Same. Over the last ten years I keep hearing about how it was going to be the next satellite tech hub, particularly with Tesla building the Gigafactory 30 minutes away. I think Apple and some other tech built small offices / datacenters there but not much else.

On a different note, I'm up there to visit family frequently, and despite being proximate to incredible beauty (Tahoe, Truckee, skiing, etc.), Reno itself is pretty Wal-Mart suburban hellscape. There are some nicer pockets but overall very meh. Reno was hit VERY hard after the Recession and there were a lot of empty business fronts downtown for a few years; it has cleaned up and brought some new blood but it still has a way to go.

The casinos are still ever-present. Some are charming but others and are still pretty gross, gaudy, and old-school, in a bad way.

All that being said, I think Reno still has a lot of opportunity. The city owns the hot and cold seasons well. The downtown area and the river could be very cool. I'm also surprised some tech-social-gaming startup hasn't attempted to reinvigorate the gambling world to take on the absolute relics that are the casino industry. PM me if you'd be into that sort of thing.

There is no PM feature on Hacker News. You'd have to put your email address in your profile

I'm a huge poker player myself and an engineer. Would definitely be interested in hearing some of your ideas.

I lived in Reno for many years and can say that it is missing the biggest draw for techies – actually being a nice place to live.

Excellent police force.

As a Northern NV native and SF resident for the past 10 years, it’s been my experience that Reno doesn’t enter into the worldview of hip techie people in the Bay Area for a variety of reasons.

Strangely, Boise _does_, but comes with state income tax.

Reno had never been immune to “Californication” though. Resistance to it almost defines the local culture.

That vitriolic anti-Californian sentiment (read liberal, educated) from the prolific good ol' boys everywhere is a pretty big turn off.

Plenty of that in Silicon Valley too. Being displaced by rich assholes who came for the money or some fad and will bail on the place just as quickly, leaving the area worse than they found it isn’t likely to make (educated, liberal) rich assholes many friends amongst those with roots or more vested long term interests. We live in a world of replacement and our communities should not be treated as another disposable product to be enjoyed and then discarded for whatever new shiny thing comes along. California, Austin, etc are selecting for people who take more than they give. Their growth removes community and disrupts lives, perhaps a fair price to pay for progress, but is it really progress?

> California, Austin, etc are selecting for people who take more than they give.

How is this measured? Any should someone born in a community without access to high paying jobs or less desirable weather/amenities not be able to move elsewhere?

It’s not an empirical statement but if you wanted to treat it as such you could look at the churn, how long people stay in the new location, broken out by earnings delta and education level. The extent to which people chase money or lack ambition is increasingly correlated with geography, to the detriment of humanity IMO. The other side of the coin is persistent poverty and social problems for the less ambitious/greedy.

Sure, that is one sort of expression. And very typical “it’s you, not me” attitude on both sides.

Another is that locals would love to know that they can afford a mortgage payment in their own hometown sometime in their adult life.

The fact you can't comprehend why they'd be unhappy about it... is why they're unhappy about it.

Our educated liberals hate Californians just fine, thank you.

Good lord. This statement alone should be hammered into your license plates when you leave. It's the perfect embodiment of why people don't like you.

I find the Reno thing bizarre myself. Would love to know why it’s not as big.

Probably uncertain ability to expand their water supply.

In the Western US, certain ability to massively expand a city's water rights is really a prerequisite for insane real estate profits. SF was a mining town before Hetch Hetchy, and LA didn't blow up until they robbed the Owens Valley.

Edit: yep, Truckee River is 100% allocated as of 2015

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truckee_River#River_modifica...

Not sure why Reno as opposed to Las Vegas. Reno's closer to Tahoe but Vegas is closer to a bunch of recreational areas. Neither city has a real downtown in the sense that SF or Austin do as far as I've ever seen. So you're almost definitely living in essentially car-dependent suburbs if that's an issue. (Though you often are in either SV or Austin anyway.)

Vegas is a miserable inferno six months out of the year. There is no spring or fall to speak of, though winters are really mild. Education is terrible. Everything is urban sprawl garbage construction. I lived there for 35 years until moving to Denver this winter. You couldn’t move me back to Vegas at gunpoint.

And this comment is why CA’s housing crisis is impossible to fix. There is no easy solution.

The main solution people propose, building more, has a very high likelihood of turning it into a suburban hellscape that people refuse to move to even at gunpoint.

We have plenty of places like that. If the option is just build more without an extremely careful plan, then just move to another city where it’s like that already. Phoenix is a nice sprawl.

But is Reno any better?

Pretty sure the summers aren't as bad as Las Vegas. I can't answer for any of the other issues.

Reno gets hot but nowhere near as bad for as long

Climate might have something to do with it. Reno has both cold winters AND hot summers -- kind of a "worst of both worlds", climate-wise.

Is it because it’s a desert and usually really hot?

Well, Austin is humid and really hot. Reno arguably is better weather wise, given proximity to Tahoe.

But a lot of this is network effects. University of Nevada doesn't have the CS strength of University of Texas, so you don't have such a strong tech scene.

The average high temperature in the hottest month is only slightly above 90. Reno isnt a particularly hot city. The ~4500 foot elevation keeps temperatures cooler than you might think as compared to other parts of Nevada.

Honestly, it's probably cooler there in the summer than Austin due to the elevation. It also gets legitimately cold in Reno with snow that will stick around longer than a day.