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Is Denver The Next High-Tech Center? (newyorker.com)
An anonymous reader write: "The spread of the tech industry outside Silicon Valley has helped make Denver the fastest-growing large city in the U.S.," reports the New Yorker, saying it's now growing faster than Austin and Seattle, becoming one of America's 20 most populous cities. Cost-conscious investors and tech executives now are opening offices in cheaper "secondary cities" outside of Silicon Valley, like Salt Lake City, and the good universities near Denver mean a well-educated workforce, coupled with a low cost of living.
"Though the city isn't the headquarters for any big tech companies -- like Dell in the Austin area or Microsoft and Amazon in Seattle -- several of them, including IBM and Oracle, have offices here. The presence of those offices, and of the universities, has also helped create a vibrant startup scene: people get educated here or come here for jobs, and then they graduate or leave those jobs and become entrepreneurs." Last year venture capitalists invested $800 million in Demver's tech, energy, food, and marijuana companies, and in 2014 Oracle paid over a billion dollars to acquire Denver-based Datalogix.
Anyone else live in a burgeoning "secondary" tech city? Scott McNealy said he co-founded his data-analysis startup in Denver because in California "The prices of everything have skyrocketed. The regulations. The pension deficit. The traffic. It's just not a fun place to go start."
"Though the city isn't the headquarters for any big tech companies -- like Dell in the Austin area or Microsoft and Amazon in Seattle -- several of them, including IBM and Oracle, have offices here. The presence of those offices, and of the universities, has also helped create a vibrant startup scene: people get educated here or come here for jobs, and then they graduate or leave those jobs and become entrepreneurs." Last year venture capitalists invested $800 million in Demver's tech, energy, food, and marijuana companies, and in 2014 Oracle paid over a billion dollars to acquire Denver-based Datalogix.
Anyone else live in a burgeoning "secondary" tech city? Scott McNealy said he co-founded his data-analysis startup in Denver because in California "The prices of everything have skyrocketed. The regulations. The pension deficit. The traffic. It's just not a fun place to go start."
Cleaner air and water.
I don't know that it is high tech jobs, or legal pot, but odd things are definitely happening in Denver. We just refinanced our house after less than two years, and the value shot up by almost $100k. Thankfully we bought when we did, but I don't know how my kids will afford to live here in the future. The townhomes they are building a block away will go from $350-$650k! Denver proper is mostly landlocked so prices will continue to rise.
Traffic is awful and getting worse. Getting up to the mountains to play on the weekend has become a real chore. We leave for skiing at 5:30am to beat the traffic up I70. Driving in or out of the city during rush hour is completely awful.
The bad traffic has brought the return of toll roads on most of the regional highways that weren't already tolled. Even the interstates have or are getting toll/express lanes now. Be prepared to pay up for your commute.
One bright spot - after decades of wrangling, our light rail network is finally being expanded out to serve much more of the metro area. Even the cheaper suburbs will have rail access to downtown in a couple of years. (Not Boulder, they hate you, sorry).
Please bring your hipster programmer selves here so I can continue to have someone local to work for and keep feeding my 401k until retirement. Then I can sell my house for a small fortune and move out of this crazy town.
Yours Truly, Generation X.
When people start flooding into your state from California, it sounds great, right? They're coming for the jobs, the good life you have, the environment that allows businesses to exist without choking the life out of them. But what happens next?
They start complaining that things aren't like they were in California. And then they start making changes. Like all new arrivals, they don't give a shit about you've been doing things, they're going to be doing it their way from now on. And that means the California way. It's what they were fleeing in the first place, but they plan to re-implement it in your home. These people vote, too. Once they outnumber your city's people, what are you going to do?
This is what happened to my beloved Austin. When I left, I think the population was booming over 500,000 and it was already terrible. Today? Something like 1.2 million. Sad, my city will never be the place it was when I lived there.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Have you learned nothing from this technology? Centers are obsolete. It'll be a network.
High taxes, business-strangling regulations, insane housing prices driven by land-use laws that strangle supply [battleswarmblog.com], and the future is further imperiled by unsustainable public pension debt [pensiontsunami.com] and rising labor costs due to the minimum wage hike.
Meh... I've been hearing that for years. Most of these criticisms come from the fact that California is a solid blue state with 54 electoral votes go to Hillary. If California was a solid red state with 54 electoral votes going to Trump, everyone in the right-wing echo chamber would be singing a different tune.
There's 2 things always required to become a 'tech hub', neither of which Denver has. First is money - and the article points out that Denver has no corporate HQ's. Second, is a world class education community that feeds technology and is benefactored by the first requirement (money) . Unless there's a tech school University of Denver that's on the same caliber as CIT or UW, this is just smoke