opinion spectrum
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3/26/2007
It seems to me that if you read many of these posts, you will see common themes, and get a pretty good sense of the place relative to other places. And if you read the CityViews of other places, you will find quite different feels in the common threads in those cities' posts versus those for Denver.
It is a sunny place most of the time. If sunny is a big part of what you want out of life, Denver has that. Of course, the mountains are not far away, though the traffic there and/or back can be truly perplexing, though maybe not much different from San Francisco to Tahoe, for example.
Denver's suburban sprawl is utterly incredible. It is a suburboriented mentality here, and can be so even within the city-propper and out into the mountains.
Denver "natives" (i.e., usually > 1st generation white people) can be pretty interesting people.
I would guess (in many years of exploring the area) that at least 60% of people that move here move here from the midwest - Indiana, Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska. And many of the transplants here tend to like their SUVs and think it's real cool they're now able to go skiing and for a bike ride so regularly. Those tend to be the motives of many here.
Polls have found that the Denver "work force" is one of the most dissatisfied in the country.
People here can be clique-ish, and more so than other cities and towns (and countries) I've lived in. Conversation can often be relativiely surface and it can be surprisingly tricky to actually get to know people here.
There are many people with at least bachelor's degrees, though I am not convinced it's a "well educated" populace. Many can prefer to go to their alum gathering at a LoDo bar and watch "the game", or hop in the SUV with their buddies and head to the mountain condo for some drinking and skiing over exploration of things that "well educated" people might like to think and talk about.
There is certainly more diversity in Denver than in, say, Boulder, or maybe a little town in Wyoming or Oklahoma. But you don't really feel that exchange much. There are a few neighborhoods with a lot of Latin or Vietnamese flavor, for example, but I suspect few of the predominantly white people here ever venture there, and vice versa (no making a day of going to "China Town" for some ethnic flavor here, e.g.). Overall, I have seldom seen so few people of color (Indian, East Asian, middle-eastern, Afro-American, etc.).
My understanding is that Colorado public scho
kevin | Denver, CO