Google Grows in Boulder

Plans Call for Campus at Pearl and 30th Streets

Google is big on Boulder; that’s plain.

Since setting up shop in the city in 2006, the King Kong of Silicon Valley has grown its local operation to more than 300 employees at four spots.

If all goes as planned, the firm will be able to accommodate a projected Boulder workforce of 1,500 in comfort and style: The city has largely approved a new, 330,000-square-foot Google campus at 30th and Pearl Streets. The complex would represent one of Google’s biggest concentrations of employees.

Many people welcome the prospect of stronger ties between Boulder and the celebrated technology firm, which would further stoke the city’s economy and burnish its reputation as a hive of innovation.

But a vocal opposition says Boulder can’t handle many more residents — especially affluent ones — without making life tougher for locals of modest means.

“We don’t have a lack of jobs here, we have a lack of housing,” one Daily Camera reader wrote to the paper.

Still, all signs point to Google growth, and to further debate about how to promote growth generally without making Boulder too exclusive.

Photography © iStock/Antagain