When the aerospace company Sierra Nevada Corporation moved into the Colorado Technology Center about eight years ago, employees on their lunch break could stroll by the alpaca farm next door.
Now the animals are gone, and the land is cleared and ready for the new development surging along the Denver-to-Boulder corridor…
The comments are not so sunny!
I’ve lived in central Denver for nearly 30 years. The changes here are in fact stunning, lately coming at warp speed, and overall there is no doubt that Denver today is a much more interesting, vibrant and promising city.
That said, the public transportation here is very limited; the highways around the city are inadequate (the main artery around Denver, enlarged in the mid-2000s, was obsolete a year after the expansion was finished) there is ugly sprawl of cheaply built houses and unattractive malls dotting the suburban landscape, and the state is so fracking-happy that two Colorado cities have now popped up as earthquake zones in the newest US Geologic Survey.
Oh, and this is a right-to-work state with weak unions. Result? Much lower salaries than on either coast. That, along with the dramatically increasing cost of housing – and higher education – spells, if not disaster, then certainly not good news for the middle class.
Finally, you’ve never seen so many young hipsters as you do in downtown Denver. That’s because they’re the only ones who can afford to live there. Over 40 and not a tech VP or attorney? Off to the suburbs with you!