"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
-re-reading Home of the Brave, I'm reminded just how fucked the rest of the country is in 2020: NYC had a nuke dropped on it, Chicago is pretty much a ghost town due to the Wasting Plague and the inefficiency of the local government, and LA the San-Angeles Metroplex is a vast urban hellscape. Even Wisconsin kind of got fucked - Milwaukee and Green Bay got turned into corporate industrial cities and the government basically "rubber-stamp[s] their approval on bills just to avoid alienating themselves from the rest of the region." There is an arcology north of Eau Claire - a bunch of dairy farmers trying to remain independent in the face of corporate farms and the devastation of arable land - and it's the only arcology to ever have issued an indoor pollution alert. "One of its big problems is that most people don't relish being inside a dome with a bunch of cows. And the cows don't like it either." NorCal is (comparatively) a nice little state.
-I'm getting more of a handle on the neighborhood and the local gang - it's a bunch of kids who really don't have anybody other than each other, and their mentor/boss, an ex-cop who's trying to make sure that at least one neighborhood in Night City won't be an urban hell. Strangely enough, think "Dangerous Minds" rather than "Robocop." Some of the crew either wants to be or used to be muggers and dealers (a wannabe boostergang) because that's all they know, some are just looking for a family, and the ex-cop is trying to direct their energy towards positive pursuits: things like getting Real Food and medical care for some of the poorer residents of the neighborhood. (see, Ari? good people CAN exist in CPunk)
-here's a small collection of cyberpunk literature. Burning Chrome is a book of short stories, and the Sprawl trilogy is, as always, great for mood - Bobby in the beginning of Count Zero is a great example of the type of game I'm thinking of, as opposed to Case in Neuromancer. "The Hacker Crackdown" (Bruce Sterling) and "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" (Neal Stephenson) are non-fiction, and both are pretty good reads (although "In the Beginning..." is kind of dated now).
and, for reference, night city. still not sure where exactly the neighborhood is going to be.