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.
Ruth Seloover, 78, and her husband, Jack, 81, have watched an explosion of growth and population in her hometown of Erie, Colorado, where her father moved from Illinois during the Great Depression to find work in the town’s bustling mines
A recent study by GoBankingRates ranked Erie as the fourth fastest-growing wealthy suburb in the Unites States. Buyers have flocked to the town for its mountain vistas, outdoor offerings and prices lower than surrounding cities like Boulder and Denver and their pricier suburbs
Erie’s town council is racing to keep up with the pace, implementing ‘beautification’ projects and others in the historic Old Town (pictured) while working on construction for a new, mixed-use Erie Town Center about a mile away
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…