American

dream changing for some Coloradans

BY CHRISTY STEADMAN CSTEADMAN@COLORADOCOMMUNITYMEDIA.COM

Amber Carlson is a Colorado native. She loves the Denver area for all its amenities — from outdoor recreation to the arts-and-culture scene. But with so many other people moving to the region because they also love those things, Carlson would consider moving away.

“I don’t blame people for wanting to live here,” she said. “It’s got a lot going on.”

Carlson doesn’t want to uproot from Colorado, but if she did, it would be because of the region’s skyrocketing cost of living.

“It’s di cult when you’ve lived here your whole life and it has become hard to stay,” she said.

Carlson is in her 30s. She went to Denver’s George Washington High School and is currently in graduate school at the University of ColoradoBoulder. She lives with her partner in a house in Wheat Ridge that he owns, a situation she feels fortunate to have. Otherwise, Carlson said, she is not sure if she would be able to a ord a rental on her own.

Her experience leaves her with questions about the idea of the American dream — owning a home. It is, for many, a dream of a singlefamily home on a private plot of land in the suburbs, maybe with a picket fence and tire swing hanging from a lofty tree.

But younger people are changing their perceptions about what the American dream should be. Driving that change is the increasingly una ordable nature of housing, according to a few surveys, including one by Bankrate last year. It found that two-thirds of respondents cite a ordability as a major hurdle to homeownership. eir pinch points included everything from salaries that didn’t keep up to a lack of ability to save for down payments to high mortgage rates.

‘The American dream has decreased in relevance’

James Truslow Adams, a writer and historian, is credited with coining the term “the American dream” in 1931 — early in the Great Depression — in his book, “ e Epic of America.”

“ e American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement,” Adams wrote. “It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”