Nice for families, if you can afford it
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3/16/2021
I grew up here in the 1970s and 80s, when it was indisputably the best suburb of Denver. The city was close, but horseback riding and hunting were even closer, and of course the mountains are right there. The park system was and still is amazing, and the town is riven by creeks that we kids explored and took advantage of. I still visit to walk the river and highline canal. The demographics were mixed, and class consciousness was very low. People complain about lack of "diversity" there a lot now, but "white" is a recent invention, and if you count diversity of cultures not just melanin (Irish, Italian, German, Spanish, Protestant, Mormon, Catholic, rich, poor, etc etc) there was and is a ton of diversity. In many ways its shocking how stable Littleton has remained and how much the same it appears - how many places in history have looked this much the same for so many decades, free from war, violence, or economic devastation? At the same time, the cute older small town I lived in has been rapidly subsumed by inconceivably rapid urban expansion, and its been devastating at times to come back and see the ticky tacky homes spread out practically all the way to CO Springs to the south, when I remember riding on Jackass Hill when there was nothing but pasture as far as the eye could see.
I have family who've remained and raised families, and while I used to think the place was too conservative, now I'm sad that all of Denver has been utterly deranged by woke-tardation, including Littleton. And the little 3 bedroom, one-story 1950s clapboard house my sister and her blue collar husband bought for $70k in 1980 is appraised today at $500k, with no significant changes to it. That doesn't encourage the kind of young families I grew up amidst. The cute downtown is way more vibrant than it used to be, and if I were loaded and worked in Denver I'd still want to live in Littleton. I can't imagine how anyone else affords it.
Matt | Denver, CO