Economic Trends
Boulder, Colorado has a highly localized economy, which is concentrated in the city since early regional conservation efforts prevented expansion outwards. This localized economy, with primarily unique and local businesses, lends itself to the attraction of the creative class and innovation. There is also a very high concentration of the technological sector, which tends to employ the creative class. The University of Boulder Colorado has aligned many of their well-respected programs/ graduates to meet the needs of the prominent sectors within the city.
Always A Service Sector City In the United States, industrialization led to manufacturing, which led to an abundance of jobs based in the manufacturing industry. However, the number of these jobs dropped significantly in the 1970s and 1980s, and created a major shift in the U.S. economy to service industries. Fortunately, the city of Boulder was not highly focused on the manufacturing industry and did not incur the level of decline in manufacturing, as did cities like Detroit (61).
Since Boulder’s inception, it was a town based on providing services and supplies for the miners going into the mountains. The image to the right (25) is a historical Sanborn Company Fire Insurance map from 1890, which lists in the legend the businesses at the time- already very little manufacturing and numerous lodging facilities and churches.
Still Focusing On Services Boulder's current economy is still based largely on services, with a concentration of high technology in the city. Boulder has 1,217 employed establishments pertaining to professional, scientific, and technical services with an annual payroll of $1,283,517,000 in 2007 (U.S. Census Bureau). The city has become a center for “technology start-ups and other entrepreneurial endeavors” (67). Boulder had several large corporations focused on technology locate within the city, starting in the 1950s. Some of these well-known technology-based companies include: IBM Corporation, Ball Aerospace, Wells Fargo and Google (66).
Regional Presence The spatial interaction technique of rank-size rule illustrates Boulder's regional economic impact, compared to other cities in the state of Colorado. In this analysis, the top 12 cities were ranked according to their population mass (refer to table on the right). The graph illustrates that the largest city maintains a population of about 600,000. From there it shows that the second largest city is about one-third less and the third is about half the population of the first ranked city. After that, the population differences between rankings are less drastic. Furthermore, it confirms that that Boulder and Denver are far from equal, although they are very close in proximity, with a small friction factor. Denver has the metropolitan dominance but Boulder has a unique and desirable economy.
The city has a high concentration of high-technology jobs and has the non-market factors (such as open space) to attract the creative class, which is key to economic growth (63). Boulder’s industry also benefits from the proximity to the city's early concern for education, which brought the University of Colorado Boulder that contributes research and development, as well as to the basic economy. Moreover, Boulder is known for its’ venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, which is a necessary component to growth and innovation (64) of a city.
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Data Source: U.S. Census Bureau.
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