Partly occupied by warehouses and distribution facilities
Lance Gilman bounced his white GMC truck up a hill in the high desert country east of Reno, Nevada, and paused at the top to survey his property. Spread out below lay the 165-square-mile Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, about the size of Rhode Island.
“There’s a tsunami coming in,” Gilman said, referring to the businesses, developers and workers he envisions occupying the place some day. The site, already partly occupied by warehouses and distribution facilities for Wal-Mart, Amazon and Federal Express, is where Elon Musk’s electric car maker Tesla Motors plans a factory to make batteries, helped by more than $US1 billion of incentives provided by Nevada.
Out on the horizon, just past the boundaries of the industrial park, can be seen the red-tiled roofs of another of Gilman’s properties: the Mustang Ranch, the first licensed brothel in Nevada. For Gilman, this dry, desolate slice of Storey County is where the old Nevada, symbolized by adult entertainment like gambling and prostitution, meets a new Nevada, where high-tech manufacturing and distribution businesses built on an immense scale may restore some of the state’s fabled wealth.
“In the 1800s, Storey County was the richest place on earth because of the Comstock Lode, gold and silver,” said Gilman, 69, who bought the land for the industrial park with a partner for $US20 million in the late 1990s. “Then it became poor. Now, maybe it will be the richest place again.”