Hey bro, I went to Tahoe this past week for thanksgiving. Stopped in your town of Reno to let my kid out of his car seat for a bit. Sparks, actually. We shopped at scheels. I liked how you could see the mt rose ski hill from town, and that you have a whitewater park on the truckee. Is it an ok place to live? Tahoe is close, and that place is beyond rad. Give me the deets bro, do you like it? Jobs good there?
Hi.
And yeah, Scheel's and that whole shopping area is pretty damn cool. The ferris wheel is pretty fun too.
I think this is a great area to live. The worst parts of town are just kind of shady, nothing I wouldn't allow my 13 year old daughter and my wife walk home from at 10:00 pm at night. The worst parts of town are actually the trailer park areas in Sun Valley, just north of Reno, where word has it there is the world's largest trailer home area. There is some redneck violence up there, but really even then nothing much to worry about unless you are trying to steal someone's chickens (no joke...shootings over chickens have happened more than once...lol). For the most part it is nice. It is quiet with a small-town feel with all the big-town amenities. And Tahoe just a half hour away, the bay area 4 hours away, and a straight shot to pretty much anywhere else with I80 right there it is well-connected, which is why so many of the bigger companies have distribution centers here.
We really love it here other than neither of us have family in the area. We would much rather be in SLC or the area for that reason. Otherwise, with nothing to tie us down, we would choose this area to live in.
The climate is great, very moderate. It gets much colder in Utah in the winter and much hotter in Utah in the summer. We have like 2 seasons...summer and winter. It hits summer around April 1 and stays summer-like all the way until Thanksgiving often. We had temps as high as 70 just a few weeks ago and just today got our first snow, which may be the only snow we see that sticks more than a few days. But if you want snow, Tahoe is right over the hill with some great skiing, and even tubing and snowshoeing. In the summer we will see mid-90's for a week or 2, maybe even crack 100 for a couple of days, but normally that is about it. But it does hit the mid-high 80's and can stay there from June through mid-October, just cooling off a bit in the mornings.
Another really nice thing here is downtown, where the "Biggest Little City" signs are (yes there are 2 =). The downtown is really a great place to spend time. The truckee runs right through downtown and they have created a very cool river-walk area for a few miles, with lots of restaurants and shops right on the river. We spend a lot of time there with our family in the summer, and it is even nice for a winter stroll when we get snow. It is beautifully-kept. It is also nice to just walk around campus at UNR, which as a very nice campus with interesting restaurants and lots of activities for the community. Generally it is a very clean city, for the most part.
Schools and such are decent. Nothing earth-shattering, but their worst school in this area is a far cry from some of the "worst" schools we encountered in Ogden, SLC, Portland, Boise, and L.A.
Jobs are a bit tougher, but that is going to improve immensely in the next 60 months. Tesla is building their "gigafactory" just over the hill from the eBay facility where I work. It is going to bring directly over 6,000 jobs, and indirectly as many as 16,000. Much needed for our area, which has had a hard time climbing out of the recession. Here is a short op-ed piece about it I found interesting.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michel...ings-reno-can-expect-from-teslas-gigafactory/
The worst things about living here, other than being quite a long way from family, is that the housing market is a bit jacked. A lot of people lost homes to foreclosures, so they jacked their credit up. Then the home owners and banks even just held onto the property, trying to rent. At first it was nice, rent was fairly low due to competition, but recently it has flipped and now rentals are going for some pretty high prices, kind of because the owners realize people are stuck and have to rent, so why not charge more. Forced demand + limited supply = higher prices. We pay $1340, which is fairly cheap. We have seen homes smaller than our going for $1600-$2000 and renting at those prices. Crazy. But the home-buying market is pretty good on the flip side of that.
There, probably more info than you wanted or needed.
