That's a repulsive suggestion to many people who live in Boulder. Living in a city of <250k people is a feature, not a bug. Boulder is not cheap, if people wanted density they could already move to Denver for the same price and climate.
If Boulder wants to be Ann Arbor of the Mountains, that's fine. But I suspect that's not what Boulder really wants; people who live in Boulder want to have a competitive employment market with multiple options for where to work and little risk of being forced to relocate out of town if their job doesn't work out. That's a basket of benefits that you can't humanely get while holding density constant.
So it's not a case of wanting things both ways, it's a case of the city choosing economic expansion over the subset of people that want to keep things affordable and uncrowded.
Interestingly, the modern liberal position seems to be that everyone is welcome here, just, you know, not actually here here. Somewhere else, here. Not where I live, here. We talk about this in terms of immigration, but my experience is that, in actual practice, people don't even want Ohioans to move to their town.
Hm, most of the people I know who live in the "coastal elite" cities did not grow up in those same cities; they grew up in places like Ohio.
(Which, again, is fine if Boulder wants to be a steady size forever - make sure enough people are moving out to bigger towns to cancel out population growth, by making sure they don't have too many job opportunities locally.)
Yes, and generally speaking, if they liked Ohio, they would've stayed there, because you can still make a very nice living as a coder in middle America. That means they're going to be even more upset about Ohioans closing in, because they'll feel like the culture they left behind is sneaking back up on them.
Or, sure, they can decide that being a 100K-person town is what they want their city to be, and use zoning to actively resist any single employer having over 1K people in the town. But this isn't a Google-specific problem, and if you try to address it with Google-specific solutions (either "Take special measures to invite Google because they'll bring in high-paying jobs" or "Take special measures to exclude Google because they'll destroy your city"), you'll be in trouble when some other, possibly non-tech, employer comes along in the future.
My old church is located under the old Citigroup Center skyscraper at 601 Lexington, which is also an entire block; Citigroup used to have both that building and the block across the street, 399 Park, for a couple of decades. When they moved out of those buildings to another neighborhood in Manhattan, that caused a drop in noon mass attendance but that was really about it. Their presence didn't destroy the neighborhood, let alone the city, and their move didn't destroy it either.
The fact that NYC is capable of handling Citigroup-sized companies and Google-sized companies moving in and barely even noticing is one of the deep reasons I like living in NYC. I wish more other cities would do the same, because I don't think there's anything unique to NYC about the ability to do this. Maybe population - although the Denver-Aurora-Bolder metropolitan area, at 3M, isn't that much smaller than NYC (8.5M). The internet is telling me the Google Boulder office can support up to 1,500 employees. You shouldn't give them corporate welfare, but also you should just be able to accommodate them without that, they're not that big. It should just be a building, and you should have lots of those.