Love the mountains but can't afford to live here
-
1/23/2019
I grew up in Colorado Springs, left to join the military, and came back because the mountains will always be home, but regular people can't afford to live here anymore. The cost of living is ridiculously high, starting with housing that has risen at an unnatural rate and will likely crash if COS history is any indicator. Buying a house? Expect to pay more than asking price, and in the last 2 years, houses have sold within a day or two of coming onto the market. Rents, including substandard apartments, have risen due to demand, and they fail to live up to the expectations of those paying $2000 a month for the privilege of not being homeless. Yes, homelessness is an issue here. Of course it is. There's no affordable housing. The waitlist for subsidized housing has been closed for a decade. They bulldoze homeless communities but fail to do anything substantive. In the past, they've bussed homeless people out of town, which doesn't really solve the problem. Average American workers are out-priced, much as they were in Aspen and Vail years ago. The average people I know (and I'm an educated professional) look to move farther out, but there's only so far you can go. Traffic is exactly as others have said. It's one of the highest incidence of tailgating in the country, people are rude (and they're my home town!), and the roads have not grown to accommodate the number of people who have moved here in the last 5 years. Potholes will ruin your tires, suspension, shock absorbers, etc. Crime has escalated in the past 10 years. The public transportation system is pathetically inadequate for a city this size. We're in a perpetual drought (so when Sperlings says we get 68 inches of snow a year, they must be looking at data from a hundred years ago). Honestly, I could go on for pages, but the truth is that I love the mountains, and Pikes Peak will always be home, but I can't afford to live here anymore, and even if I could, I wonder if I'd really want to considering the current state of our city. How we showed up on 2 "best places to live" lists in 2018 is beyond me.
M | Colorado Springs, CO