When Will Cherry Creek Flood?

Until the Cherry Creek and Chatfield Reservoirs were built, Cherry Creek and the South Platte Rivers, respectively seriously flooded about once every thirty years and often at the same time.

From my days as a journalist, I learned that the Cherry Creek dam was not built to the engineer ordered specifications. It has nonetheless held for decades, so it isn't too bad, but it would probably fail under conditions less extreme than those it was designed to withstand.

We get more extreme weather events now than anyone expected when it was built. We will probably have what until recently was considered at 500 year weather event at least every 50 years now.

The Cherry Creek basin is mostly designed to address this risk, with green spaces and parking garages along most of its extent.

But, there is one place along its edges, where the basin has steep constraining walls, and critical infrastructure is just a few feet above the narrow walled Cherry Creek bike path. That is the Denver Health Emergency Room, Denver proper's only Level One Trauma Center.

I worry about this risk now and then, and we really should build a flood wall to protect it now, before the Cherry Creek dam fails is a "freak not freak" weather event.

The HR Zeitgeist

So, today was my first day at a new job as a senior assistant city attorney with the City and County of Denver.

As usual, as a lawyer, I can't talk about the substance of what I actually do at work, due to attorney-client privilege and confidentiality rules and so on. 

But, as in any big organization (the City and County of Denver has at least 11,000 employees), day one at a new job is not mostly about the substance of the work that day. I probably only did about two hours of actual legal work on my first day. 

Day one at a new job in a big organization is about getting your employee ID, completing employment related paperwork, getting accounts with various workplace software systems set up, learning where the bathrooms and break rooms are located, figuring out the layout of your part of the building so you don't get lost, introducing yourself to your co-workers while trying to match their names to faces in your memory, watching orientation videos, and reading orientation materials.

This wasn't my first rodeo. I'm a middle aged man and I've been through this drill before in my life. But I haven't done it recently, since I've been self-employed and worked in small offices for a couple of decades. 

A couple of things struck me as very different from my prior experiences.

Preparing For Mass Shootings

The last time I went through the "onboarding" drill, in 2004, was five years after Columbine, and three years after 9-11. At the time, we were more concerned about international terrorism in high profile locations, than we were about the era with a never ending wave of school and workplace shootings, even though, in hindsight, that era really began with the Columbine High School shootings in 1991.

On the day of the Columbine shooting, in 1999, I had just recently moved to Denver and lived close to downtown before moving to the Washington Park neighborhood after which this blog is named the next year. I saw the Denver bomb squad's truck rush right by me, sirens blaring. I recall thinking at the time that something really bad must be going down, although I hadn't listened to the news yet that day and didn't know what was going down at the time. The Denver bomb squad truck was headed for Columbine High School. Not much later that day, the news confirmed my suspicions. It was a massacre. Thirteen students and one teacher were killed before the two shooters committed suicide (one died a quarter century later from these injuries, while the others died almost immediately); twenty-three more people were injured (twenty by gunfire) in a spree that lasted 49 minutes, even though a police office had responded within five minutes.

But back in 2004, during my last onboarding to a larger employer, five years after Columbine, our society's response to "active shooter situations" still hadn't really jelled yet.

Before Columbine, police and institutional administrators had doctrines about responding to armed threats that favored the cautious approach appropriate for situations where an armed person had taken multiple people hostage, but wasn't actively shooting anybody. 

After the fact recognition that the institutional and law enforcement response to Columbine had been inadequate, crystalized the recognition that a different response was appropriate in an "active shooter" situation. In an "active shooter" situation, the right approach is to minimize harm by denying the shooter targets, and by boldly doing everything possible to neutralize the threat as quickly as possible. But it took years for a consensus to emerge around the best law enforcement and institutional response to an active shooter situation.

"Lockdown" and "active shooter" drills only started when my children were in early elementary school, in the late aughts. None of my onboarding experiences in 2004 or earlier had imagined the possibility. 

The mostly small law firms that I worked at over the years devised skeletal security plans on an ad hoc basis when there were specific security threats (usually from a client's ex-spouse, or soon to be ex-spouse), like keeping shades drawn to deny someone with a rifle a target in our office, or thinking about escape routes out back doors and how to stall threatening people while everyone was trying to flee.

Fast forward to 2025. Onboarding and HR materials still have the old mainstays. A brief history of the institution you're beginning to work for. A review of various nuts and bolts considerations related to sick days, employee benefits, and other employee policies and procedures. Strong cautioning against sexual harassment.

What is new to me is the new, major focus on how to head off violence in the workplace, and how to react in the event of an active shooter, even though it has been a part of my children's lives for as long as they can remember. There was even once a shootout unrelated to their school, that took place just outside their high school, during which their high school was locked down. 

For me, this hit hard. Unlike my children, this was not something that I had ever been systemically prepared for before. Even in years in the Boy Scouts, with its "be prepared" motto, all of the way to becoming an Eagle Scout, we'd never considered these scenarios. But, this issue was raised in two or three different sessions in my orientation activities today, consuming almost an hour on my first day of work.

This isn't by any means a criticism, even though it was unsettling. This instruction is necessary in our day and age when these kinds of shootings are weekly, if not daily occurrences. There were two school shootings on the same day on September 10, 2025 last week.  And, the instruction works.

At the Evergreen High School shooting in Colorado last week, which involved an active shooter who emptied and reloaded his revolver many times, all over the school, firing dozens if not hundreds of times, and trying to attack students in many different classrooms, only two victims other than the shooter were shot.

One victim was in the school at the time. This victim was a casualty of one of the first shots fired, and was probably one of the intended primary targets of the shooter. He was shot with little or no warning, and until then, no one at the school knew that the shooter had a gun with him that day.

No amount of training about what to do when an active shooting incident starts could have saved this first victim, although someone might have taken action to prevent it from happening in response to the shooter's disturbing social media activity (which his parents appear to have been aware of, at least to some extent, but didn't act upon). The FBI had started investigating the shooter's social media postings in July, but wasn't able to identify who was making them prior to the September 10 shooting.

The other student was shot by the shooter while fleeing, outside the school. This student was probably a target of opportunity after the shooter was thwarted in his attempt to find his other intended targets in the school, and instead shot someone else at random out of frustration, not long before the shooter shot himself. The active shooting episode (as is often the case) was all over before law enforcement could confront the shooter. This second victim was, realistically, the only conceivably preventable casualty that all those drills were not enough to completely save. 

Both of the victims who were shot were initially in critical condition, but have survived for more than five days so far (as of early this evening one victim was in critical but stable condition, and the other victim was in serious, but not critical, condition), as a result of extremely rapid and decisive medical responses once the shooting stopped (or maybe even earlier, the details aren't perfectly clear). The two victims were brought to a specialized trauma center, while receiving emergency care en route, well within the "hour of power" when a serious trauma victim can often be saved. While this is speculation on my part, I suspect that the less seriously wounded victim was probably the second one who was shot while fleeing, and that the distance that this victim put between him or herself and the shooter was probably decisive in preventing that shot from killing this victim.

The only life that wasn't saved was the shooter, who died from his self-inflicted, point-blank, gunshot wound which he intended to be suicidal and which ultimately did cost him his life. But even he survived in critical condition for hours due to the rapid medical response, and the quality of care that a Level One trauma center can provide. 

There were eight hundred or more people in Evergreen High School school at the time the shooting started. But, the active shooter training and lock down drills paid off. The shooter would almost certainly have killed many more people, as the shooters at Columbine did in 1999 in another affluent part of the same suburban Colorado county, if everyone in the school hadn't done what they had learned in their annual drills. 

Evergreen High School's students, teachers, and administrators, almost instantly after the first shots were fired, turned the school into a fortress of locked or barricaded doors. The shooter repeatedly tried to break into classrooms to kill more people, some of whom were probably his intended targets, but he failed. People who couldn't lock themselves into a safe place hid out of sight if they couldn't flee and weren't shot. The rest of the students, including those in a cafeteria near where the shooting started, and some hallways full of high school students, successfully fled to safety purposefully and without hesitation, mostly getting out within a minute or two after the shooting started. They ran far away, beyond the range of the shooter, to safety. 

Everyone who wasn't shot was promptly accounted for, to make sure that there were no victims who were shot, but not found, who needed medical attention.

The world has changed. Twenty-five years ago, an active school or workplace shooting of multiple people was shocking and almost unthinkable. Now, while it is still much less common than other kinds of murders and attempted murders, school and workplace shootings are a routine fact of life that we have accepted as a society (even though many of us urgently want policy reforms to address them), and we prepare for them in much the same way that we prepared for tornados when I was a kid in school, and in much the same way as we prepare for plane crashes in advance of every commercial airline takeoff.

Preparing For High Rise Fires

Another change today was more thorough and vivid instruction from HR on what to do if there is a fire in a high rise building than at any place I've worked before now. 

This is a direct offshoot of the 9-11 attacks in 2001, as well as the fact that I'm working on the 11th floor of a downtown office building.

I don't recall ever even thinking about fire safety when I worked near the top of a high rise office building in Glendale, Colorado from 1999 until the summer of 2001, a few months before 9-11. No one ever even mentioned the possibility.

My office at the time of 9-11 was a single story steel framed building with a brick facade, multiple exits, and a window that could be opened and escaped from in every room, so escaping a fire wasn't a concern there either. And, nobody was worried that our tiny suburban office building, which was also home to a miniature golf course and a drive though coffee kiosk, was a terrorist target. 

This threat wasn't a big deal at the workplace I joined in 2004, the last time I had a thorough onboarding at a new job in a large organization, since our offices were on the second floor of a modern, up to code, sprinkler equipped, three story concrete, steel and glass building in a suburban office park. It also wasn't much of a concern in 2005 when I worked on the first floor of a two story converted Victorian era mansion with a fire escape from the second floor, and many windows in every room from which people inside could safely escape if need be.

I did get a little fire emergency training from 2010 until 2019, when I worked on the 20th floor of a high rise office building in downtown Denver (on the same block as downtown Denver's signature "cash register building"). Within a year of starting to work there, I was appointed to the unpaid position of fire marshal for our little office suite with a peak occupancy of about six people that took up about half a floor of the building. We went through annual drills where we walked down twenty flights of stairs and assembled at our office's appointed regrouping site in front of the Warwick hotel a couple of blocks away. But my duties were communicated to me in a low key manner, face to face, from our previous office fire marshal to me. I served in this role until the office suite's lease ended, and so I never had to pass that hat to anyone else. My subsequent offices were also small and low rise.

But, now I work on the 11th floor of a downtown office building for a large, bureaucratic organization that employs everyone in the building. And, the horrors of people trying to escape the World Trade Center still seem almost as fresh as they did twenty-four years ago, even though the threat of foreign terrorism has slipped to the back of our consciousness. So, this was, rightfully, a significant focus in our orientation, even though it was also unsettling.

Midweek Rants And Observations

* It was 101º F today in Denver. Fortunately, we have a brand new swamp cooler, so this is survivable. I'm honestly a little surprised that our power stayed on. We've had two power outs for more than an hour each on hot afternoons in the last few weeks.

* My office suite is having a potluck next week. There was a sign up sheet for names and what you are bringing. A majority of people who signed up said they were bringing "TBD". Suck it up my office neighbors. Commit to something.

* Why does it take the City of Denver weeks for a deed that is recorded and digitally processed by the Clerk & Recorder's office weeks to be reflected in the Assessor's Office records?

* A recent new report stated:

Church stands by call to execute gay people: “I will not apologize for preaching the Word of God.”: A men's night sermon said gay people should "blow yourself in the back of the head."

Just what I would expect a Baptist church in Indiana to say. The most vile people in America are Christians.

"Not all Christians are this bad" you say? Then why aren't they picketing outside the steps of this church for heresy and blasphemy? It isn't my place to do that. Not my monkeys, not my circus. But it is hard to take any Christians seriously when this isn't the instant and vigorous response of Christians who say they're wrong.

* There is a tornado warning in Washington D.C. right now. WTF?

* There are too many crazy people in this country, and not just in the White House.

A group that calls itself an anti-government militia told News 9 it’s “absolutely” targeting Oklahoma weather radars, claiming they control the weather. The warning comes just days after a vandal knocked out News 9’s live radar.

* I don't doubt for a minute that the allegations of this complaint, which was later dismissed (not on the merits), were true:

* The people who leave anti-immigration comments on social media posts and news story (and there are lots of them) are among the most vile people you'll see on the Internet. These people would have been pro-Holocaust, pro-segregation, pro-slavery, and pro-witch burning.

It is a reminder that the evil that is Donald Trump runs deep. There are there millions, if not tens of millions of these monsters in the United States.

Stupid hurts people. But this level of vile goes far beyond that. They are as bad as the most culpable violent criminals in our prisons. Where do these people come from? What can we do about them?

* It just doesn't stop.

* Anti-aging, life extension drugs are a real possibility, if not in my lifetime, in the lives of my children.

A simple monthly injection allows mice to live 25% longer and free from diseases: The strategy — the injection of a simple antibody — has already begun to be tested in humans in an attempt to cure age-related illnesses.

* The Texas floods have are already the fourth most deadly floods in Texas history. There are still 161 people missing, so they could easily rise to #2, and floods in San Antonio are ongoing.

 

Most of these deaths were preventable. The part of Texas hit has consistently had the highest concentration of flood deaths in the United States since the 1930s. State and local officials rejected a proposal in 2017, in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, to install flood detection devices and warning sirens but weren't willing to spend the money to do so. Trump's cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service impaired the warning that people at risk in the flood received. Trump gutted FEMA which only started to take action to help 72 hours after the floods when it was already too late (the U.S. Coast Guard, in fairness, stepped in anyway and saved about 165 lives at the insistence of a brave rookie over the indifference and waffling of his supervisors). The Texas Governor and its top emergency response official have urged Trump to cut or eliminate FEMA.

* Gun homicides are down, but gun suicides have reached a record high.

The CDC reports 27,300 gun suicides in 2023, constituting 58% of all gun deaths, a record high. Wyoming led the nation with about 19.9 gun suicide deaths per 100,000 residents — nearly 10 times the rate of Massachusetts, which had the lowest at about 2.1 per 100,000.

Gun homicides fell for the second year in a row, dropping from 20,958 in 2021 to 19,651 in 2022 and 17,927 in 2023. Despite the decline, the 2023 total ranks as the fifth highest on record for gun homicides.

Residential HVAC Economics And Environmental Considerations

I live in a 100 years old house in central Denver with natural gas boiler driven steam heat radiators (the steam heat boiler was originally coal fired, which is not an option now, then converted to gas, and then replaced) and a swamp cooler. (I'm looking at this now because my 24 year old swamp cooler is replaced for the first time today.)

Is this the best choice from a cost perspective? 

Yes.

Is this the best choice for the environment?

Probably, although a heat pump is quite competitive from an environmental perspective and will grow more attractive as the power grid in Colorado becomes greener over the next decade or two.

Cooling

In Denver, swamp coolers (a.k.a. evaporative coolers) generally cost less to operate than heat pumps, especially during the cooling season, in part, because Denver's humidity in the summer is low. Swamp coolers use significantly less electricity than air conditioners, often saving 60-80% on energy costs. Heat pumps are about 50% more efficient than central air conditioners, but swamp coolers still draw 20% to 40% less electricity than heat pumps. See here and here. All three cooling costs are powered by electricity, so the relative energy costs are indifferent to the price of electricity.

Swamp coolers do use some water than heat pumps and central AC systems don't use. But this is pretty negligible in terms of the cost of well under a dollar a month (you pay for tap water at prices on the order of a few dollars per 10,000 gallons, and a swamp cooler uses less than 900 gallons a month and is only operating about five months a year, so the water costs are less than $3 per year). This is also pretty negligible in terms of the swamp cooler's share of total water consumption. In contrast, water for landscaping uses about half of our water consumption despite the fact that we have only a couple hundred square feet of lawn.

The maintenance costs of a swamp cooler are a little bit greater than for central air conditioning and heat pumps, however, because they have to be started up every spring, and shut down every autumn (filter replacement costs are comparable for central air condition and swamp coolers), but this can be a DIY maintenance job if you are up for it, and the costs is significantly smaller than the energy cost savings involved.

Also, a swamp cooler is much simpler and less expensive to repair than an air conditioner or heat pump because it is mechanically simpler. A swamp cooler has one simple electric motor that runs a fan, and the water flow is controlled by a float system similar to one in a residential flush toilet. A broken swamp cooler take much less time, much less skill, and much less expensive parts to fix than a broken air conditioner or heat pump. Higher end and newer swamp coolers are also more resistant to rust than older models.

And, the up front installation cost of a swamp cooler is lower than the installation cost of an air conditioner or heat pump, even without utility or government incentives, although rebates from Xcel Energy to encourage swamp cooler use improve this comparison.

A heat pump or central AC can reduce temperatures a bit more than a swamp cooler does. But this only matters at all for maybe the ten or twelve hottest days each year, and even then, with a good quality swamp cooler like the one we are having installed, the difference is tolerable and isn't huge. And, the humidifying effects of a swamp cooler also make a home more comfortable in the very dry, almost high desert conditions of Denver summers, relative to air conditioning or a heat pump, once you get used to it. Both a swamp cooler and central air conditioning do suck in the sometimes polluted outdoor air into the house on low air quality days which we get plenty of in Denver in the summer. But a swamp cooler does a better job of filtering that air than a typical central air conditioning filter does.

Environmentally, apart from energy costs, swamp coolers are also better, because they don't need the chemical fluids required for heat pumps or central AC to move heat outdoors (or to suck subsurface cool temperatures into your home).

Heating

In Denver, a gas boiler steam heat system is about 25% cheaper in fuel costs (at current natural gas and electrical prices from Xcel Energy which is about $1.26 per therm for natural gas and 20 centers per KwH for electricity) than a geothermal heat pump. See this calculator. In fact, this is the least expensive heating option of all of the possible alternatives, including gas forced air furnaces, wood stoves, pellet stoves, heat pumps, heating oil, kerosene, propane, or electric baseboard heating.

A couple of years ago, we replaced our old natural gas boiler (which had been converted from the original one hundred year old coal fired boiler), which is much smaller, is easier to operate and maintain, and is slightly more efficient, than our old one. It is much less expensive to replace a natural gas boiler for an existing steam heat system than it is to install a new heat pump system of any kind in a building that previously had a steam heat radiator system. I suspect that it would also be cheaper in new construction, but the installation cost advantage in new construction would be much less decisive.

Heat pump installation costs also have to be compared to the combined installation cost of both the cooling system and the heating system, because it does both jobs. And, in new construction for a new subdivision, using a heat pump and an electric water heater, instead of natural gas heat and other natural gas appliances and water heaters, avoids the substantial costs of building a subdivision with deeply buried natural gas pipelines serving each home. So, again, when building new construction homes in new subdivisions, the installation cost economics for heat pumps v. natural gas heating are much different than they are with existing construction in which every home is already served by natural gas pipelines.

The steam heat boiler does consume water that the heat pump or a gas forced air furnace would not (although many gas forced air furnaces have a humidifier built in that uses considerably more water than a steam heat boiler per year), but this too is negligible in both cost (less than a dollar per year) and the amount of tap water used (probably less than 90 gallons a year), since it is an almost closed system that recycles the water and only loses a little bit each cycle to evaporation at the boiler point. Our steam heat boiler has a water filter that needs to be replaced twice a year (because a lot of our pipes are old and made of galvanized steel and have some rust in them) at a price comparable to the cost of an air filter for a gas forced air furnace (which is not necessary in a heat pump) but this is also negligible compared to the differences in energy costs.

In terms of the in home results, radiator based steam heat is much nicer than gas forced air heat, because it doesn't dry out the air (an issue that a built in humidifier only partially addresses) and doesn't drag polluted outdoor air into the house on poor air quality days which Denver has plenty of, even in the winter.

Historically, heat pumps have been used primarily in the South in the U.S., where high humidity during long hot summers makes evaporative coolers useless in the summer so homes need either air conditioning or a heat pump to be comfortable in the summer, where it doesn't get that cold in the winter so the amount of heating needed is modest enough that infrastructure costs necessary for natural gas or heating oil based heating systems didn't make sense, and when heat pumps were less effective than they are today at heating homes in the winter. Since the infrastructure and installation costs of central air conditioning and a heat pump are similar (although geothermal heat pumps are a bit more expensive to install than central air conditioning), the marginal cost of a heat pump over the central air conditioning that you would otherwise need in the South was modest (technologically a heat pump is basically an air conditioner that you can run backwards), it made sense there to heat homes with a heat pump. Also, since the amount of heating degree days per year in the South is pretty modest, the greater summer cooling efficiency of a heat pump relative to central air conditioning pretty much pays for the energy costs of providing heat on infrequent and mild winter days in the South. And, since the amount of energy needed for fuel for the winter for a heat pump in the winter in the South is pretty modest, saving a little money with a cheaper fuel was relatively less important than saving money by reducing the installation costs and having more energy efficient summer cooling.

Modern heat pumps, especially geothermal heat pumps, that are well suited to colder climates and designed for them, are now widely available. But this wasn't the cost effective option when Northeastern homes overwhelmingly were heated with heating oil, and Midwestern homes and western homes in places with cooler climates were overwhelmingly heated with natural gas. And, as noted above, the economics of heat pumps are a lot more favorable in new build construction, especially in new subdivisions that dispense with creating natural gas pipelines to every home, than they are in homes where the old heating and cooling system needs to be torn out and replaced by a new heat pump (especially in homes with boiler based heat rather than forced air heating and cooling ducts).

Environmentally, at this point, it is a bit of a wash.

Natural gas in a home boiler burns almost as efficiently and cleanly as in a utility scale natural gas power plant (and is more efficient and less polluting at turning natural gas into heat because it doesn't lose energy by converting heat to electricity, losing electricity in transmission lines, and converting electricity back to heat again). And, natural gas creates much less air pollution than coal or firewood or pellets or propane or kerosene or heating oil in a home boiler, and creates less air pollution per unit of energy used than a utility scale coal fired electrical power plant.

But the air pollution caused by generating the electricity in the grid, in part from coal, and less efficient (for heat production) natural gas, is offset by the fact that about 45% of the electricity in the grid comes from hydroelectric, solar, and wind power in Colorado.

Natural gas also creates toxic pollution in the ground in the extraction process (a significant share of which comes from fracking), and that toxic extraction process is used to provide 100% of the fuel for a home natural gas boiler, but only less than half of the fuel for the power grid. But, the mining done to extract the coal that is the source of a still significant share of the electricity in the Colorado power grid, is much more toxic and creates far more harms to workers and the public from the extraction process alone (ignoring the air pollution) than natural gas extraction does (even considering the harms of fracking).

As more of Colorado's power grid comes from renewables, and less of it comes from natural gas, and coal is eventually virtually eliminated as a source of electricity for the Colorado power grid, electricity will eventually be greener than natural gas, but this will still be partially offset because a home boiler still generates heat with less energy than the power plant generating the energy needed for a heat pump does. So, even as the grid gets cleaner and tilts a little more in favor of heat pumps relative to a natural gas boiler, the environmental difference is still going to be pretty modest.

Home Based Solar Power Considered

Last year we got a detailed bid for the solar power system that our particular home could support in terms of power generation capacity and cost.

In terms of the cost of the electricity, it could have met almost 100% of our current electrical demand at a cost that would be about the same as buying electricity from Xcel Energy at the prices we are paying for electricity now, over the next twenty years (with substantial Xcel energy rebates and government tax credits). So, this wouldn't have changed the cost calculus discussed above, although having our own solar power with some sort of battery storage would have given us a hedge against rising electricity prices from Xcel over time.

But, given the rapid rate at which solar panel prices are falling, and the rapid improvements that are in the works in battery technology, it might be cheaper to get a solar power/battery system and the product might have better quality a decade or so from now, even without rebates and tax credits.

And, the fact that our house is a hundred years old and has roof framing that is almost surely not up to current building code standards was also a consideration. The rooftop solar power installation might have disturbed that by putting more of a burden on the roof or just damaging the existing roof framing in the process in a manner that in a worse case scenario might have required a major structural repair job to bring our roof framing up to current building code standards, in a half duplex where that kind of repair would also have to involve the owner of the other half of the duplex.

Solar power would have insulated us from temporary disruptions in our electrical service from Xcel (which typically range from a few minutes to a couple of hours and happen at most two or three times a year, with outages of more than a couple of minutes only once every few years).

It would have been environmentally cleaner, of course to get 100% of our electricity (on average) from solar power, although the environmental benefit of this would be reduced over the next couple of decades as the Colorado power grid gets greener.

If we were building this home new at this time, we would probably have opted for solar power, particularly if it was in a new subdivision that didn't have natural gas pipelines in place to every home. But as this stand, the benefit of getting rooftop solar power was not decisive enough for us to justify the time, trouble, and disruption to our lives in connection with the installation work and any possible follow roof repair work that might be needed, to justify making the change now.

Personal Reflections

* This year I'm going to be a sag wagon husband, taking my wife to her Horsetooth Half-Marathon in Fort Collins in April (one of the most difficult half-marathons there is, due to extreme elevation changes in the course) and to the New York City Marathon in November. As I write this post, my wife is doing an 18.5 mile training run for the 13.1 mile Horsetooth race.

* This year, our house which we bought twenty-five years ago turns 100 years old. We've been generally good stewards of it. Its fair market value is more than triple what it was when bought it. But our twenty-five year old swamp cooler is due to be replaced, so we'll do that this spring. I'll be getting bids next week. We're suffering from renovation and repair fatigue, however, after several major projects, so we may pause that, apart from landscaping (to eventually kill the lawn and replace a badly weather damaged back patio gazebo), for a while.

* We could find ways to pay off our small mortgage faster than it is scheduled to be paid off with increased principal payments, if we felt an urgent need to do so. But why waste an ability to borrow money at a 3.625% fixed rate with tax deductible interest that helps our credit rating, while inflation eats away at the inflation adjusted value of the loan principal every year? The money that would be used to pay off the loan can be invested instead for better returns, even in very safe bond investments (or even if it were in high return FDIC guaranteed CDs).

* We've received our compost bin as part of a new City of Denver program that has finally come into being. It takes a little getting used to in daily life to split waste into three categories instead of two and we've thrown out some waste that should be composted. But, we'll get the hang of it. The City also didn't pick it up the first time we put it out on a collection day for some reason.

* In contrast, we've pretty much gotten used to the new policy of having to bring reusable bags to the grocery store or pay a 10 cents per disposable bag tax on that formerly free service.

* One of my two cars has been unofficially the kids car for a long time, but this year, we will officially be a one car household as title to our kid's car is passed down to the next generation. 

* My Nissan Juke will hit 60,000 miles right around the tenth anniversary of purchasing it this year and is in pretty much perfect condition, except for some cosmetic hail damage that we don't plan on fixing. 

* The only thing the Juke lacks that I would actively like to have is a blind spot detector. I wonder how hard it is to add one on an aftermarket basis. 

* If I drove in the mountains more, I'd get snow tires, as the Juke is otherwise a perfect snow car. But I don't drive in the mountains all that much, and Denver doesn't get enough snow to justify snow tires, in lieu of all weather tires with a decent tread.

* My plan is to replace my Juke with an EV (not a Tesla) sometime after the next generation of far superior solid state batteries enter the market, the Trump tariffs have been repealed, and the national charging network is better, perhaps five to ten years from now. This will require emptying the garage (which currently has so much stuff stored there that there is no room for a car), moving the garage stuff to a new backyard shed, and installing an EV vehicle charger (which Denver's building codes now require in new garages, I've heard). The new EV could very well end up being my last car. 

* Incidentally, even though Nissan sells decent enough EVs, it's looking like there's a good chance that Nissan won't exist anymore by the time my next car purchase rolls around. The company is in dire straights, and a contemplated merger with Honda has apparently fallen through.

* Also vaguely car related, I have dropped SiriusXM, which my car is equipped to receive. I almost always listen to Spotify using Bluetooth to my cell phone instead when I'm out and about, and don't drive enough in places with no cell phone access to justify keeping it. 

* My generation has seen vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, iPods, videocassettes, large format video disks, DVDs, 5.25" floppy disks, 3.5" floppy disks, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, hard drives with actual disks in them, and analog broadcast television all come and go (we were too young to really experience 8-track tapes). We have seen digital broadcast television, digital radio, dead tree format newspapers and magazines, large movie theaters, satellite TV (first with large dishes and then with smaller ones), short wave radio, land line phones, pay phones, pagers, slow speed intercity passenger rail, paper checks, personal letters, "dumb" Blackberries and flip phones, and home yogurt makers, lose their shine too. Denmark's Post Office is discontinuing letter delivery at the end of this year and taking away all of its post boxes. Analog FM and AM radio are also just dying a slow and gradual death (especially AM radio). Wrist watches used to be a daily necessity and are now jewelry and a fitness tracking device. Vinyl records are actually coming back, but it's a niche thing that probably won't get big. We saw supersonic commercial flight come and go, but it looks like it will return soon, beyond a niche. So, seeing satellite radio start to lose its relevance too isn't all that shocking.

The story of AM radio over the last 50 years has been a transition from being the dominant form of audio entertainment for all age groups to being almost non-existent to the youngest demographic groups. Among persons aged 12–24, AM accounts for only 4% of listening, while FM accounts for 96%. Among persons aged 25–34, AM accounts for only 9% of listening, while FM accounts for 91%. The median age of listeners to the AM band is 57 years old, a full generation older than the median age of FM listeners.

From a 2009 Federal Communication Commission report (via Wikipedia). A person who was a median aged AM radio listener in 2009 is now 73 years old. Baby Boomers are between the ages of 61 and 79 in the year 2025. As of 2024, the average AM and FM radio listener combined is 57 years old, and 62% of all AM and FM radio listeners combined are 55 years old or older. AM/FM radio formats that were historically mostly AM like talk radio and religious programming, have the oldest listeners (although Spanish language radio formats which were also historically AM dominated have younger than average listeners, and country music formats are only a little older than that).

* I've also decide not to renew my digital Washington Post subscription this month, even though I've read it regularly since college, because the editorial interference of Jeff Bezos in the paper is undermining the quality of the product. I'll probably remove it from the sidebar of this blog as well.

* Today is the start of daylight savings time. I would eliminate it and have standard time all year round if I could. There is nothing wrong with changing the time that businesses and governments open and close during the course of the year if particular businesses and governments want to change that on a seasonal basis.

* My new office, across the street from Shotgun Willies, is so far a success. At a recent deposition I hosted there, that went smoothy from a logistics perspective, opposing counsel and her paralegal were plotting and scheming about how to get a coffee maker a nice as mine for themselves.

* Evidencing my progressing older age, I got a colonoscopy last month. It went fine and I don't have cancer, but it isn't something that I'm looking forward to the next time it is scheduled, a few years from now. The pre-procedure purging is harrowing.

* In very positive news, they are on the brink of introducing a new and affordable screening test for pancreatic cancer, which was the main cause of death of my father, his brother, and two of my not related by blood aunts. If there is a genetic risk factor, my brother and I probably have it, and we will probably live to benefit from this screening test. In even more positive news, they are close to being able to provide a pancreatic cancer "vaccine" that would prevent some subtypes of pancreatic cancer, although this isn't quite as imminent.

* It is a relief that both of our children have finished college, secured good jobs in the tech sector, established themselves in their own apartments, and found good relationships with significant others. 

* It would be nice if they could buy homes for themselves, but the housing market is the toughest for buyers that it has been in at least thirty-years right now, due to a surge in mortgage interest rates, while home prices mostly remain sticky at prices established when mortgage interest rates (and hence home affordability) were half what they are now.

* We've very much enjoyed being able to see our children's significant others this year. We'd welcome their upgrades to official son-in-law and daughter-in-law status, but that's up to the kids to decide. We are proud of the progress that our daughter's boyfriend has made toward becoming a Chartered Financial Analyst®, and are excited about our son's girlfriend's first half-marathon in the District of Columbia next weekend that she is just finishing her training to prepare to run.

* My official running competitions have been limited to 1 mile fun runs and 0.5 km races with donuts at the half-way mark. 

* I'm more ambivalent about my daughter's new dog, Oakley, because, as most people who know me are aware, I'm not a dog person. But, I'm learning to tolerate him.

* Both my nephew and the daughter of a dear friend of the family are applying to colleges this year. They have gotten out all of their applications, and have received acceptances and rejections from some schools so far. Even if none of them remaining responses are acceptances, they each have decent options. Over the next month or so, they'll each hear from some remaining schools that haven't given them an answer so far and they'll make their big decisions. For different reasons, neither will be going to schools in red states.

* Next year will be senior year for both of my nieces, so we'll get to watch the process of them deciding what to do after high school again next year as well, from front row seats. My brother and his wife will probably move to a different home in the Boston metro area once they become empty nesters.

* On July 3, 2025, less than four months from now, this blog will be 20 years old.

Stray Thoughts

* The U.S. does a horrible job of using contraflow (i.e. having major highway have some lanes run in the opposite direction to accommodate the needs of people evacuating) when it is appropriate for things like people evacuating from Hurricane Milton in Florida. It also greatly underuses this tool to manage day to day shifts in the direction of traffic in and out of central cities with commuters. This should be standard operating procedure in both cases and would not be expensive. It could save hundreds of lives a year and get people where they needed to be much faster with existing infrastructure.

* Similarly, the National Guard underinvests in resources for evacuating people from natural disasters and places with civil unrest, despite the fact that this is one of its core missions. Amphibious all terrain buses with light armor sufficient to deal with debris and distant civilian small arms fire, for example, is an asset almost every National Guard could use.

Image from here.

Image from here.

* Search and rescue drones for the National Guard (e.g. small ones like the one in the link that can go into small spaces that may be unsafe) should also receive more funding.

* Self-righting boats are cool. They are mostly used as lifeboats. Being on a cruise ship in the direct path of a Category 5 Hurricane on the other hand, is terrifying.

* There is a $4000 device that prevents people from dying while they are trapped in a flood of grain in grain elevators. It should be much more widely used.

* Poor training and tactics for responding to people with mental health crises or who are suicidal, who don't have firearms, is one of the biggest unnecessary source of deaths caused by police. Colorado Springs police officers provided us with an example of this just after midnight this morning.

* For a lot of reasons, I favor abolishing municipal courts in Colorado. Some abuses in Pueblo illustrate the problem.

* The U.S. economy is extremely healthy. Crime is down dramatically to the lowest levels since 1969. We are not at war for the first time in more than twenty years. The fundamentals couldn't be better. This should not be a close election.

* Denver Ballot Issue 309 is probably a constitutional taking as it would shut down the sole slaughter house in Denver, potentially exposing the City and County of Denver to hundreds of millions of dollars of inverse condemnation liability.

* The U.K. has conceded it is not sovereign over Diego Garcia, while retaining its military base there.

* The U.S. Navy recently rescued some civilian Iranian mariners who were in distress.

the brand-new destroyer received a fresh tasking: deter aggression and protect “the free flow of commerce” in the waters of the Middle East. While there, the crew heard an emergency call. “A distressed mariner is a distressed mariner,” Cmdr. Kevin Dore, the commander of the Inouye, said Friday after his ship and crew tied up at their homeport here. “If an emergency like that happens, it is ‘Get there as fast as you can and do everything you can’ to save what, in this case, was two distressed mariners who happened to be Iranian.” The crew sent search-and-rescue swimmers out in a small boat, rescued the mariners, and gave them medical assistance.

* Quality pre-school is more beneficial to a child when the child's peers in later grades also went to quality pre-schools. When the child's peers in later grades didn't receive the same quality pre-school, the benefits of quality pre-schooling "fade out."

* Wars involving Israel are ongoing a year after October 7, 2023. It is simultaneously fighting in Gaza against Hamas, against the Houthis of Yemen, against Iranian missile strikes, and against Hezbollah in Lebanon. It's military is remarkably effective on all fronts and it is stopping something like 99% of inbound missiles and drones. It is fighting lower key fights against Hamas in the West Bank. Despite the devastation in Gaza, Hamas was still firing missiles at Israel this week.

* Russia has been clamping down on reproductive rights and now bans even talking about why someone might want to not have kids at all. 

* Seriously underwater mortgages are, surprisingly, most common in places that don't have particularly high housing prices.

* This could be true:

* Fewer high school and college students are also working than there were thirty years ago.

* A downtown Denver high rise office building recently sold for 80% less than it was purchased for. Vacancy rates in downtown high rise office buildings are at record highs in most major U.S. cities, mostly due to the rise of remote work that reached a tipping point during the pandemic.

After The Civil War, Deplorable Confederates Infected Other Places

The Union should have done more to crush the Confederacy than it did during Reconstruction.

This paper shows how white migration out of the postbellum South diffused and entrenched Confederate culture across the United States at a critical juncture of westward expansion and postwar reconciliation. These migrants laid the groundwork for Confederate symbols and racial norms to become pervasive nationally in the early 20th century. Occupying positions of authority, former slaveholders played an outsized role in this process. Beyond memorializing the Confederacy, migrants exacerbated racial violence, boosted novel forms of exclusion, and compounded Black disadvantage outside the South. Moving West, former Confederates had larger effects in frontier communities lacking established culture and institutions. Over time, they continued to transmit norms to their children and non-Southern neighbors. The diaspora legacy persists over the long run, shaping racial inequities in labor, housing, and policing. Together, our findings offer a new perspective on migration, elite influence, and the interplay between culture and institutions in the nation-building process.

Samuel Bazzi, Andreas Ferrar, Martin Fiszbein, Thomas P. Pearson, and Patrick A. Testa, a new NBER working paper.

For example, in the post-Civil War era, Colorado politics were dominated by the KKK.

Good Job Denver Nuggets!

The NBA pro basketball team, the Denver Nuggets, my hometown team, is the best pro basketball team in the U.S. after winning the NBA finals yesterday. Good for them, I guess. This is the first time it has made it to the finals at all in the history of the franchise.

In 2022, our pro hockey team, the Colorado Avalanche won the Stanley Cup (also in finals against a Florida team). It also won two previous Stanley Cups.

Our football team, the Denver Broncos, has won the Super Bowl three times.

Our baseball team, the Colorado Rockies, made it to the World Series once, but has never won.

Our pro-soccer team, the Colorado Rapids, and our pro-lacrosse team, the Colorado Mammoth, have, as far as I know, never made it to a national final.

Crime And City Living

A thirty-four year old man was killed yesterday a couple of blocks from my daughter's home in a recently designated historic neighborhood that is walking distance from Denver's downtown Auraria campus. 

This is the second murder within a stone's throw of her home since she moved in. Like the last one, it was swiftly solved, but a quick arrest doesn't bring the dead back, or erase the unease the murders leave behind.

This burglar and murderer who was already wanted on outstanding warrants was caught with the latest technology - a traffic camera feed and iPhone tracking, as well as more old school gumshoe work, and the weapon used, a metal bar, was also old school. He was caught to the victim's house keys in hand.

The previous murder in the neighborhood involved two girls, probably with gang connections, who were fighting downtown and reconvened to the park. A bystander who tried to intervene was shot and killed by one of the girl's boyfriends.

Crime, serious and petty, is a reality of daily life in a major city.

There have been three shootings near East High School, which is almost exactly half a mile from my office.

A couple of years ago, a man went on a murder spree that started about four blocks from my office, killed a passing acquaintance of my wife on South Broadway in the middle, shortly before its end resulted in the death of a clerk at a hotel where I'd met a friend from out of town a few months earlier.

A few months before that, some drunks drove their car into a light pole in the alley behind my office and took out power to the entire block for a day. They were arrested on the spot barely conscious in the car.

I was having breakfast at a fairly nice restaurant a couple blocks from my office, maybe a year ago, when a schizophrenic homeless man barged in and started trying to wreck havoc, knocking things to the floor, before a couple employees and a patron in an elegantly executed maneuver managed to remove him from the premises and send him on his way.

It barely even counts as crime, but I routine drive by one to three homeless encampments going to or from work, or on errands elsewhere around town.

The most serious incident my family has personally experienced was a few years ago when I was robbed by two men at gunpoint in front of my home who then fled in a beat up late model car. I stayed cool and cooperated with them, and it honestly wasn't even a lasting PSTD class trauma.  I called the police ands they came, but no one was caught and there wasn't much of an investigation.

They took my laptop, my cell phone, and my wallet. In the end, it was inconvenient, but not life altering. Almost all of the files on my laptop were backed up in the cloud and a quick call from my wife's phone to my assistant made it possible for him to adopt new passwords that made it impossible for any of the data to be accessed even if someone could breach the password to the laptop itself. He also quickly alerted my credit card companies to the theft and no unauthorized charges were made. It took a couple of weeks to replace my ID and credit cards which was particularly inconvenient because I had to be on a trip for which I needed not just an ID for airport security, for which I could use my passport at home, but a driver's license to rent a car. I'd also had about $100 in cash and an unfilled pharmacy prescription in my wallet. The cash was a total loss, but I managed to find the prescription, wrapped around a couple of discarded meth prescriptions in a public trash can a couple of blocks away, the next day. The monetary loss was sufficiently marginal that I didn't make an insurance claim. While they weren't caught for this mid-level felony, I'm sure that within a few years that the perpetrators ended up in prison for something, OD'd, or killed.

Other incidents of crime were far more mild. A locked bicycle was stolen off of our front porch. A stroller we were no longer using was stolen from our garage when the garage door was left open once. My car parked on the street has been broken into several times with a handful of items of trivial value like spare change, a pocket knife, a disposable lighter, and a bottle of ibuprofen were stolen although my musical tastes were sufficiently unfashionable that they didn't steal my CDs.

I've had a couple of instances of authorized credit card charges. One was a set of recurring false charges probably at a gas station I used to frequent when I worked in Wheat Ridge that I didn't even notice until I started working in the Denver Tech Center on the other side of town but kept seeing charges from a gas station I no longer used. The other was a string of expensive appliances purchased from big box home supply stores in Houston, Texas while I was several states away and knew no one there. Both were reversed without much trouble when I called attention to them and the problem didn't recur.

Beyond that it's been nothing more serious than littering and dogs pooping on my lawn without the owner picking it up, and near misses with cars violating traffic laws from cutting me off on the highway or a roundabout when they were supposed to yield, to nearly being hit by someone running a red light, to honking my horn at someone driving the wrong way on a one way street towards me.

My partner in my law firm, who also lived just a few blocks away from me, experienced a couple of home burglaries.

Still, it's survivable.

In the practice of law itself, it isn't usually quite so personal. 

Mostly, I routinely dealt with cases of major fraud and embezzlement. Economically, these cases, often involving hundreds of thousands to many millions of dollars of losses, have been the most serious. But white collar crime simply isn't as traumatic of violent and physical blue collar crime.

I have, however, worked on a couple of wrongful death cases involving homicides (which honestly are easier on the stomach than negligence based personal injury cases because you don't have to delve into the gory medical details of the horrific injuries). There have also been several cases involving the multiple legal facets that can flow from sexual assaults involving people who know each other, domestic violence, and child abuse, from restraining orders to custody to claims for money damages.

There have also been a number of cases of more mundane thefts from probate estates, the most notable of which involved a widow whose late husband had rented heavy construction equipment that his employees misappropriated a dozen of after his death. 

Finally, there have been a few cases of on the job potential threats of violence from people connected to cases we are involved in, the most notable of which happened in Grand Junction, Colorado, where I had to deal with a stalker ex-husband who had followed his wife and our of our attorneys back to our offices after a hearing, while the client, the attorney, and rest of the employees of the office fled out the back door to hide until the police arrived. The attorney involved, a former domestic relations magistrate, took the risk very seriously because she and her law clerk had been shot outside the Mesa County Courthouse by a disgruntled husband in a divorce case after a hearing.

Precipitation In Denver In 2022

The year 2022 was drier than normal in Denver, but not a record setting drought year either. There was rain in the forecast for today, but it doesn't appear to have happened. The years 2020, 2018 and 2006, for example, were much drier with under 9 inches but more than 8 inches of moisture in each of these years. The year 2002 had 7.48 inches.

COVID Stalls Denver's Population Growth

Denver, despite being landlocked, has added 158,173 people in the last fifteen years. Residential rents and home prices have gone up dramatically, as new housing supply has lagged behind demand, although a disproportionate share of metropolitan Denver's new housing starts in the past fifteen years have been in Denver proper, year after year.

The combined efforts of a pandemic and these rising housing prices finally hit a breaking point, however between July 2020 and early 2021, when many people nationwide left high cost of living cities to live with family and work and study remotely during the pandemic. 

But even this only rolled back growth by one year in Denver (thankfully, after the 2020 census data that was used for redistricting was complete by then), and the metro area as a whole was merely flat, growing by 0.02%. Housing construction has continued full tilt, heavily favoring luxury rentals, so while the "for sale" inventory in the Denver real estate market remains extremely tight, we may be due for a brief plateau in housing prices.

Denver had quite the run, experiencing a full 15 years of uninterrupted population growth. The pandemic has reversed the trend — or at least paused it.

The latest census estimates show that the city was among many nationally that saw more people move out than move in between mid-2020 and mid-2021. That happened — especially in higher-cost cities — while the pandemic was scrambling many aspects of work and life, raising the possibility that the new dynamics will be temporary, experts say. 

. . .

Denver’s population ended up at an estimated 711,463 as of July 1, according to new county population estimates released late last month by the U.S. Census Bureau. That was down 6,167, or 0.9%, from mid-2020. The decline reversed most of Denver’s entire prior-year population gain.

. . .

In just a couple of years, Denver, which is both a city and county, went from adding more people by number than any other Colorado county to losing the most of any county in the state last year. It wasn’t alone, with some metro suburban counties also showing declines during the year ending July 1.

All of it added up to a stagnating of metro Denver’s longstanding rapid population growth. The seven-county metro area’s population stood at an estimated 3.2 million, an increase of just 683 people, according to a Denver Post analysis.

But . . . demographers say there are many reasons to think the declines experienced by Denver and some of the nation’s largest urban areas — including New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco — will be short lived. . . . 

Denver’s last population decline occurred in mid-2005. Then, from 2005 through 2020, the city’s population grew from 559,459 to 717,632 — an increase of 28.3%[.] . . .

Colorado as a whole saw an increase in residents in the new estimates, adding an estimated 27,761 to eclipse 5.8 million.

El Paso County, home to Colorado Springs, grew by 0.8% to an estimated 737,867 as of July 1. It remains the state’s most populous county, ahead of Denver.

In the Denver area, other metro counties were a mixed bag. Jefferson, Boulder and Arapahoe counties lost population slightly — all by less than Denver, percentage-wise — during the year ending July 1. Adams and Broomfield counties grew slightly, while Douglas County grew by 2.5%, or nearly 9,000 people — the largest numerical increase in the state last year. . . . Denver proper’s loss mostly was due to residents moving to other places in Colorado or out of state, with nearly 9,000 more people leaving than arriving. Some of that was offset by a net natural increase, with births outpacing deaths by about 2,700.

Nationally, most counties had the opposite of Denver’s experience. Most saw net increases from migration, but when it came to natural population changes, more than 73% recorded more deaths than births due to COVID-19 and other factors.

From the Denver Post. 

Denver's Tight Housing Market

It's a seller's market in Denver's housing market right now. 

There were 486 active real estate listings in Denver yesterday, including lots and mobile homes, according to a friend of mine who follows these things. This is down from the start of 2022 when there were only 1,477 active properties on the market in the Denver (968 single family homes and 509 condos), which is 11,175 fewer houses on the market than usual.

Denver's population was 715,522 at the 2020 United States census, a 19.22% increase since the 2010 United States census. The average household size in Denver is 2.29 people. Denver has about 312,455 households in all, and Denver's demand for home went up by 50,372 homes in the last decade, on average, 5037 new households per year.

About 20% of people in Denver, in a typical year, live someplace different than they did a year ago. So there are a lot of people looking for new places to live.

As of July 1, 2019, there were 338,341 housing units in Denver. Denver issued 5,059 building permits in 2020, some of which was for commercial properties, but some of which was for apartment buildings with more than one residential unit. So, supply and demand are neck and neck. This has led to soaring housing prices.

Also, it is worth noting that while Denver's population is rising, that enrollment in the Denver Public Schools is actually falling significantly, to the point where the district is planning to close schools and lay off teachers and staff. 

Migrants to Denver are apparently disproportionately childless adults (often Millennials), and people are having fewer children. Indeed, the high cost of housing in Denver, fundamentally driven by a failure of housing construction to keep up with demand, is one of the reasons people are having fewer children.

Housing prices in Denver are soaring at far more than the rate of inflation, eyeballing it, an increase of 125% from 2012 to 2020 (an average rate of increase of 10.7% per year).

In 2021, the average price of a single family home in the Denver metro area was $612,274, up 16.68% over 2020, an all-time high and the tenth consecutive year of rising housing prices. 

In December 2021 in the Denver metro area the median price for a residence was $545,000 (average $626,573), the median price for a single family home was $599,990 (average $705,753), and the median price for a condo was $381,500 (average $441,390), all of which are record highs.

Rents in Denver are no better. As of October 2021:

[A]ccording to October’s National Rent Report from Zumper, the third largest online rental platform in the U.S.

Since pandemic closures swept the nation in March 2020, Denver’s median one-bedroom rent has risen 11.8 percent, and two-bedrooms grew 14.3 percent. In 2021, those rates have climbed 20.7 percent — making Denver the sixteenth priciest rental market in the U.S.

Median Denver rent for a one-bedroom is $1,690, and $2,190 for a two-bedroom. . . . One-bedroom rent prices are highest in New York City, where they’re $3,100, followed by San Francisco at $2,800 and Boston at $2,530.

There also aren't lots of rental vacancies. In 2021, "metro Denver’s apartment vacancy rate plunged from 5.5% in the first quarter to 3.7% in the second[.]"

In contrast, "the median rent in metro Denver, including the incentives offered by landlords, was $805 in the first quarter of 2010, according to RealPage." This was an increase of 81% from 2010 to 2018. 

Another source says that average rents in metro Denver were up 85% from 2010 to 2019 (somewhat less than the 105% increase in the median housing price in that time period in the metro area). There were 61,700 apartment units built in the Denver metro area from 2010 to 2019. 

Meanwhile, median household income in metro Denver was up only 55% from 2010 to 2019. Inflation from 2010 through 2022 has cumulatively been 28% (nationally).

Zillow puts the increase in rent from 2010 to 2019 at 88% in the Denver metro area.

This is a stark contrast with metro Denver from 2000 to 2010, when metro area rents grew at slightly less than the rate of inflation (a 22% increase in nominal dollars and a 2% drop after adjusting for inflation). 

Moreover, since the surge in prices is driven by the fundamentals of demand outstripping supply, this doesn't appear to be just a speculative price bubble that could pop at any time.