When Ruth Seloover recently opened her mail to find an unsolicited check for $488,000, she didn’t even flinch – she just threw it straight in the shredder.

It was an offer to buy the three-bedroom home she shares with her husband Jack in Erie, Colorado. 

The couple had bought the property in 1969 for $15,250, and the check might have seemed like an enticing offer even a decade ago.

But now the 78-year-old just finds it funny. ‘You’d have to add a few more hundred thousand for us to do this,’ she chuckles, as her spouse of 57 years works on a jigsaw puzzle in the other room.

Ruth was born in Erie in 1946, when a snowstorm forced her mother to deliver at home in an old mining office her father had converted into a family residence. He’d moved from Illinois to Colorado during the Depression to find work in the bustling mines.

Ruth’s husband, Jack, a Midwesterner who had passed through Colorado after serving in Vietnam, took one look at his now wife and never left. 

Since then, the couple have seen one of the nation’s most dramatic residential transformations.

When the Seloovers married in 1968 – 10 years before the last mine closed – only around 600 people lived in their community. 

For decades, there were no grocery stores, paved roads or stoplights. Ruth would drive miles to get food and was forced to ‘stockpile’ between trips.

Today, she and other Erie residents are nearly spoiled for choice. The town is full of workers in reflective vests building new homes, eateries, fitness studios and liquor stores.

The Seloovers’ backyard garden – which still features a 28-foot irrigation well her father dug – adjoins a lot that was vacant for years after a local family’s concrete business shut down.

Now it’s a construction site for 12 planned duplexes among a neighborhood full of multigenerational midcentury homes in Erie’s quaint Old Town.

Across the street from the Seloovers’ front yard, another duplex is being built on land where homes have never stood.

And one mile away, a stone’s throw from the intersection where Erie got its first stoplight around 20 years ago, the town has purchased land for a new mixed-use development with a hotel, community space and retail properties.

The new projects and construction sites dotting up across the town show Erie is expanding in every direction – and at a rapid pace.

In fact, Erie is now the fourth fastest-growing wealthy suburb in America, according to a recent GoBankingRates study.

In 2010, its population was 18,135, according to US Census data. Last year that number surpassed 40,000.

According to town estimates, nearly 100,000 people are expected to be living within a five-mile radius by 2027.

The median income now stands at $163,644. That’s more than double the national median income of $80,610, according to 2023 US Census data.

When realtor Brandy Unruh moved from Las Vegas to Erie in 2007, she said the major building projects hadn’t started, but signs it would become a boomtown were already clear.

Erie’s first subdivision, Northridge, started going up around 1995, a year or so before the town’s streets were finally paved. It was so exciting Ruth left work to eat lunch in the driveway and watch.

The first homes in the first Northridge cul-de-sac you hit when driving north of Old Town on Briggs Street, the main historic strip, sold for around $279,000 as new builds in the late Nineties. Today they are valued at around $1million.

Growth slowly increased over the next decade. Developers started buying up more surrounding farmland with breathtaking Rocky Mountain vistas in the background.

Towns like Boulder, closer to the mountains to the west, saw property prices begin to skyrocket.

Suburban sprawl from Denver’s metro area, meanwhile, was creeping steadily further north – as Colorado became one of the most popular relocation states in the nation.

From 2008, Colorado spent 15 years enjoying the sixth-fastest population and labor force growth rates in the country – and the third-fastest personal income growth rates, according to the 2025 Colorado Business Economic Outlook from the University of Colorado Boulder.

It also ranked in the top 10 states people chose to move to for all but one year from 2015 to 2023, according to U’Haul’s growth index.

Unruh says that, from 2014 to 2018 ‘we were in what was called a seller’s market’.

‘Homes were sitting on the market 30-ish days or less. They were going under contract, in some cases at asking price, which at that time was – after coming off of the recession – unheard of, and we were seeing homes just getting multiple offers again,’ she tells the Daily Mail.

‘There were not enough [homes] available,’ she says – and, ‘at the time, in the state of Colorado, the Colorado economic summit projected that we had more jobs than adult humans. We had more people moving here than leaving for years.’

All of that accelerated wildly when Covid hit.

‘Those pandemic years, I think, is when it went from, ‘This is a good place to live,’ – and people were moving here already in vast quantities – to ‘This is crazy’.

‘I had a lot of listings where we were getting between 20 and 40 offers on every single house, all of them over asking price. There were not a ton of homes for sale,’ she says.

‘During the December of 2020, going into January of 2021, the week of Christmas – which is the slowest part of the real estate market – there were 20 homes for sale.

‘Thirteen of them were actually finished; the rest of them were new builds that were not done yet,’ she says. 

To the east, west, north and south of Old Town, real estate signs border major thoroughfares advertising properties selling from the $500,000s and $600,000s – but that’s still far cheaper than places like Boulder and most of Denver.

‘I never even knew Erie existed until my cousin moved up here,’ says Connie Klipka Kruger.

She had wanted to return to her hometown of Arvada after her cardiologist husband retired in North Texas last May.

But house prices in Arvada, six miles outside of Denver and serviced by the city’s light rail system, were ‘tremendously high.’

‘A lot of the homes haven’t been redone, and they’re still extremely expensive. It’s a lot closer to the mountains, but it was just the price that was not worth it to me,’ she explains.

So Kruger followed her cousin to Erie, enamored by the town’s offerings as well as its prices. There she bought a home that ‘checked all my boxes’ and moved in with her husband and their dogs in October.

Girl Scout troop leader Liz Reynolds, 43, cites similar reasons for choosing Erie.

‘When my husband and I got married, we were renting in Boulder for years, and I loved Boulder – but we wanted somewhere to own a house and raise a family,’ she tells the Daily Mail, while helping her daughter put up a sign for cookies in the window of the Old Mine restaurant on Briggs Street.

‘Some of the other surrounding towns around Boulder we were even priced out of – so we just had to keep going east until we found something affordable,’ says Reynolds, who moved to the town in 2016 and ‘kind of watched everything build around us.’

She calls Erie ‘very suburbia’ while her fellow troop leader, Jessica Smith, lauds the area’s ‘small-town feel’.

That’s a refrain heard over and over throughout Erie, from natives to new arrivals, both young and old, as residents tout the town’s benefits.

And it’s something officials are trying to preserve amidst the area’s explosion in population and popularity.

‘What we’ve really been trying to do is make sure we preserve and maintain a small-town feel, while we’ve technically outgrown that descriptor,’ says Gabi Rae, Erie’s director of communications and community engagement.

‘We’d love to keep that – and not just with how it looks, but how it feels to people… with our small community events that we host all year round, with our connectivity and our trails,’ she says. 

Rae adds that they are also creating a bridge from one of their new communities to the old historic district to help maintain the small-town vibe.

The planned new Erie Town Center, she says, is still going to look and have that historic feel and will be connected by pedestrian pathways to Old Town – where Briggs Street is also currently awash with reflective vests and construction workers.

Erie is currently working to make crossings ADA accessible while simultaneously completing ‘beautification projects,’ she continues with new planters, trees and streetlights that ‘match the aesthetic … that historic feel’.

Businesses and infrastructure, meanwhile, are trying to keep up with the pace of growth.

Erie falls within both Boulder and Weld counties, encompassing two school districts; there are now 11 schools in the town and plans to build a second public high school.

Mountain View Fire Rescue, which serves 250 square miles throughout Northern Colorado, is building a new Station 15 right off Erie Parkway driving west of Old Town.

For years, Erie had no grocery store within town limits. But now there’s a Safeway and a sprawling King Soopers Marketplace, and another grocer is earmarked for Erie Town Center, says Rae.

That’s a plus for Ruth Seloover, who recalls having to drive miles for forgotten ingredients in years past.

‘I stockpiled,’ she says.

Popular new local establishments have cropped up in Old Town such as Erie Social Club, which opened less than two years ago in a new building off Briggs Street – adjacent to an equally new park with an ice skating rink.

Owner Nick Varnado and his wife had worked for Disney in Florida for 25 years before relocating to Erie in 2016. She got a job at Vail Resorts, headquartered in a neighboring town, and Varnado became a sommelier during the pandemic.

‘Three and a half years ago, you would’ve been sitting on dirt,’ Varnardo explains, just hours before the social club’s weekly Tuesday night trivia.

Participants and regulars come from both Old Town and new neighborhoods, with one team named for the nearby Colliers Hill, where home prices start in the mid-$500,000s.

But residents, new and old, say there still aren’t enough places like the social club to congregate.

‘We need more places to hang out. There’s not a lot of good places to just hang out, grab your coffee, go sit,’ says Dan Gump, 46, who moved from Colorado Springs to Erie in 2020.

He and his wife, Casey, are trying to rectify that and held a grand opening for Briggs Street Books and Music last month.

They were originally attracted to Erie by the price, the small-town feel, the views and the outdoor offerings; both are runners and Dan is a cyclist.

‘That was another thing that sold us, too: You can really hop on a trail and … get around,’ says Casey.

As more and more people move to Erie, however, there are unsurprisingly complaints about traffic and school overcrowding.

Buyers who have purchased homes sight unseen, or have only done cursory research, have found themselves within a few hundred feet of oil drilling or Erie’s Front Range Landfill.

Despite this, the same patterns that pointed buyers to Erie in the first place are starting to preclude others from relocating to the town. 

Simply put, Erie, too, is pricing people out.

‘I don’t know that we could afford Erie now,’ admits Girl Scout leader Reynolds.

The Seloovers’ grandson, who’d relocated out of state, is now trying to come back – but can’t afford anything nearby.

‘I just want to see it slow down a little bit,’ says Jack Seloover, 81.

‘The amount of people coming in, that’s great, but I’d like to see it slow down – and have the town think about what they’re doing.’

According to communications director Rae, town officials are on the same page.

‘We’re really optimistic about the future,’ she says. ‘We’re getting so many young families and young professionals who are coming into the space that are just excited to make themselves a home, a community, a life in Erie – and we, as a town, really want to support that vision.

‘We’re figuring it all out.’