Why We Settled in Golden

David E.Damouth www.damouth.com

minor update 9/21/2008

Introduction

We've often been asked why we chose Golden, Colorado when we finished our full-time RV expedition around the continent and decided to buy a house and settle down again. I've provided partial answers on several occasions.This document is intended to gather and slightly organize past musings on this subject.

We spent most of our working careers in Rochester, NY. After retirement, we traveled full-time for over 4 years, spending at least a few days in most of the places that seemed like candidates for a permanent place to settle. We ended up in Golden, CO (the western-most suburb of Denver). As I write this, we've been in Golden for almost six years, and are still happy with almost everything about the place.

Our selection criteria

I actually tried to build a big spreadsheet, ranking each of our retirement candidate cities from one to 10 on all of the various aspects that we cared about. This exercise helped us focus our thoughts, but otherwise didn't turn out to be very useful. At the end, we just went with an educated "gut feel". The spreadsheet is here. Although incomplete, it may be a starting point for people who want to do something similar. Several columns of the spreadsheet never got filled out - usually because we didn't have enough data. I don't want any questions about the specific numbers in the spreadsheet - some are guesses, some are now obsolete, and many are very subjective, dependent on our mood at the time.

Looking at this spreadsheet will give you a complete list of the criteria that we considered, the weight we assigned to each criterion, and the specific values for each city on our final list. The major criteria were:

Easy access to large-city amenties - shopping, cultural events, high quality specialized medical care, and a large and diverse population within which we could find communities of people who shared our attitudes and special interests.
Open space around us - either a few acres of our own land or public open space.
Easy access to world-class classical music. We have a special fondness for small chamber choirs.
A climate that would allow comfortable outdoor activites all year. We wanted to minimize the number of days per year when we would be confined indoors by temperatures that were too hot or too cold.
An affordable house with (ideally) 2000 sq. ft. of living space, two guest rooms for friends and family, 1000 sq. ft. of unfinished space for my workshop, 1000 sq. ft. of garage for two cars, lawn equipment, canoes, etc. and land suitable for serious gardening.
High speed Internet access. Not so much of a problem today, but not widely available six years ago.
Easy access to mountains, oceans, sailing, skiing, windsurfing, hiking, biking, table tennis clubs, competitive volleyball leagues.
Peace and quiet: Dave would like to be far enough from neighbors to have deep-forest silence; Helen would like dark smog-free nights for star-watching.
Access to wilderness: Reasonable drive to multi-day wilderness canoe trips
Relatively low total taxes and other living costs.
Intellectual Resources: libraries, both channels of National Public Radio, general university facilities, good newspaper, adult education programs, etc. This suggests a large nearby university and plenty of high-tech industry.
Scenic beauty: views of mountains, and oceans, preferably from our yard, but at least within easy walk or drive.

We're often asked about a couple of items that are not on this list:

Big-city traffic: We've spent quite a bit of time in cities with a reputation for horrible traffic - Seattle, San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and now Denver. Traffic has not been a major problem for us. We prefer to live out in the suburbs. As retirees, when we do have to go into the central city, we can usually choose our travel times and routes to avoid the worst of rush hour. (Los Angeles is an exception: it sometimes seems to have 24-hour-per-day traffic jams.)
Location of friends and family: Our children and our close relatives are scattered all over the country, so this was not a major factor in choosing our own location. Friends have also scattered over the years. Our largest concentration of friends was of course Rochester, and this did weigh fairly heavily in our decison process. It almost, but not quite, outweighed the long grey winters.

What's good about Golden?

Our house is at 5900 ft elevation - summers are generally cool enough to allow outside activity. On the rare really hot days, half an hour's drive will get us a mile higher, where it's generally 25 degrees cooler. Winters are generally mild enough for outside activity - people golf all winter, with the exception of the few days it takes for the hot sun to melt the snow after an occasional snowstorm. Hurricanes, tornados, and earthquakes are unknown. The one negative weather aspect is that hailstorms are common in summer, and can do considerable damage.

We live in a small town (17,000 population), where nearly everyone is on a first-name basis with the city councillor who represents them. We get over 300 days a year of sunshine.

The town is right at the boundary where high desert meets the mountains. Humidity is very low. We're less than an hour from world-class skiing, snowshoeing, and the glorious hiking in the high peaks in summer. Our house is a few blocks from the campus of the Colorado School of Mines - a small but highly ranked engineering university. We're 20 minutes from the cultural activities of downtown Denver. We're 30 minutes from downtown Boulder and the huge University of Colorado campus, and all the activities that this represents. We're within walking distance of good restaurants and grocery stores, and "downtown" Golden. The middle of Golden has an excellent white-water kayak course on Clear Creek - usable for about nine months of the year. The county library system is high-tech, well stocked, and emminently usable. It's ranked among the top few public library systems in the country. I can sit at my computer and search a unified catalog of most of the libraries in Colorado (and a few in Wyoming). When I find a book I want to read, a few keystrokes will have it reserved and sent to my local library (within walking distance) for pickup. When the book is at my library ready for pickup, I receive an e-mail. A few days before the book is due, I will receive an e-mail reminding me to return it. This is all free.

Golden and Jefferson County, as with most of the Front Range communities, have been active in buying and preserving large tracts of land surrounding the city and extending up the mountain slopes. Budgets for parks and recreation are generous, and we have an extensive network of hiking and biking trails connecting throughout the area.

The five-county Denver Metropolitan Area has dedicated a 0.5% sales tax for support of public cultural and scientific programs. The community recently voted to extend this tax for another 10 years. This has resulted in a large and dynamic cultural environment - high quality museums, wonderful botanic gardens, and an incredible number of art clubs, community choirs, orchestras, etc. There are three superb chamber choirs that have received major national recognition. We've only found this concentration of quality performing arts in a few other, much larger, cities.

Colorado income tax is a flat 4.63% of Federal Taxable Income, with an exemption for the first $25,000 per person of pension or Social Security or IRA income.

Colorado sales tax varies with locale - currently a 4.1% State tax plus zero up to around 4% local sales tax depending on where a store is located. Within the Golden city limits, we pay a total of 7.1%. Property taxes are relatively low - about a third of what we paid in Brighton (a Rochester suburb), for a similar sized house. We're currently paying abut 0.6% of market value of the property. For those folks over 65 who've owned and occupied their house for 10 years, there is a state-wide senior exemption from property tax, which is 50% of the first $200,000 of actual value.

Property costs in the Denver metro area are high compared to more rural areas. Drive an hour east or west and it's much cheaper. There is a special state tax on motor vehicles, including RV's, which is fairly high on new models and declines with age. Last year, I paid $645 total property tax and registration fee for my 2002 Winnebago Journey 32TD, which probably had a market value of around $80,000 at that time.

Incidentally, Golden has no restrictions about parking RV's on private property. A few of the newer neighborhoods do have homeowners' associations and covenants that restrict RV's. Much of the property near us is unincorporated Jefferson County, which again has no RV parking restrictions. As far as I can tell, it's also ok for me to park my motorhome on the street in front of my house. Our visitors can also park their RV either on the street or in my driveway, and live in it. I've searched the municipal code and see nothing prohibiting such things. We have had visitors park their large RV's in our drive for several days.

What other cities did we consider?

The San Francisco Bay area has great music, scenic beauty, and the kind of activities we like. But the population density and very high property costs are major drawbacks (we lived on the peninsula south of SF for several years, and have visited the area several times since then).
San Diego was our first choice, except that a major reason for being there was to be near the ocean (within a couple of miles), and it turned out that house prices anywhere that near the water were hopelessly out of our range. Probably two to three times as much as we paid in Golden - and Golden is fairly high relative to a lot of other places.
The zone right along the ocean has a relatively constant year-round temperature, moderated by the water. Living in the somewhat more affordable desert foothills to the east of San Diego was much less attractive - too hot in the summer, and occasional freezing in the winter. Helen looked forward to building an elaborate sub-tropical garden along the coast where it has never dropped below freezing in recorded history. I was attracted by the ocean and the reasonably convenient access to the interesting and sparsely populated Anza-Boreggo desert, a 90 minute drive to the east of San Diego.
On the negative side, it's hard to escape from the dense population, with Mexico (which we're not fond of) immediately to the south, Los Angeles to the north, and the ocean to the west. The desert to the east is the *only* escape. Not much music of the type we like. No world-class chamber choir.
We considered Prescott and Flagstaff, AZ. Their high altitude desert location creates a nice climate. But they are too small to have the various big city amenities we want.
We considered the Chapel Hill, NC area. Climate is a bit warm and humid and the music is mediocre - and it's getting crowded.
We considered our own small island in the out islands of the Bahamas. We love sailing in that region, and we could escape to Miami for an occasional culture fix - it's a couple of hours by fast power boat, or an easy flight from Nassau. Helen couldn't quite face that much isolation.
We considered the Puget Sound area - perhaps Sequim or Camano Island. Seattle and Vancouver have a lot of the kind of music we like (northern cities have much more "culture" than southern cities for some reason). We could spend the rest of our life exploring Puget Sound in our boat. Uninhabited mountains are very close. But Helen likes sunshine, and the Puget Sound area is even worse than the Great Lakes area for dull grey winters when you don't see the sun for weeks at a time.
We considered staying in Rochester, or perhaps moving a bit south into the Finger Lakes area. We really like the place. The Finger Lakes are beautiful. Escape to the wilds of Ontario is easy. We have many friends there. But the winters are grey.
We considered the mid-Atlantic coast - perhaps Charleston, SC or Savannah, GA or in between. The ocean and the extensive salt marsh wilds along the coast are attractive to us. The southern culture is not our cup of tea, but we could probably find enclaves of compatible people. The music scene is ok, not great. The climate is a rather warm and humid in summer, but bearable.
We considered Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. Lots of the kind of music we like; Close to wonderful wilderness canoeing; nearby lakes that would offer windsurfing. More sun than Rochester. But the winters are colder and longer.
We considered, generically, the Sierra foothills in California. Nice country, close to skiing and mountain hiking, but a bit far from big-city culture and shopping.
We considered the west coast of Florida, with Bradenton as an example. Good access to boating on the Gulf, good access to big-city amenities, but not much music of the kind we like. Florida is beginning to feel rather crowded, and it's a long way to wilderness (except for the Bahamian Out Islands, which are lovely and sparsely populated). The summer heat and humidity would be difficult to tolerate.

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