Colorado Springs is, on paper, a very reasonable place to live.
The unemployment rate is manageable. The cost of living, relative to Denver, still feels like a deal to anyone who moved here from somewhere that stopped being affordable while they were figuring out where to live. The mountains are present every single morning whether you've earned them or not, which is one of the few genuinely democratic things about this region. And the military presence means there is always work — not glamorous work, rarely well-compensated work, but work, the dependable kind, the kind that justifies the decision to stay when staying was not obviously the right call.
From the outside it looks like a city that functions.
It has the right aesthetic markers of stability. The megachurches — and there are enough of them that you could attend a different one every Sunday for a year and never repeat, which some people do, though for different reasons. The military installations, which lend the whole valley a sense of purpose-by-proximity, as if the mission belongs to everyone and not just the people in uniform. The neighborhoods where the lawns are maintained with a precision that suggests either genuine pride or the specific anxiety of someone who needs the outside to look controlled because the inside is not.
"From the outside, it looks fine. This is the brochure. The brochure is accurate as far as it goes."
The Dais — Import Economy SeriesThe brochure does not go very far.
What the brochure leaves out is that a city which looks fine from the outside — which has enough legitimate industry to seem credible, which has a population that turns over fast enough that faces don't accumulate memory — that city is useful to people who need their work to be invisible.
Invisibility is a feature. Invisibility is, in certain industries, the entire business model.
And Colorado Springs, without having planned it, without anyone sitting down and designing it this way, has spent several decades building excellent infrastructure for invisibility.
The I-25 corridor runs north-south through the spine of the Front Range — Denver above, Pueblo below, Colorado Springs in the middle. Federal law enforcement has documented for years what moves along that corridor alongside the trucks and the commuters and the people driving to visit their parents.
The transient population helps. When everyone is from somewhere else and headed somewhere else, nobody is quite sure which faces are supposed to be here and which ones aren't. Accountability requires continuity. Continuity is not this valley's strong suit.
The economy helps. Not because it's thriving — it isn't, not for everyone — but because it has just enough legitimate service industry, just enough hospitality, just enough of the kinds of businesses that run on cash and don't keep great records, to provide what lawyers call commingling and what everyone else calls cover.
What moves through this corridor, primarily, is not adults who signed a contract and understood the terms.
It is children.
Some of them came from somewhere else. The word import is ugly and transactional and accurate — they were moved here because here has money, has turnover, has the specific combination of demand and discretion that makes certain markets viable. Some of them were already here. Already in systems that were failing them quietly — the foster system, the school system, the family structures that were collapsing in the neighborhoods behind the neighborhoods that photograph well.
Nobody handed them a brochure.
Nobody asked if they wanted to come.
The boards that oversee social services funding, public health priorities, and the rehabilitation infrastructure that intersects with trafficking cases — they are making decisions in rooms that are open to the public.
The inputs connect to the outputs. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes messily. But they connect. Part Three of this series is about exactly which rooms, which meetings, and what showing up actually looks like.