When we see stories about Pueblo in out-of-town media outlets, quite often our community is described in simplistic and overly negative terms. We’re the “Napa Valley of marijuana” or we’re “a blue-collar town still trying to recover from a decline in the steel industry.”

Those kinds of shorthand descriptions give people an inaccurate and incomplete description about what’s happening here. They’re the product of intellectually lazy thinking – and they completely ignore any good news that conflicts with those narratives.

Take, for example, the year-end reports on home sales in Pueblo County. Both the Colorado Association of Realtors and the Pueblo Association of Realtors reported that home sales were up significantly in 2017 over sales recorded the previous year. The local association reported that there were 2,868 home sales in the Pueblo area last year, up from 2,582 in 2016.

Read more at The Pueblo Chieftain.