RENO, Nev. — On a Wednesday evening inside the University of Nevada, Reno Innevation Center, a group of 16 people are standing in a circle, engaged in lively discussion.
They’re talking workforce, housing and homelessness; they’re talking education, infrastructure and policies. They’re talking challenges, big and small, facing not only the broader Northern Nevada business community, but also the region as a whole.
The group consists of leaders from varying industries — education, construction, technology and more — who are gathered April 18 for the Northern Nevada Business Weekly’s inaugural Titans of Commerce Roundtable. The event was sponsored by City National Bank.
The closed-door sessions, moderated by Stefanie Fenton of Reno-based Double-Black Advisors, were created to find common ground, trigger collaboration and spark innovation across all industries in Northern Nevada.
Based on the first of four sessions scheduled on a quarterly basis for 2018, it was clear the region’s industry leaders are motivated to take on challenges and cultivate ideas together, rather than in separate silos, in an effort to contribute to Northern Nevada’s growth.
ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT
And while the region rapidly grows, Mike Kazmierski, president and CEO of the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada, feels that the Reno-Sparks area needs to stop thinking like a town and start “thinking like a city.”
After all, EDAWN projected an increase of more than 52,000 new jobs and 42,400 new residents to the region between December 2014 and December 2019 in its Economic Planning Indicators Committee (EPIC) Report.
“We as a community don’t think very big,” Kazmierski said to the group during the two-hour session. “We’re still thinking like a town, we’re still leading like a town. We’re binding ourselves up with challenges instead of saying, ‘we are now becoming a city, let’s take this thing on.’”
Pausing, he succinctly added: “We’re still leaping over mouse turds when we have mountains to take on.”
Moreover, industries in Northern Nevada need to shake their “prospector mentality,” said Mark Anderson, director of Nevada Industry Excellence.
“For a state that has so much going on and a pie that is so big, often we’re acting as if there’s this small pie and we need to protect our own little piece of the pie,” Anderson said. “So the teamwork and collaboration that we could be having is not happening.”
FINDING, KEEPING TALENT
On the topic of growth, two of the most common challenges echoed during the discussion stem from Northern Nevada’s recent economic boom — a lack of qualified workforce and a lack of attainable housing.
“Those are always the top two topics,” said Rob Hooper, president and CEO of Northern Nevada Development Authority (NNDA). “I don’t care if you put manufacturers together or you put government (officials) together … there’s a big commonality in the issues that we’re facing.”
Some business leaders said attracting skilled workforce to the region is a challenge due to a variety of reasons; from the poorly rated education system to the area’s housing crunch.
For the second straight year, Nevada was ranked worst in the nation — 51st out of the 50 states and District of Columbia — in Education Week’s annual Quality Counts report.
“I can’t hire people in their early 30s-40s with kids who are school-going age,” said Owen Roberts, general manager of Microsoft Reno. “Because the quality of education in the state of Nevada is so poor, people look at it and go ‘we’re not coming.’”
Roberts also said retaining diverse talent is a struggle at Microsoft.
“We can get young diverse talent, but we can’t keep them in this town,” he said. “Because they look around and don’t see anyone like them. There’s no cultural support system. We keep them for two years and they go, ‘we love you, but we’re going to Seattle’ or ‘we’re going to the Bay Area.’”
Later on in the roundtable, Roberts proposed an idea: “Imagine having a hiring fair here, all major companies, in a non-competitive fashion, just trying to hire great talent for the region?” Hooper, however, feels a lot of the missing talent, especially in the skilled trades, is already here. He said community colleges play a key role in fostering the development of the hiding-in-plain-sight workers.
“We (at NNDA) are trying to figure out how to go out into that space to attract these people into programs, whether it’s for healthcare or construction trades or manufacturing or any of the programs,” Hooper said. “I think we have to look inward to find our people right now until we solve this workforce, attainable housing issue.”
‘THE MISSING MIDDLE’
Last month, the median price for a single-family home in the Reno-Sparks area broke a record set before the Great Recession, totaling $375,000 in March — and $400,000 in Reno alone — according to previous reports. This is compared to a national median price of $250,400 for March, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Anderson said the housing issue is a “double whammy.” Not only is there not enough housing, he said, but people moving in from California,, who find housing in Northern Nevada significantly cheaper, are driving up the market.
Hooper said the housing issue is “somewhat of a catch-22 situation,” noting that the majority of the housing being built is Section 8 — for low-income housing — or market rate, “where the profitability is.”
“But who’s building the missing middle right now?” he asked the group of leaders. “You look at 35 percent of your total income as the magic number that goes toward housing. You take someone making between $18 an hour and $80,000 a year — who’s building that inventory (for them) right now?”
HOMELESSNESS IMPACT
An issue that stirred perhaps the most discussion during the April 18 Titans of Commerce Roundtable is one that continues to stare the region in the face: homelessness.
In 2016, according to the Nevada Housing Division, the Homeless Point in Time Count for Northern Nevada was 989 people, with 126 of them between ages 18 to 24.
All told, a non-contributing youth imposes a taxpayer burden of nearly $14,000 per year, according to the Economic Value of Opportunity Youth. Once they reach 25, they impose a future lifetime taxpayer burden of more than $170,000.
Dr. Anthony Slonim, president and CEO at Renown Health, thinks the handful of groups in the region trying to combat the homelessness problem need to be talking to each other.
“We don’t have the ability to adopt innovative solutions for homelessness or any number of problems because we’re too busy defending our turf,” he said. “This is nonsensical. We end up getting in each other’s way and we’re not breaking through on issues as important as homelessness and half a dozen other issues like that.”
Developer Par Tolles, founder of Tolles Development Company, said members on the private side have formed a taskforce and started working with the city of Reno on the homelessness issue. Specifically, the taskforce blueprinted a new transitional housing development.
“It will be the first impactful thing that the private side has done (to combat homelessness),” Tolles said. “Our hope is that it will snowball with others. The city (of Reno) has jumped in, and it is a very redeeming process to see that, OK, there’s a bunch of people out here that really do care about this issue.”
FOSTERING LOCAL YOUTH
Meanwhile, at Truckee Meadows Community College, architecture students are working on a tiny houses project for the homeless youth in Reno, said TMCC President Karin Hilgersom.
The project, she said, will be presented to city council members on May 4.
For Hilgersom, the tiny houses project not only helps the homeless, but also gives the students meaningful and enriching hands-on experience.
“To help solve a problem and really help a community, to me that’s where higher education is going,” she said. “That it’s really about integration and trying to have well-rounded students who are also good citizens and good community members.”
Kazmierski said the root of the homelessness problem, though, is the lack of state funding that goes toward combating mental illness and drug and alcohol addiction.
Many in the discussion agreed that, while new shelters and transitional housing developments are necessary, it’s only moving the homelessness problem, not helping solve it.
According to the World Atlas, Nevada spends $89.41 per capita on mental health funding, which ranks 33rd in the country. For comparison, top-ranked Maine allocates $345.36 per capita on mental health.
“We are one of the least funded states in the nation in mental illness, least funded states in education, and we pay for that with our homeless problem,” Kazmierski said. “So either we step up and pay the bill one way or the other. Right now, we’re paying for it with an increase in homelessness.”
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