As a lifetime Oregonian, I enjoy Bend and get out there a couple times a year. My family even considered moving there a few years ago in search of a place with more sun. But in deciding between Boulder and Bend, we ended up choosing Boulder, well actually Broomfield, but Boulder was the draw, because as you found Boulder housing prices were too high.
Which leads me to the question, did you consider living outside of Boulder to still get most of the things on your checklist, but not face the high housing prices or difficult political climate?
The problem with Bend, as we came to decide, was there is no "outside of Bend", it's an island with not much of any other place to go for jobs, housing, diversity. Add in the fact that the jobs that are there don't support the house prices. With Boulder, you can always fall back to Denver or one of the many suburbs if your independent business or remote job falls through.
We ultimately moved back to the Portland area for other reasons, but would still choose Boulder/Denver over Bend if we had to do it again.
> did you consider living outside of Boulder to still get most of the things on your checklist, but not face the high housing prices or difficult political climate?
Yeah, but at that point, you're back to the whole car commute thing, or a really long bike ride. And you're significantly farther from the mountains by bike, too.
Fort Collins was something else that looked pretty interesting, but I didn't see many jobs there.
> there is no "outside of Bend"
Yeah, that's something we're nervous about, and definitely a point in favor of Boulder. OTOH, Bend does seem to be growing - they're building the new university now, which should help a little bit.
> the jobs that are there don't support the house prices
I got lucky from that point of view, I guess.
Speaking of stopping by, I'd be happy to meet up with people for beer or whatever as soon as we're slightly more settled in.
> Yeah, but at that point, you're back to the whole car commute thing, or a really long bike ride. And you're significantly farther from the mountains by bike, too.
Ahh, right, car-free commute is a good point.
> Fort Collins was something else that looked pretty interesting, but I didn't see many jobs there.
My reaction to Fort Collins was similar, really liked it too, but seemed more like Bend as far as lack of jobs/backup-plans go. I like smaller cities and I work remotely, so backup plans shouldn't matter as much as it does to me. I'm probably too risk-averse in that sense, as I also had the same fears when looking at a move to Corvallis before. I suppose I'll always need to be near a bigger city to compensate.
There's a small tech scene in Fort Collins, mostly focused on hardware. Intel, HP, AMD, Broadcom, Avago, LSI, and Microsoft come to mind. (Well, three of those are now one)
A small market like that is good and bad. There is no glut of engineers, so you aren't a cheap throwaway commodity, but options are fewer.
You could use Boulder/Denver/Longmont as your fallback. A sizeable commute, but that adds IBM, NASA, Western Digital, Xilinx, Avaya... and a host of startups.
The real startup scene in Fort Collins is probably microbreweries. Engineers of every type are starting microbreweries.
Curious to know in what ways you think so? Not that I disagree. I was at the intersection of Broomfield/Erie/Lafayette and we spend much more of our non-being home time in and around Boulder, Lafayette and Louisville than Broomfield. So, while Broomfield was our residence, Boulder was still the draw.
I used to live in Lafayette and definitely agree- the only reason we lived in Lafayette vs. Boulder was the housing was much more affordable. The town is pretty quiet but we would always drive up to Boulder if we wanted to hang out or do something fun. Denver wasn't too far away either, so we would go there for concerts or conventions or whatever.
I moved out to Oregon and live in the Salem area for a similar reason- the housing is much more affordable here than in Portland. I'm about an hour from Portland and an hour from the coast, so we split our time up between the two.
"lively" Boulder is a bland white town full of people who are almost exactly the same. They are awesome, granted, but there's little to no diversity here. The college kids are mostly wealthy out of staters whose parents can afford to pay 200000+ for an ok state school. Most come here to play hippie, snowboard, and party.
Boulder is hippies with breast implants. Beautiful, wealthy, educated people who want to isolate themselves off from the rest of society. People here are very bland. There is next to no nightlife. Bleck, what a disappointment.
Which leads me to the question, did you consider living outside of Boulder to still get most of the things on your checklist, but not face the high housing prices or difficult political climate?
The problem with Bend, as we came to decide, was there is no "outside of Bend", it's an island with not much of any other place to go for jobs, housing, diversity. Add in the fact that the jobs that are there don't support the house prices. With Boulder, you can always fall back to Denver or one of the many suburbs if your independent business or remote job falls through.
We ultimately moved back to the Portland area for other reasons, but would still choose Boulder/Denver over Bend if we had to do it again.