Denver-to-Boulder corridor booming (Red Rocks Edition)
When the aerospace company Sierra Nevada Corporation moved into the Colorado Technology Center about eight years ago, employees on their lunch break could stroll by the alpaca farm next door.
Olivia Sandoval, left, and Kayla Galet take a break from exercising at the top of the stairs at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colo. Cultural amenities like Red Rocks are drawing highly educated workers to the Denver area.
Now the animals are gone, and the land is cleared and ready for the new development surging along the Denver-to-Boulder corridor.
Here in the Mountain West -- but also in places as varied as Seattle and Portland, Ore., in the Northwest, and Atlanta and Orlando, Fla., in the Southeast -- employers are hiring at a steady clip, housing prices are up and consumers are spending more freely.
What Denver and its surrounding cities share with other boomtowns is an appealing environment for a skilled work force, which has increasingly meant the difference between prosperity and stagnation.
Such places have become business incubators and magnets for educated millennials. The lifestyles that 20- and 30-somethings often seek depend on a medley of urban living, public transit and lots of entertainment options (which in Colorado includes marijuana, legalized for recreational use since 2014).