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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

Denver is inexpensive compared to California, Seattle, NYC, and Boston. But it is (relatively) urban, dense, walkable, and bikeable, with lots more bike lanes incoming. It has a mass-transit system of sorts, although it really needs a north-south subway connecting Cherry Creek to Downtown and past the freeway, as well as an east-west subway along Colfax. It has relatively good and sunny weather. The airport is very large and relatively easy to get to. The economy is pretty strong. Taxes are not insanely high. I was looking at it as a possible place to move.

Austin has many of those, but without mass transit, and Phoenix has some, but it's less urban and the traffic is horrible.

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Also notable: virtually isolated from natural disasters: no earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, wild fires (in the urban areas), volcanoes, floods, tsunamis, land slides, avalanches, or sink-holes.

Also, climate modelling says that it's going to get wetter which would make its land more arable.

So, good retirement investment.

Also, much nicer weather than people think.

Not to mention you are hours away from world class skiing

While I agree that more both north-south and east-west transit lines are needed, the geography of the area makes subways prohibitively expensive. The soils in the area are expandable soils, and run deep. Any subway tunnels would have to be dug much deeper than is typical, down to a depth of year-round consistent humidity and temperature, so not to be destroyed by seasonal soil shifts.

An elevated line would be more feasible (and is indeed in place for some portions of the existing rail lines), but again, you still have to sink your supporting piles deep due to the soil, and that raises the costs. This is why the existing rail transit in the metro area largely follows rail corridors that existed beforehand.

Finally, botched project management has eroded public will to support more rail lines.

I want more transit rail too, but getting it is going to be an uphill battle.

Shhhh, don't ruin it for us.

It's really terrible there, don't move there!

Legal weed, friendly people, crazy nice weather, 30 degrees and people are out in tshirts and boots, outdoor stuff.

It's some kind of hippie Shangra La. We go there when we can for long weekends.

The cooler weather in Denver and huge focus on fitness / outdoors beats the pants off Austin for me on any given day. I do indeed want to be healthier and spend time outdoors!

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