It must have been 85 in a 75 then. I came over a ridge going 90 as I passed someone then got trapped in the left lane with like 5 cars in the right lane going 75 exactly with the sherrif at the lead. Felt like I'd look too guilty if I hit the brakes and got back in line just because I saw the sherrif. I just crept along at like 76 and slowly passed them and immediately got lit up. He was like I got you going 85 but we both know it was faster than that. Obviously really stupid in retrospect. Not really the point anyway, I was speeding however way you look at it. The point was that I told a sherrif in rural Colorado that I was on my way to go to Colorado.

Completely depends what state you're in. In Wyoming 5 over is risky but in CA you can do 20 over with little risk of getting pulled over. Same deal on East Coast. In CT, 10 over is the max you can do whereas in NH you can do 15 over just fine.

I’m an east coast resident. 30+ over is extremely normal. The speed limits are ungodly slow on highways. Go elsewhere and people think you’re a maniac because they aren’t used to it.

I, a cultured Kansas Visitor, am familiar with other parts of the state, such as Dodge City, and Liberal. These areas are different from the I70 corridor because

#COWS

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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.

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.

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

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").

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