Fort Collins, Colorado

FinalPantasy
2y ago
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My sister lives there. She absolutely loves it. She has a young daughter with her. She hasn’t said anything bad about the school system and it seems like a rich suburb so I can’t imagine its bad. When I visited I really liked it but was only there a couple days. The rough thing for me was the lack of humidity dried me out so fast but I’m sure you get used to that.

ifflejink
2y ago
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I grew up in Fort Collins and moved away over a decade ago, but I go back to visit pretty frequently. It was a really good place to grow up overall because there’s so much green space, it’s safe, it’s bikeable, there’s a decent amount of stuff to do and it’s pretty friendly. It can be its own little bubble, though, and it’s extremely white- there isn’t a whole lot of diversity. It’s also surprisingly expensive if you want to live somewhere that isn’t car-dependent because a huge portion of the city is very, very sprawling. Traffic has apparently gotten relatively bad for a small city over the years, too.

For schools, they’re mostly good-quality and fairly well-funded. Poudre High School, on the northwest side of town, did have its own issues because it catches a mix of rural areas, low-income areas, middle-class spots and IB students from around the area. Those issues were mostly around that specific school being very, very overcrowded. I’m not sure how noticeable it is now, but LaPorte (small town just northwest of Fort Collins) has historically had a pretty significant white supremacist presence. Poudre pulled a lot of kids from that area and it meant that, while you didn’t necessarily see anything super overt, there was a lot of overtly white supremacist/Nazi graffiti in the school.

SummitSloth
3mo ago
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Do it. I live here in the old town area and love it. Denver is a hour+ haul from foco but pretty much everything you need is here. Has everything you want listed out.

Mountain access is the catch, especially if you ski the resorts. You gotta drive an hour south then fight traffic on I70. There is the Poudre canyon/Cameron pass just west of us that has some great hikes. If you're moving here, you gotta accept the extra driving time but the trade off to live in foco compared to Denver metro is greatly worth it.

skinsnam
2y ago
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Honestly, I haven’t really enjoyed my time here nearly as much as I though I would, but it’s also very much not my scene. I like small towns with very close access to nature and Fort Collins is large (at least to me) with a lot of breweries and bars (I don’t drink) and the close nature is often very crowded or very close to busy streets. It’s also the least friendly place I’ve ever lived, but take that with a grain of salt. Many of my transplant friends often talk about how it’s the nicest place they’ve lived, but it ranks in the bottom for me. Really just depends on where you’ve lived before.

Its “pedestrian friendly”, but I’ve nearly been hit about 7 times walking/riding my bike in the three years I’ve been here- an issue I haven’t had in other cities or towns I’ve lived in. Just today someone turned left on a green while I was in the middle of the crosswalk and would have hit me had I not ran out of the way. Today was the third time I’ve almost been hit by someone turning left and not looking.

I do enjoy the amount of accessible bouldering and the closeness to RMNP and poudre canyon. For me, those are the stars of Fort Collins. I also enjoy heading to Cheyenne for fun. I love rodeos so being close to frontier days is a treat for me. I’m a big live music person and Washington’s and The Aggie often have good shows. Denver isn’t too far either if I want to head to a show down there.

Living in Fort Collins Colorado / Ten Reasons to Move Here