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").