Sums up why we ended up in Bend, Oregon rather than Boulder, Colorado. In the latter, there is a small but significant group of people whose idea is that the area needs fewer jobs, not smarter housing.
Edit: http://journal.dedasys.com/2015/06/18/boulder-colorado-vs-be... - more about our choice, for the curious.
Which leads me to the question, did you consider living outside of Boulder to still get most of the things on your checklist, but not face the high housing prices or difficult political climate?
The problem with Bend, as we came to decide, was there is no "outside of Bend", it's an island with not much of any other place to go for jobs, housing, diversity. Add in the fact that the jobs that are there don't support the house prices. With Boulder, you can always fall back to Denver or one of the many suburbs if your independent business or remote job falls through.
We ultimately moved back to the Portland area for other reasons, but would still choose Boulder/Denver over Bend if we had to do it again.
Yeah, but at that point, you're back to the whole car commute thing, or a really long bike ride. And you're significantly farther from the mountains by bike, too.
Fort Collins was something else that looked pretty interesting, but I didn't see many jobs there.
> there is no "outside of Bend"
Yeah, that's something we're nervous about, and definitely a point in favor of Boulder. OTOH, Bend does seem to be growing - they're building the new university now, which should help a little bit.
> the jobs that are there don't support the house prices
I got lucky from that point of view, I guess.
Speaking of stopping by, I'd be happy to meet up with people for beer or whatever as soon as we're slightly more settled in.
Ahh, right, car-free commute is a good point.
> Fort Collins was something else that looked pretty interesting, but I didn't see many jobs there.
My reaction to Fort Collins was similar, really liked it too, but seemed more like Bend as far as lack of jobs/backup-plans go. I like smaller cities and I work remotely, so backup plans shouldn't matter as much as it does to me. I'm probably too risk-averse in that sense, as I also had the same fears when looking at a move to Corvallis before. I suppose I'll always need to be near a bigger city to compensate.
I'll be on the lookout for meetups as well.
A small market like that is good and bad. There is no glut of engineers, so you aren't a cheap throwaway commodity, but options are fewer.
You could use Boulder/Denver/Longmont as your fallback. A sizeable commute, but that adds IBM, NASA, Western Digital, Xilinx, Avaya... and a host of startups.
The real startup scene in Fort Collins is probably microbreweries. Engineers of every type are starting microbreweries.
Boulder is hippies with breast implants. Beautiful, wealthy, educated people who want to isolate themselves off from the rest of society. People here are very bland. There is next to no nightlife. Bleck, what a disappointment.
I moved out to Oregon and live in the Salem area for a similar reason- the housing is much more affordable here than in Portland. I'm about an hour from Portland and an hour from the coast, so we split our time up between the two.
http://openboulder.org/ob-opposes-two-growth-related-ballot-...
They are smart people spearheading these anti-growth measures. They want (like you said) the Boulder from 30 years ago. They are motivated, smart, and have the time to attack growth.
And cutting back on construction is only going to turn this place into more of bland sanitized white suburb college town. There's little to no culture or character or funkiness here and cutting off growth will only serve to stamp it out more.
People here like to say silly things like "entrepreneur capital of america" or "startup hub" or silly things like that. Shoot, coming from SF, this place doesn't have even a drop in the bucket of what the bay has. I'm not saying that's bad or good but thinking it's a real tech hub is a joke.
Oh come on - it will always be the birthplace of Illegal Pete's, right ?
So even if you did move to Boulder, you'd probably oppose the construction of more high-density housing, right?
What I want is to live within biking distance of where I work (10 minutes today - yay!), as well as be able to ride my road and mountain bikes, and have other outdoor stuff close by. In Boulder, to get something affordable, you need to live in one of the nearby towns, which means either an hour by bike, or a drive. Thus - for me - defeating the entire purpose of not living in a big city.
I like density in other words, as long as the total population is not too high.
IOW, never?
Summer in Oregon is wonderful, no two ways about it. What we'll have to see is how the winter is over here. I grew up in Eugene and lived in Portland, and just can't handle that endless gray.
Down: Bend was not built for the massive influx of people that the city has seen in recent years. The transportation group is trying to work through it but they will need to be very creative as there is a nice distance gap between East Bend and West Bend.
There are also lots of traffic circles that are single lane that seem to slow down traffic (good and bad) but they run right up against homes and businesses so there are not many options for expansion.
If you own in Seattle now is a great time to sell. We moved a year ago (enjoyed Seattle and its quirks/beer/outdoors) to a more Bend-like community and run our business from here. The transition was worth its weight in gold and we don't look back one bit.
+1000000 would do again
I'm not questioning your decision, but it's worth being realistic about what high-density construction could achieve.
Even though there does seem to be a large influx of people in cities like SF, NYC, Austin, it seems like there is going to be an even larger exodus to smaller towns with sane costs of living in the coming years. It could also be my that my friends are all also finally entering the age where we want to buy homes, so these sorts of places are more appealing than ever.
OTOH, it's still a lot cheaper than Boulder, meaning hundreds of extra dollars a month in our pockets. And the place we did end up with is very nice.