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CO420Tech t1_iuursra wrote

Reply to comment by SuumCuique1011 in First-Time Visit to Colorado [2268 x 4032] [OC] by remyron

No, this pic is New Mexico. It is all a lie, it isn't cool in Colorado, don't let people fool you. The New Mexicans are just trying to keep their population from growing so fast, so they post pictures like this. Stay away, it is really terrible.

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SuumCuique1011 t1_iuusa96 wrote

How convenient! I love terrible places too! So intriguing!

Colorado it is!

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Traumasaurusrecks t1_iuvtn8d wrote

Though real talk, it’s a pretty sad thing to witness so many people moving there from the inside. The rent costs tripled/quadrupled even before Covid. Most people of color - particularly Hispanics have been forced from most the front range (a northern part of Colorado where mountains meet the plains). No one talks about it and people moving their wash their hands of it ‘cause it’s systemic’ ironically a system they choose to support because not supporting it would mean not moving and adding to the issue. In addition, people that move there often bring the social issues they are running from with them and want to change everything, often destroying the culture they found inviting and wanted to be a part of.

There is a trend of transplants havjng the insular self centered nature that wealth brings and little to no knowledge of things like cleaning up a camp site, general etiquette of just being decent, or sadly often, lack much respect for nature, at all etc. there has been a striking increase in the amount of trash I pack out from trails and camp sites this past decade. I can list (vent about, lol) a few pages of other stuff (like how increasingly overdrawn the water resources are year after year), but gentrification is so freaking lame whether it’s individuals or companies. Imagine you just want was to stay where you’re from and ride the changing world with your community, but just like a South Park banking meme, ‘-aaand it’s gone’. And what I hear most is ‘deal with it’aka, you’re not rich enough. Your community was forced out cause you’re the wrong class. Guess you should have invested more when you were a child with all that imaginary money, lol.

There are/were a lot of people there of a variety of ethnicities that have been forced out that spent generations making it a wonderful and inviting place and culture.

All that too say, defo visit. Maybe even move there, but please keep in mind the situation is complicated, the other people are human too, and supporting those systems is definitely ethically grey.

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jbhoward1397 t1_iuw2g5h wrote

I think this comment is a gross generalization and slightly prejudiced. I moved here not long ago, meaning that I am not “#NATIVE”. Myself and many people like myself do our absolute best to positively impact the natural beauty of this state and to push back on the stuffiness of the native attitude.

The real reason that housing costs have skyrocketed is a lot more nuanced and not directly linked to the number of people moving to the front range.

Some Factors to Consider:

  1. As far as I am aware, in 2021-2022 more people left Colorado, than moved here—creating a slowing demand
  2. The loss of a large number of homes due to fire (Marshall) creates supply issues that drive prices up
  3. Rec. Marijuana companies are buying up homes as a way to “clean” money which further drives up prices due to the demand and reducing residential supply
  4. Construction companies over the last few years have been dealing with record high raw material costs and low labor retention which reduced productivity (supply) and increased costs

Costs in effectively all major cities globally have continued to skyrocket in the post-pandemic world, so this issue is not unique to Denver/Colorado. The real issue is not with general population gentrification or ignorance (these ideas divide people), it’s with rampant corporate greed spearheaded by politicians who’s personal wealth somehow inflate to exorbitant levels during terms of “public service”.

We all need to stick together, build each other up, and educate.

Edit: Grammar

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thehappyheathen t1_iuw96pf wrote

This is actually an issue in startup culture. Weird segue, I know. There is a problem with growth when it outstrips the ability of the prevailing culture to integrate new people. I think that's what you're describing. Colorado is a small state, the population is only about 5 million or so. It's smaller, as a state, than some cities. It sounds like you're saying that for a long time, the small population of Colorado had a shared culture, including concepts like "leave no trace" in most of the backcountry. When people moved in too quickly, they outnumbered the locals and didn't have to integrate, so the environmental ethics have been lost. When I moved to Colorado, I feel like I was surrounded by a lot of people who grew up on the Front Range. They took me hiking, taught me to ski and shared their values. I feel like that's happening less now because there's too many people moving for them to get absorbed into a circle that is mostly people who have been in Colorado for years, if not their whole life.

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Traumasaurusrecks t1_iuwkd31 wrote

Yes, you are nailing a chunk of the social parts. You write it out really well. I think the economic part adds a really insidious element to what you have above. Mostly newcomer influx can be dealt with though 'locals' by sticking together culturally while either including the new people or not (not always healthy, but eh). The other half of this is the economic/livelihood shift that literally forces poorer people to move, live beyond their resources, or become homeless (I'm ignoring the idea that everyone just gets better jobs as that is largely not a community option in my experience). Now, it is a huge systemic thing to look at, and mostly can be blamed on companies/international greed at horrifying scales. In these posts, I'm pointing out the individual contribution of people with wealth moving there, but it isn't the root, and I get it - it's a nice place. It just sucks to be not wealthy and be on the receiving end.

The increase of rent and property taxes (I know much more about the rent elements) from the early 2000s and onward basically got untenable for lower classes and moves up in wealth brackets varying from community to community. Some places priced out even the middle/upper class - like Boulder with 1,000,000$ homes on the low end. Or mountain towns where the ma and pa places must close cause they can't afford to pay help a livable wage.

In theory, the new money in the area would help everyone, but economic and government spending impacts from it are not equal across the board. Our lower income communities which were already underserved basically get no change or token amounts of service. Even in areas that receive lots of new people, often not even the schools improve as they are often sent to different highschools. Or in our school district funding was focused on already well off schools - although they did finally address the asbestos, lol. Then with gentrification comes an erasure of history of poor/minority areas (especially in this case) by renaming the place- like Five Points is now RiNo in Denver. And all this economics stuff hits minorities harder - when gentrification came to my hometown, it was the hispanic families I grew up with that had a harder time landing better jobs/paying the bills, and it's not like it was a perfect system before, but it actually got harder for many. All this to say that for lower income communities, to stay, you needed income increases or upward mobility far in excess of general income increases.

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VonMillersExpress t1_iuxdezf wrote

Lifelong northern Front Range native. There aren’t that many of us that I run into. No idea what impact that has or has had in what you’re discussing, but whatever is happening now is different than what was happening before. But that’s not a bad thing! The old joke motto we had for Fort Collins was “Wide streets, narrow minds”. Doesn’t really apply anymore, and that’s a good thing to my mind.

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EGG_CREAM t1_iuw6rzg wrote

The problem is not people moving here, we have plenty of land. Nobody is developing enough apartments and houses, we're not on an island it's just plain greed. Stop blaming the wrong people here.

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Traumasaurusrecks t1_iuwa5r9 wrote

Sort of agree to disagree a bit. Another big part of the growth is water availability. We have been overdrawing the groundwater like crazy. Farmers get pushed out for housing developments in large part to get their water rights. But the groundwater is way way overdrawn. If you stopped 100% of human consumption in CO, it'd be 200 years of precipitation and aquifer recharge to return the water levels to the previous "normal" - it aint infinite and consumption volumes are increasing. But at the root of that is greed, and a water law system that is messsssyyyyyyy at best. So, how to address it is without just collapsing the system is difficult at best

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EGG_CREAM t1_iuwe3jp wrote

Water is and has been a huge issue out here forever, there's no argument from me there.

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Traumasaurusrecks t1_iuwlcod wrote

Thanks, and know that I definitely hear you though. Technically, there is tons of space. And housing costs are primarily a housing volume issue (and an investment issue). I work in water in other areas of the world, and we overlap into urban planning and such, and, oof - it does a doozy on planning and growth capacity

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ColoradoCyclist t1_iuw9cuu wrote

Colorado isn’t just terrible. It’s also filled to the brim with poop. There is poop everywhere. Doorstep? Poop. Street? Poop. Mountains? Poop. Underpants? Poop. You’ll hate it here unless you’re into…

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CO420Tech t1_iuuu8nv wrote

Go away! We're full! 😝

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Traumasaurusrecks t1_iuvq3bv wrote

Seriously. Gentrification ain’t no thing for the outsiders till it comes through your town like a tornado. Rent tripled in a decade. Stanford is doing studies on Colorado because of how fast the people that made this place is getting pushed out. I feel pretty sad seeing Colorado in these forums. I get i - it’s pretty, but it is basically the tragedy of the commons and the system of people (corporate or individual) out pricing locals is sickening.

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CO420Tech t1_iuvy1on wrote

I'm a native and my family's been here since the 1850's so I feel ya. And you're not lying about the rent - the apartment that I rented in Denver across the street from Rose Medical just 20 years ago was $500 then, and is $1700 today. I used to have a dream of buying a little cabin in Marble, CO where it is beautiful but out of the way enough that a 2-3 bedroom cabin on 2-3 acres of land maxed out around $45-60k, but now they cost more than the 4 bedroom house we live in down in Denver and the land has been parceled down to 1/2 acre lots like the place is a real town instead of a glorified mining camp. Ludicrous. There isn't such a thing as an inexpensive mountain property now, even in towns where the median income is maybe $20k, unless it is a 1970's single-wide trailer. There are still some affordable properties in CO, but they're either scattered over a network of county roads across the Great Plains, or in hellish, isolated shitholes like Cortez. The only place along an interstate that is still affordable by any definition is Pueblo (because... gross. Pueblo is nasty), but even they're feeling it. You know things are bad when people have to move to fucking Pueblo to own a house (seriously, fuck that place with a cactus. God I hate it so much. Seriously, Cortez's motto should be "Cortez - At Least We're Not Pueblo").

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Front_Beach_9904 t1_iuw6fjt wrote

Florida was reasonable 5 years ago. Now I’m being priced out of my home state.

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ramblejambler t1_iuy6fhc wrote

I keep wondering...where are we supposed to go? As we're getting priced out of locations. I've lived all across America by this point. I want to find my forever home. Yet coast to coast the rent is just insanity incarnate. What you get for the price is someone's chewed up slipper. Not sure what to do.

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Front_Beach_9904 t1_iuyjdnt wrote

I’m out of ideas too my man. I was working 60 hours a week before the pandemic to get by. Now even that isn’t enough

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ramblejambler t1_iuykhb9 wrote

Plus side, big/small and anywhere in between if you're not in the upper class you seem to be eating shit right now. So you're not alone.

We scraped everything we could out of our lives, and pretty much live like monks now. Had to move to a lower cost of living place, but we're getting priced out of that too. So I'm thinking Midwest next, but damn I'll miss land features (unless we move to an area with those).

p.s. - Good luck and keep your head above water!

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Front_Beach_9904 t1_iuym5yc wrote

You too man! Maybe we should start looking at other countries

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ramblejambler t1_iuyphbj wrote

Been wanting to, no lie. Only catch is my girl has a medical condition and she gets her treatment here. So the whole things been a mess. If I had the chance? SE Asia for sure. 10/10.

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Darrows_Razor t1_iuv96p7 wrote

Actually it’s just kind of…meh. Not terrible but not great also. Best not to come.

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dben89x t1_iuvje1y wrote

There should really be a r/dontmovetocolorado

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BGYeti t1_iuvdoi8 wrote

Yeah I fucking hate Colorado, don't ever move here.

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