My wife and I are originally from Denver, we both grew up there and went to University the state before moving on to live in NYC and now SF.
All of the negatives you mention are really negatives about the people that live currently live there, not the geographic location itself.
The Denver of 20 years ago didn't have those things, one could buy a nice home within 30 minutes of your work for 200k, good schools and medicine, not terrible weather.
It's since been Californicated, and now my wife and I live in SF for a similar coat of living ad it would cost to live in one of the hipper neighborhoods of Denver. I agree, that changes the math, it's why we live here.
The Denver metro area of 20+ years ago was a hidden gem. You could really buy a very nice home as an average income earner, it was idyllic.
+1 on this. I grew up in Denver and around 2015, things just started to become super Californicated. Most of my friends from Denver now live essentially on the outskirts of Denver (Lafayette, Brighton, etc.) because it's the only places they can afford.
Maybe I'm getting older but I personally would only move somewhere in the mountains if I wanted to live in Colorado. Denver and Boulder downtown areas just doesn't interest me anymore.
While it’s tempting to upvote this in hopes of reducing crowding, I’ve lived in Denver a decade and it’s a highly livable city. There’s neighborhoods that are outsider-popular but actually miserable places to be, like the central business district on weekends, but it’s otherwise an incredibly walkable small city with good nature access, a vastly improved restaurant scene (good luck finding anywhere open past 9pm ten years back), and a general pace of life that prioritizes living over careerism.
The cost of living is certainly high; it’s not a huge discount over most places, though still cheaper than NYC, SF, Boston. And the public schools aren’t consistently great, so you have to search around.
Overall, though, it’s a pretty great place. I wish it were in a country with less terrifying politics, but that’s neither Denver’s fault nor unique worldwide.
I left Denver a couple years back because of the pollution, my allergies are now pretty much gone. It's far to dry and arid for my tastes. The city is definitely better about work life balance than other tech hubs, or maybe they play too much and too hard in CO. Driving is insane there, so many reckless drivers that I bought a bigger vehicle just to feel safe on the highways.
I went to DSW most years, i never found it something to write home about. Mostly people looking for funding
What countries have "less terrifying politics"?
The Develop Denver (iirc the name) week is much better.
It probably correlates closely with the democracy index [1].
To go out on a limb and propose my own dumb hypothesis, I would wager that it is at least somewhat inversely proportional to percentage of tax base spent on military expenditures [2]. Countries that are growing or spending money on maintaining hegemony want to keep populations voting in a way that continues to support these industries. Distraction, polarization, disenfranchisement, and stoking nationalism are just a few of the ways this can be accomplished. Pacifist nations don't have these concerns and can focus more internally.
> The Develop Denver (iirc the name) week is much better.
I think Develop Denver was a couple of day conference. It is pretty good, more like a typical conference than a startup week. I went in 2019, not sure when/if they are restarting it. I wrote a recap of that event: https://www.culturefoundry.com/cultivate/digital-agency-life... but it looks like the domain name didn't get renewed and now the conf site is occupied by another entity.
Develop Denver, IIRC, was an organized by many of the same folks at Denver Devs (a Denver tech chat group that started on Slack and moved to Discord): https://denverdevs.org/
Yeah, drivers in Austin are atrocious but while I was in the Denver metro it was nuts how many angry drivers would tailgate me at 80mph or cut me off at highway speeds seemingly for no reason.
Yep, and ETH Denver. Good people, interesting crowd but decidedly second rate or clearly missing something. Granted, I left NYC and SF for other reasons to improve my quality of life / to have more space.
Just like Austin was likely far more desirable ten years ago I think the same is clearly true for Denver.
The whole front range area was pretty incredible pre-marijuana legalization. Definitely changed since then. Your friends are right, Californians have been flooding in for a decade plus in greater and greater numbers, and unsurprisingly they bring the same issues they tried to leave behind. Before, that was mostly contained to the Boulder bubble. (homeless issues, loud yet empty activism, blue-no-matter-who, nimby policies, you know the drill).
Sure, Denver has more of a night life now and fancier restaurants I guess?
We moved from SF to Denver during the Pandemic to get some more space. It's a very new city without much character that takes generations to develop. We moved up to 10k feet in Summit county and we absolutely love it here. There are so many beautiful spots in Colorado outside the Front Range. I'm done living in the Big Shitty.
