I live in Boulder. It's certainly expensive, although more reasonable than some of the other popular tech cities. I honestly don't think of it as crowded though. There's tourist spots to avoid, but plenty of open space for all.
I found it crowded. I guess it depends on where you're coming from.
On weekends, It takes 3 hours to make (what should be) a 1 hour drive at 5AM going to the mountain to ski, very difficult to find parking at most trailheads, camping spots are pretty much swamped on the peak to peak...etc. etc.
But I guess if you're coming from L.A. or somewhere that kind of traffic isn't too bad lol
And that's not all Boulder traffic, I'm sure there's a lot of Denver and surrounding city population crush, was just miserable on the weekends I found.
I don't know why our city council and planning boards waste so much time on "affordable housing" when it's clearly not fixable.
The economics don't make sense to have a highly desirable place to live with a highly constrained housing supply and also make it affordable. The affordable housing plans here basically boil down to a lottery.
CAGR is misleading because it tracks population when what is more important is household growth. Household size has fallen from 2.63 in 1993 to 2.51 today, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but means you need 5% more houses to hold the same number of people.
Yes, and there is a general misunderstanding, mostly a willful misunderstanding among older, established homeowners, of the fact that you need to build more housing just to keep the population the same, especially when older people are squatting on empty family-sized homes.
I lived there for 6 years and halfheartedly agree. It's a very nice town in terms of general quality of life - definitely the best I've ever experienced, and I've lived all over America. But there's a pretentiousness in the air that can be utterly nauseating at times. The "Boulder bubble" is real.
I enjoy some of the pretentiousness, namely the physical fitness and cycling fanaticism. There are some really, really tremendous athletes there.
But Boulder lost me at the rock worshipping yogis that appropriate "brown people cultures" into their daily routines while chastising white people who celebrate Cinco de Mayo. They're fucking everywhere.
It's pretty, and it would be nice to be that close to the mountains, but I can't stand the political climate in Boulder. Denver is fairly blue but still diverse enough that I feel comfortable here even though I don't personally share a lot of those views. Boulder, though... it's like people are trying to build the Berkeley of Colorado there. Which is fine, live and let live. But I would never want to live there.
I don't know, but based on this entire thread, I think this was one of the places that was popular for people to move from cities during the pandemic, when everyone was working remotely.
Its fascinating to me that for decades people have been moving to the same cities from places like Boulder (and many such all over the country) for opportunities/careers/lives and now a few chose to move from the cities to these small towns. While I understand that people do not like change but how is this any different, its still people making a choice of moving to a different place in the country which they think is better for their lives? Isn't this NIMBY, its fine as long as everyone moves to NY, but not here.
Boulder is more accurately described as a neighborhood or region of Denver.
If that’s not obvious today it certainly will be when the staggering construction in Arvada, Broomfield, and so on, has filled in all of the areas that could plausibly be used to argue otherwise.
Part of the reason it's so expensive here, though, is the swath of city and county owned open space around the outskirts of town. Maybe some day it'll get developed, but I think it'll be a long time before that can happen.
Boulder probably has enough of a unique character that thinking of it as its own thing rather than just a commuter suburb is probably reasonable. But there are certainly places within 25+ miles of Boston, say, that are reasonably described as suburbs and probably exurbs out to about 50 miles. (It's how ESRI would generally describe them.)
It sort of depends. To use another Boston area example, no one would reasonably consider Portsmouth or Nashua in NH as suburbs even though people will go into Boston for a night's entertainment and probably fly out of the airport.
From my limited perspective there isn't much space.
I'm a bit of a stranger to the area- right now I am in a Starbucks in (I think?) Boulder. But I came out to work as a tech with an audio company I contract for to do concerts up at some ski resort. And I am sleeping in my truck front of the Warehouse in Broomfield. But the guy who hires me has a house in Boulder where he keeps a lot of our equipment... and I am often not super clear about when I am just crossing a large green space and when I am crossing into different cities.
So you are probably right, but that's not how I've been experiencing this over the last summer's worth of gigs.
Of course, to me the drive from Boulder to FoCo seems like one continuous city.
Contextually, it might be the fact that I come out for work from Durango, and crossing the san luis valley is what "open space" looks like to me.
So maybe I'm just not sufficiently calibrated for the city yet.
So…? Arlington and Fairfax are different counties than DC. Heck, they’re in a different state and across a river too. But nobody would argue they aren’t suburbs of DC.
25 miles is well within commuting distance for many major metro areas.
Boulder may arguably be a suburb or not. But an arbitrary 25 mile limit isn’t what defines suburb or not.
Brooklyn and Manhattan are in different counties too.
Ask yourself questions like what airport do you fly to and where would you take your kids to the children’s museum if you lived there and you’ll realize what city Boulder is a part of.
>Brooklyn and Manhattan are in different counties too.
You're going to use the most densely populated city in the US for your example?
>Ask yourself questions like what airport do you fly to
Colorado has one international airport - are you saying ALL of Colorado is Denver? Are you saying Newark NJ is in the same city as Brooklyn? I don't know where you're heading, but it's just logical gymnastics.
My old boss when I worked in Boulder (commuting from Arvada) claimed he hadn't been to Denver proper in at least a decade, not counting DIA or the interstate to it. I believe him. Boulder is definitely its own thing.
