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Comment by tschellenbach | Hacker News Reader

I moved from Amsterdam to Boulder, CO. The tech ecosystem is amazing here. It's crazy how many tech companies are in a tiny city with ~100k people. You just walk down the street and it's Nest, Google, Github, JumpCloud, SolidFire, Logrhythm, VictorOps and hundreds of smaller startups. Great ecosystem. People are friendly and welcoming. It's amazing, except the internet. It's expensive, unreliable, and slowwwww.

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Calling it a tiny city is a bit of a stretch considering the sprawl along the entire front range (South Denver to Fort Collins). You're suddenly at 3+ million.

Yep. Having worked in Boulder for 4 years, my observation is that the number of people who actually live in town are the minority. In-college interns or new college grads tend to live in town. There is a smattering of more senior engineers in Boulder as well. But it seems most people commute in from Longmont, Erie, Louisville, Superior, Lafayette, Broomfield, Denver, or Ft. Collins. I worked with a guy who commuted from Colorado Springs (!) daily. I have no idea how he stayed sane.

I thought the person I worked with that commuted from Fort Collins to Boulder was nuts, but the Springs?!? Hopefully it was a really fulfilling job.

I used to live in Fort Collins, and had to commute from there to Englewood/Tech Center area once every couple of weeks. Even that infrequently, it made me want to die. Usually the morning drive was tolerable, a bit over an hour if there wasn't an accident. But in the evenings it could take 2-3 hours, again without an accident. And there is ALWAYS an accident on I-25. I'd end up just staying in the office til 7PM or later because I'd get home at the same time whether I left at 5 or 7 anyway. I cannot imagine doing a commute like that daily for any reason. I'd get home in such a bad mood I that didn't want to see my family, just pour a drink.

Thankfully I was able to work remote 90% of the time in that role.

I thought my coworker from Castle Rock was out there (and he did end up moving to Erie). But when you look at bay area commutes it seems reasonable. The mind boggles.

Sure, but you just described an area of approximately 2400 square miles. No one who lives and works in denver is going to be happy to start making the commute all the way to fort collins(or vice versa).

It's a very nice place. Unfortunately, they are egregiously failing to provide enough housing at reasonable prices, so they copied that bad aspect of silicon valley as well as some of the good.

can't build up, can't build out. Its a tricky problem, but we don't want to use our open spaces for development. The surrounding areas are reasonable

I think the "can't build out" thing is over-emphasized. We can't build out only in the relatively skinny band of open space around town. But there is lots of space that is / can be built on outside that band, ie. Louisville, Superior, northwest Arvada (Candelas), Gunbarrel, Niwot, Longmont. None of thee places are very far from Boulder. What we need is better public transportation. Most people drive into town, so there is lots traffic and parking is hard, which makes people want to live in town to avoid that.

yeah the transportation could definitely use some help

You can grow up, in, out, or grow the prices. Boulder has chosen the latter, meaning that more and more people drive into the town to work. Big win for the environment, there...

We were promised light rail, and even raised taxes to build it out, and then the government decided to give us a toll lane on a highway(managed by an australian company) and a bus route as a compromise. Front rangers talk a lot about environmental stewardship but from their actions I don't believe they really care about it.

amen to that

unfortunately you can grow up, because of the view and its prohibited. You could potentially grow in and there have been a lot of condos built in recent years, but part of what makes boulder nice is that its not overdeveloped. Some people would prefer to pay a premium to keep it that way.

> unfortunately you can't grow up, because of the view and its prohibited

Because they don't want to is the reason.

As a consequence, people like teachers, firefighters, police, nurses and so on can no longer afford it and must commute in to serve the landed gentry.

Yuck.

As a native to boulder I don't want them to. Nothing predicates you should have to live in boulder, or that the town has to be built up. Thats just a temporary solution, boulder has worked hard to keep the town nice and I appreciate that. They have done a lot of work to provide low income housing but it's a difficult task and we should continue to work on this. The workforce should be negotiating their salaries to compensate, and we should improve transportation for the surrounding areas.

Stop being a NIMBY and let the market work. If the market wants to build up let it. There will still be plenty of areas with views, you'll just have to pay more.

If you want to live that way check out Denver, sounds more up your alley

I was going to say it sounds similar to madison but that is half the population! Would you say it is oversaturated with tech?

I think the difference between the two is that Madison is further from Milwaukee. It looks to be around 80 miles between Madison and Milwaukee. Denver and Boulder are much closer, about 30 miles.

How do you like it in Boulder ? (Question for others as well).

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