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Comment by hkarthik | Hacker News Reader

Boulder was like this when I was in college there, well before Google existed. They always capped growth at a ridiculously low percentage because of all the NIMBY behavior.

Housing in the surrounding suburbs of Denver would easily be less than 1/4 the price. Most people who worked in Boulder commuted from a nearby suburb even back then. Thankfully it was the only the city in the area to pick up on NIMBYism, unlike the Bay Area.

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I was thinking the same thing. Boulder is about as gentrified as it gets for Colorado - median home prices are over $500k. (http://www.zillow.com/boulder-co/home-values/)

But how do you know that Boulder real estate won't get more expensive if Google moves in? Seems like they'd be adding at least a couple percentage points to the higher income working population, which would have that effect.

Let's say they say No, and Google moves a town over. What happens then?

Google moving a town over would be the same as choosing a town like Longmont or Broomfield. Which is likely to be just fine, and provides just as many jobs for graduates in the area, without getting mired in Boulder politics.

That's exactly what Sun and every other big tech company did in the 1990s when they had a footprint in Colorado.

Being the Devil's advocate - does it still push up Boulder's home prices?

And also, for people who purport to care about urban sprawl, is pushing things farther out and increasing commutes a good answer?

The only way to decrease sprawl would be to increase density, and frankly few Coloradoans would go for that. Few cities outside of Denver have tall buildings because people don't like their mountain views obstructed. And public transportation is pretty limited. Many people live in Colorado to enjoy the outdoors, and to do so, you need your own transportation. Once you have your own transportation, there's very little incentive to take a bus or train on a regular basis.

Ok, but Boulder is supposed to be fairly liberal, environmentally conscious and so on. They seem a bit out of touch with reality: they don't want to increase housing stock, but they don't want higher prices either.

Highly unlikely. Boulder's incentive is also to keep the prices reasonable so that there is enough affordable student housing for the 31,000 students that live in the town. Students make up 30% of the population of the entire town. The student population doesn't care much for things like public school and property taxes that tend to drive housing prices up or down. For them, it's purely about cheap rent, good access to the bus system, and walkability.

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