Daily Inspiration Quote by Gary Bauer

Bauer’s line sounds like a neutral observation about supply and preference, but it’s really an argument disguised as inevitability. “As long as there’s land available” turns a political choice into a law of nature: if the prairie is there, sprawl must follow. That framing quietly absolves decision-makers of responsibility for zoning, infrastructure, water policy, and climate risk. It also smuggles in a value judgment that treats low-density growth as the default setting of Colorado, not one development pattern among many.

The second half is the sharper tell. “Colorado residents will always go for a single-family over a condo” is less a statement of consumer desire than a pre-emptive veto against densification. “Always” does a lot of work, flattening generational shifts, price realities, and the growing cohort of people who would take a well-built condo near jobs and transit if it existed in meaningful numbers. It’s the rhetoric of permanence deployed to block experimentation: if preferences are fixed, why change codes, invest in walkability, or tolerate height?

Context matters. Colorado’s growth pressures, rising home prices, and mounting constraints (water, wildfire, commuting time) have made housing form a proxy battle over identity: frontier spaciousness versus metro pragmatism. Bauer is tapping the cultural romance of the detached home - autonomy, privacy, a yard - while sidestepping the trade-offs that romance imposes on everyone else: longer drives, higher public service costs, and exclusionary scarcity. The intent isn’t just descriptive. It’s to make a particular future feel like common sense.