vast real estate portfolio of office buildings, apartment complexes, retail properties and other sites downtown, and his father has been managing his estate through a probate case in Clark County District Court.

Hsieh’s holdings included several old motel properties. And since his death, city records show, the shuttered buildings drew vagrants, were torched in fires and had piles of trash.

“They’re sort of just sitting there rotting,” said Las Vegas real estate investor Steve Siegel.

‘Offensive odors’

Carlos Sanchez, managing partner of The Usual Place, a music venue near the motels, said he sees random people going in and out of the shuttered properties.

People cut the fencing or go through cracks, said Sanchez, who described the motels as “stagnant” properties.

Since Hsieh’s death five years ago, city officials deemed several of his former motels “nuisance” properties and told management to secure access points, remove garbage and graffiti, not allow homeless people on-site and, in at least one case, remove all “offensive odors,” city records show.

Some of those buildings, including the one with the foul smell, have already been torn down. But others still stand.

Ongoing vandalism and related fires “have impacted the structural integrity of the buildings, making them potentially unsafe,” Hsieh’s former side venture DTP Companies said in a statement to the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Sunday.

After discussing the properties’ condition with the city and exploring available options, DTP “made the difficult decision to raze the motels to help make the community safer and more attractive to residents, business owners, patrons and future developers,” it said.

It did not say when it made this decision or when it expected to tear down the motels.

City spokesman Jace Radke confirmed on Monday that no demolition permit applications had been filed for the motels.

‘It’s a big empty building’

John Hasler, who works in a barbershop on Fremont Street near the shuttered motels, said that police respond when there are problems at the buildings and that others stop by to check on them.

But the boarded-up motels are a “magnet” for the homeless, he said.

“It’s a big empty building, man,” he said. “What do you think’s going to happen?”

The Review-Journal examined dozens of code-enforcement case reports, correction notices, and notices and orders that the city issued about Hsieh’s former properties since his death. The documents mostly dealt with shuttered motels around the eastern stretch of Fremont between 11th and 14th streets.

Hsieh acquired the properties examined for this report in 2012 or 2013, and his estate still controls them, according to property records and business-entity filings.

Several of his motel properties got new signs as part of a city-run revitalization program called Project Enchilada, which was proposed in 2018.

Today, retro-looking signs for the Star View, Las Vegas and Lucky motels, as well as Las Gables Court, stand in front of boarded-up buildings.

In extreme circumstances, city officials can determine a property is an imminent hazard and demolish it, and the owner would pay the costs for the work, according to Radke, the spokesman.

The city has not declared any of the vacant motels on East Fremont an imminent hazard, he noted.

Radke said the new signs would be saved when the motels are demolished.

‘The more they sit, the more dilapidated they get’

Las Vegas landlord David Charron, whose commercial property on Fremont Street is home to the popular cafe PublicUs, a wedding chapel, and other tenants, said a few months ago that tearing down the motels without a plan for the sites would make the area look desolate.

But the current situation doesn’t help either, he noted.

“The more they sit, the more dilapidated they get,” he said.

City officials reported in 2021, for instance, that squatters were entering the former Valley Motel at the corner of Fremont and 14th streets from the alley behind it. Then, in 2022, they reported that a fire next door, at the former Gables motel, had spread to the building.

Both properties were owned by Hsieh and remain standing.

In 2023, city officials also received a complaint about a break-in at the Gables site. According to the report, someone had broken all the windows and damaged the plywood that was nailed over previously broken windows and doors.

And in 2024, the city issued a notice that the fire-damaged former Valley Motel was a “hazard to children in the area” and harbored vagrant activity.

“Do not allow homeless individuals to occupy this parcel,” the notice declared.

Meanwhile, early this year, city officials issued a notice about another former motel that was owned by Hsieh.

They reported that the property, at the corner of Fremont and Maryland Parkway, was a “public nuisance” and that its roof had suffered “severe fire damage and could collapse.”

Buying spree with no plans

Hsieh, who assembled his real estate portfolio through a $350 million side venture originally called Downtown Project, was essentially a one-man redevelopment engine for a long-neglected part of the city.

He moved Zappos from a suburban Henderson office park to the former Las Vegas City Hall in 2013, and his heavy investment in real estate, restaurants, bars, tech startups and other concepts downtown sparked widespread excitement.

Among his collection of motel properties, he redeveloped one, Fergusons, into a commercial complex.

But he didn’t do much with the others, aside from painting plywood coverings to look like cartoonish doors and windows.

In 2017, Downtown Project’s then-real estate portfolio manager, John Curran, told the Review-Journal in an interview about the motels and other sites that Hsieh’s team bought these blocks “with no idea of what we were going to do with them.”

He said that market conditions would allow for redevelopment at some point. But he said that the area had been a “hotbed” for drugs, prostitution and other crime, and that boarding up and fencing off the motels gave them a buffer from such activity.

Still, he acknowledged it was a “never-ending battle” against vandals and others who tried to get in.

‘You’ve got to have a seller’

As part of his probate case, Hsieh’s family filed more than 100 sale notices in court in a two-day span in early 2021 for his Las Vegas real estate holdings. By fall 2024, the family had sold a dozen properties locally for nearly $47 million combined.

By all accounts and appearances, the sales process overall has been moving slowly. And, as seen with the motels, stretches of the Fremont Street area have effectively been in limbo.

Before DTP told the Review-Journal about its demolition plans, the newspaper spoke with Las Vegas real estate pros who are active downtown about the motels and what they think should happen to the buildings.

Developer Sam Cherry said motels in general are gaining popularity around the country and getting a hipster vibe.

“I could see that happening here,” he said, adding a cleaned-up motel with a cool food-and-beverage concept could drive traffic to the area.

Others, however, said the motels should be demolished.

Northcap founder John Tippins said boarded-up buildings do not create any optimism that things are happening in an area.

He figures Fremont Street east of the canopy-covered, casino-lined Fremont Street Experience could be a vibrant corridor with bars, restaurants, retail and high-density housing.

But, he added, “you’ve got to have a seller.”

Siegel, the investor whose namesake firm operates the Siegel Suites apartment buildings around Las Vegas, said that Hsieh’s former motels should be torn down, adding they are old and destroyed.

All told, abandoned buildings in Southern Nevada are prone to the same types of problems that the motels have experienced.

As Siegel pointed out, if a building is torn down, any trespassers can be spotted on the empty lot right away. But if the building still stands, people can break in and stay unnoticed for some time.

“It’s a problem,” he said.

KLA Capital owner Adam Foulad said that Hsieh’s former motels are beautiful buildings with nice courtyards.

But he figured that they can’t be converted to apartments, given current building codes, and that the available interior space doesn’t make a new commercial use worthwhile.

The only solution, he said, is to “take them down.”

Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.