Boulder can't have it both ways: you can't ask for blockbuster skyline employers and low density; or, you can, but as you can see from SFBA, the result is inhumane.

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.

Boulder doesn't 'want things' as an entity. The people that will be hurt by Google moving in were not the people clamoring for large employers for well-off people in the first place.

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.

but much like the bay area I'm sure a loud minority of people in boulder will express their demand for all of the above with constant density while being continually outraged that it doesn't seem to be working out as they expect.

The problem is that I don't think there's a compelling case to be made that the people who happen to live in Boulder at this exact moment in time are more deserving of the right to live there than anybody else in the United States. Other people want to live in Boulder for the same reasons you do. If enough other people want that, then it's going to grow.

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.

> 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.)

> 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.

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.

Speaking personally, I live in NYC because I wanted to experience that, not because I don’t like home. I’m not a big fan of the kind of transplant who does nothing but trash where they’re from. There’s something distasteful and uncouth about it.