Anyone know why Colorado comes out over other states on those terms?
Add to that a good quality of life for employees (low pollution, the outdoors, etc), as well as an abundance of talent, and a city (or three) that's been very focused on nurturing its tech/startup community for the past 10 years (including Denver Startup Week, the largest free startup-focused event in the world)...and it's a no-brainer.
TBH, one of the biggest recent macro-challenges for Denver is the sheer number of people moving here, a large portion of which are from California.
If the goal is to get the hell away from CA culture and SV engineering mindset wouldn't somewhere else be a better fit? I get the attractiveness of Denver relative to CA at present but if you're playing a long game that's like trading in your ticket on the Titanic for one on the Lusitania.
That being said, as someone else mentioned, if your goal is to escape high taxes and the super-expensive housing costs of SF, all while living in an area that supports your life outside the office, Denver is a good place to look at. Even if its cost of living is rising.
And people who did that were the incremental change that enable the people who you think are changing it for the worse to feel like moving there and doing that is a good idea.
Sure that boutique deli that you and your neighbors keep in business (or local law you voted for, or whatever, doesn't matter what it is, just some small seemingly non-meaningful change) doesn't really matter individually but all these little things at the margin add up to a big difference.
It's like how the presence of ethnic neighborhoods furthers immigration from whatever that source country because potential migrants know they have a turnkey place to fit in (though I consider people migrating into a position to economic disadvantage to be fundamentally different than people migrating into a position of economic advantage).
I'm not picking on you. You're just one person. One person doesn't matter. It's the larger mechanism of migration that I'm trying to describe here. Basically don't blame the new migrants. People like doing what you did are why people like them moved in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxpayer_Bill_of_Rights
Peter Thiel is the guy that's so libertarian he wrote about how extending the franchise to women was a mistake.
> …I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible… The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron.
So I can see how that would appeal to him.
I also want them to not be so backed into a corner from a funding perspective that something like that looks like a good idea. This is a pretty good example of "it's expensive to be poor". Apparently CDOT wasn't going to have enough money for plows that year without an injection of money, and the investors' negotiators knew they had CDOT over a barrel. For an example of how much that would destroy the city's economy, we already have had several inches of snow this year (even with the wild fires going).
This idea of they're not doing well so cut their money leads to paying 80% on a project that's supposed to last fifty years, and then another 80% ten years later and so forth. Then you're left without enough money for basic infrastructure.