There is nothing competitive about the wages in Denver when you're comparing to CA. Cost of living is lower than SV, but still one of the highest in the country.

Have any numbers you'd care to furnish? Cost of living may be one of the highest, but you can easily get a 2 bedroom or a house in the burbs for $1500. It's quite easy to allocated less than a third of your take home to rent, unlike SV, Seattle, NYC, Boston, etc.

I agree with you, here are some numbers to back up Denver is great COL vs salary wise. I work remotely as a mid-level DevOps guy for about $115k and no equity. I bought a 3 br house with a yard next to a light rail station 10 min drive 20 min train ride to downtown. I bought during the recession for ~220k ($350k ish now) but rent in our neighborhood for a similar house would be $1800 total. If I were moving here today and renting, we'd rent a 1 br apartment nearby for about $1100.

There's a fire-hose of Californians directed at CO. In a decade or two they will have recreated the place they left.

You're either new to Colorado or ignorant of your (adopted?) state's history: this phenomenon is as old as Colorado itself, dating back to the Colorado Gold Rush of 1859. You're welcome to complain about the people who followed you, of course (a phenomenon that's also as old as Colorado), but please do not pretend that you have an exclusive concession on a state that its inhabitants have been redefining since before you were born.

It's not just CO. It's literally every growing area, ever.

Weird thing all those Californians are from somewhere else also

It's already happened. Colorado politics has already moved sufficiently from libertarian to leftist that I would no longer consider moving there.

Sorry, but no. CS is uber conservative, but not remotely libertarian. They're fine with using the government to enforce morality, the antithesis of libertarian ideals. And the weed was definitely NOT driven by CS. The conservatives there think it's ruining their state.

Sorry, the antecedent of "it" was "colorado" there, not colorado springs.

The same can be said for WA, OR, and TX (Austin).

I live in Austin. It's really not that bad. Sure there are many people coming from CA (like I did 3 years ago) but Texas in general and also Austin in particular have distinct enough cultures that they haven't become just another CA. Just my personal opinion of course.

My near 40 years in Texas says otherwise. Yes, Texas culture is strong but the West Coast invasion has been felt. Less so in Austin because it was already a liberal place. Politics aside, the ethos was more similar to the West Coast.

We're used to waves of people moving in though and that's probably also what makes it somewhat less felt from the newcomers. We call ourselves the friendly state because of our welcoming attitude. However, I think if we ever flip from red to blue the pre-recession Texans are going to freak out.

Strange, byzantine policies, too.

"The place we were at sucked so bad we had to leave, so let's move somewhere nice and make it just like it"

The history of the world.

Des Moines is the same way.