One hundred thirty thousand dollars. That’s what it takes for a down payment to buy an average-priced home in Bozeman, Montana. Then an aspiring homeowner must fork out another $3,000 each month, which is more than two-thirds of their household’s paychecks if they make the median income for the metro area.
That’s because the average home in the greater Bozeman area is going for more than $650,000, up from an already astronomical $500,000 in early 2020. A couple of tenured professors at the local Montana State University might be able to swing that, but it is way out of reach for the rest of the faculty.
If college professors can’t afford homes, then what kind of local worker can who has no outside source of income? Certainly not public-school teachers, firefighters, cops, or journalists. Service workers? Forget about it.
As pandemic-spurred remote work is freeing folks from the office and the cities, they are buying up remote work-centers, aka houses, in places far away from their cubicles. The result is real estate markets blowing up across the West, as well as the nation.
…the average home in the greater Bozeman area is going for more than $650,000, up from an already astronomical $500,000 in early 2020.
It will take $533,000 to buy an average-price home in Bend, Oregon, and $425,000 in Corvallis — a 23 percent jump from a couple of years ago. The pattern repeats just about everywhere, with 25- to 35-percent price increases in nearly every market: Tucson, Flagstaff, Tahoe, Salt Lake City, Durango.
You can’t escape by forgoing homeownership and renting, either. Rentals, if you can find them, are similarly expensive. Boise’s median rent shot up by 23 percent over the last year, with other mid-sized Western cities seeing similar leaps.
Many of these places have long been too pricey for the average worker, but a hopeful homeowner could always look farther afield, as home prices tended to drop in direct proportion to the distance from the town’s center. It’s the old “drive till you qualify” non-policy of affordable housing, leaned on by communities from Jackson to Aspen to Park City.
But now the Zoom Boom-fueled market fire is spreading beyond the “best places” into the once-affordable bastions of working class neighborhoods, the bedroom communities, rural ranchettes and even trailer parks.
In other words, you could drive all night and still not qualify unless you have cash coming in from a trust fund, you sold out of a more expensive market, or you happened to hit it big with cryptocurrency.
Something is bound to break. When even drive-till-you-qualify breaks down, the non-Zoom workers have little choice but to crowd into substandard housing, move into tent-towns, or set up camp in the backseat in the Walmart parking lot. I know experienced teachers who have been forced into rooming with others in small apartments, like college students. It’s hardly surprising that so many businesses are having a hard time finding workers.
Perhaps the most maddening part of all of this is that the Zoom Boom isn’t the half of it: The biggest real estate action is happening in the luxury markets. Aspen saw 90 sales over $10 million last year and the average home price shot up to more than $11 million. Jackson, Wyoming’s, median sale price last year was $2.5 million, and it continues to climb.
This is happening during a time when more than a half-million people have died in the United States due to complications from COVID-19 and the U.S. economy has shed millions of jobs. Los Angeles County’s unhoused population is approaching 70,000 and even quaint small towns are seeing growing numbers of unhoused people. Wyoming, which Jackson Hole real estate firms tout as a “tax haven with a view,” is facing a budget crunch, forcing more than $40 million in cuts at the University of Wyoming.
There are solutions: Tax the wealthy — and the high-dollar real estate transactions — and put the revenues into building affordable housing.
Call it what you want: socialism, redistribution of wealth, compassion, or just a tweak in the system to keep the economy from collapsing and violent revolution from occurring.
Or maybe call it what it is: A return to a time when we took care of one another and no one felt the need to amass billions of dollars of wealth at the expense of the working class, or the people who keep America running.
Jonathan Thompson is the editor of LandDesk.org and a regular contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.
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For more on the West’s financial inequality, pick up a copy of Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West by Justin Farrell.
Photo: Bend, Oregon’s downtown. Jeff Finley/Unsplash
Good article. I may not be as familiar with history as I’d like to be but I must have missed the time when “…no one felt the need to amass…wealth at the expense of [others}”. When the heck was that?
Before Reagan demonized Unions…
Thank you Michael !
I do not recall a time that people did not love money – at anyone’s expense. People can lay it all on Reagan, but some of the people who criticize his policies are some of the top beneficiaries of them. When did the stock market become The U.S. Economy – with the Federal Reserve genuflecting to Wall Street?
This will all pass. There was a migration away from urban areas because the pandemic allowed people to live and work far from the office. Prices have reflected that shift for the past 6-8 months.
As we move past the pandemic some will no doubt stay but most of the people will return to the urban areas to be closer to work. In the meantime there are deals to be had in our cities.
I know someone who just rented a 2 bedroom apt. in the upper east side of NYC for 2k a month! That was unheard of 2 years ago. As people move back to the cities prices will go back up and also prices will drop out in the sticks. Patience.
Anything that wipes the smile off of a college professors face works for me.
They are nothing but a bunch of old dinosaurs that think the world revolves them.
um… we are just getting out of a pandemic where I live and it’s the educated researchers (taught their craft by college professors) that are saving us right?
Good article until you vilified the rich (who by the way are often employers) with this statement:
“… no one felt the need to amass billions of dollars of wealth at the expense of the working class, or the people who keep America running.”
How about government cutting waste, pensions, give-aways, unnecessary projects, etc. versus blaming and “taxing the rich”.
Very good point about the give aways.
The Tax cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (trump) cut the business tax rate from 39% to 21%.
Also the highest individual tax bracket went from 39.6% to 36%. In the lowest income bracket where literally every dollar counts towards survival, there was NO drop in tax liability.
These result in a net loss of tax revenue and will result in about 1 Trillion USD of increased debt over the years they will be in effect: Winner is the fat cat business owner, loser is the rest of us.
These details also qualify as a ‘give away’ to many people.
These are not BS figures, they were published by the Tax Policy Center in 2020 so I’d like to know why you think they are justified if you really want to talk about cutting waste and give aways.
waiting…..
When the tax policy is more equitable, we can discuss virtues of giveaways.
1) The top 50% of taxpayers paid 97% of all individual income taxes, while the bottom 50% paid the remaining 3%.
2) The top 1% paid a greater share of individual income taxes (38.5%) than the bottom 90% combined (29.9%).
3) The top 1%of taxpayers paid a 26.8% average individual income tax rate, which is more than 6x higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50% (4%).
Stop taxing the producers and work towards realistic housing solutions, but realize in an inflationary environment where costs are up 300% for materials, “affordable” becomes relative.
very few of us believe “taxing the rich” will lead to more money going to the middle class or the poor. More likely it will go to legislators and other govt functionaries and contractors who take federal handouts for infrastructure repairs only to hire illegals for their crews. This by the way happened in LA right after Obama’s election, new work crews all over the city, all with federal funds, and all hiring illegals who could not speak a word of English. No monitoring of the contractors, whatsoever. Obama’s program was great for illegals who had just arrived. Nobody else was being hired, and this new new “infrastructure” program will be a repeat but moreso and the huge amounts of money involved will inflate the dollar like the German mark, post WW1.
From someone who has lived in Bozeman for 15 years – I can tell you this will not pass. We are the fastest growing micropolitan city in the US and have been for a couple years. Sure, the pandemic escalated our cost of living and people moving in (no doubt) but this was a problem far before anyone ever heard the words “Covid 19”. I’ve worked at Montana State University for 10 years, I’ve earned a doctorate degree, and if it weren’t for my partner who bought a home in 2014, I wouldn’t be able to live and work here comfortably – even pre COVID. Our wages and salaries don’t align with the cost of living in our ever growing city.
infinite growth > meet finite planet
Every dollar I spend has a carbon footprint…I think a carbon tax should be applied, especially to those who have such an abundance and massive homes…but wadda
I know…
I recently purchased a home in Bozeman, and it was definitely a struggle – toured dozens of homes, got beat out in six offers, etc. I was very lucky to buy when I did.
I would like to make a clarification to the very first sentence in this article – $130k is what it takes to put 20% down on a home. I don’t know about you, but I know very few people who have done this. I, and most people I know, put down about 5%. You have to pay PMI until your mortgage value is less than 80% of the home (likely where the author got his 20% figure), but you don’t need that amount to purchase a home. I’m saying this so those of you who are shopping don’t get discouraged. It will be difficult, but you can do it!
In our lifetimes there will never be less people on earth unless something devastating happens, so a property investment is a very safe and effective way to keep your money that you were previously throwing away on rent. Once you’re in the home, it’s super worth it. I have faith in you!
That’s a good clarification, and really gets at the underlying problem of the increasing gap between income and cost. When buyers can’t make 10% of the cost of a down payment, historically it means they don’t have the financial resources for that property and should look at more affordable properties. However, the current market doesn’t afford that option; costs have grown explosively while wages have grown more slowly. It’s eerily similar to the conditions in 2008, but instead of buyers choosing too much house, they don’t have any more affordable options. Real estate is certainly still a great long-term investment, but the 2008 crash personally gives me pause about the relief available if there’s a market correction. Everyone has to make a personal choice about risk between long-term benefits and the high cost of entry to the market, and there just aren’t easy answers.
Why does anyone think that it is the responsibility of someone else to pay for interlopers coming to the inter-mountain west. How can you possibly think that it is a good idea to take from anyone to provide you the means to come here. Stay home, or visit and leave. Idaho was full over 50 years ago before Californian Companies moved here. Prices are what they are because of demand, you don’t like or can’t afford the cost, stay home. In fact we prefer that you stay home so you don’t ruin it for the folks that live here. There is plenty of low cost housing, move to Detroit.
At least everyone moving from the big cities is woke so things will soon be great. I mean, just look at the ”solutions” suggested in the article.
By the way, tax the rich is only one “solution”. Have any others, or are the rich now just going to pay for everyone else indefinitely?
What happens when “the rich” run out of money? Oh yeah, just redefine rich! Problem solved.
Two key points affecting ski town housing in western states that were not mentioned:
1. The role state legislatures play in hamstringing local planning control. The state of Wyoming tries every year to remove Jackson’s ability to even have affordable housing requirements. In Utah, municipalities are barred from enforcing short term rental rules, (and a million other CRAZY bills affecting local control)
2. Short Term Rentals in ski towns are just as big a problem! If you don’t reign in the location of short term rentals or have a way to require mitigation for them, your town turns into a giant hotel for tourists and second homeowners parking capital.
1) The “tax the rich” idea is bullshit. Bozeman is taxing me as a long term resident And retirees and renters and anybody with an old school, residential house to pay for growth. Not the just the rich. 2) Bozeman’s ex-very cool Main street has become this gross collection of high-end boutiques, real estate offices, and financial planner. “Investors” are literally picking this once lovely city apart. 3) Bozeman is filling up with urban and suburban wealthy hipsters who want to acquire cool by just being here but have: no civic, social or environment responsibility, don’t really do much outdoors and are massively consumptive, crushing the planet and filling the Logan landfill with their “paper” coffee coups and single serving containers. After living in Steamboat, Hailey, Id and now here, I have no place left to run to.
Why west? VT, NH, mid to upstate NY, western MA, W VA? Northern Michigan.
The interior third coast / Rockies is waaaaay over-subscribed. You should have been here last week.
Shhhhhh….don’t let them know there is a pretty stellar eastern mountain range.
Agree! 🙂
The premise of this article is that anyone deserves to live wherever they wish, and that tax policy should be the vehicle to achieve that. You would need to convince me on that point before I could even listen to the proposal.
I, too, wish I could move back to Bozeman. Billings is a pile and getting worse. But who promised I would be able to? I couldn’t move to the Bay area, or Manhattan, or many other places. Yes, those hiding prices create problems for the local economy, but obviously not enough of a problem to deter people from moving there! The bottom line is that there are still places with high income to median house price ratios, and if they aren’t mountain towns, there is nothing unjust about that.
“A return to a time when we took care of one another and no one felt the need to amass billions of dollars of wealth at the expense of the working class, or the people who keep America running.”
Um, there was never a time like this.
Exactly. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, pick your era – their fortunes (inflation adjusted) were the equivalent of hundreds of billions. Why modern billionaires are so much more bothersome is beyond me. A colleague of mine just left my company and went to work for Amazon. She’ll be making over 200k per year. Bezos created that opportunity for her,.
The author is very naive
Who could possibly expect the cost of living in an appealing locale to be low?
You can dirt bag anywhere, that’ll never changed, but homeownership is and will always be for the well to do.
Want to own a home AND live inexpensively, try moving to a less desirable locale.
We live in the greater Tahoe area, in the past four years our home value has doubled, as has trail users, waiting in line at stores, etc, etc ….
There’s no one to blame but everyone is to blame.
It’s almost as if there was a single entity hoarding HUGE tracts of available land and forbidding the creation of affordable housing on same in these Mountain West towns…
And almost like this same entity was subsidizing low interest rates and printing HUGE sums of cash which is then forced to chase said artificially limited land and housing…
A person could be forgiven for thinking that our government, either party, was working for the bankers rather than the people… but what do I know?
Since we’re talking about “redefining”… pretty sure the rich redefined the tax rates in their favor over the last 40 years with disastrous results.
‘If yon second or third vacation home is left unoccupied fer more than say, 2 weeks, then it shall hereby be fair game for folks to move on in and be house pirates’ – Edward Teach
I’m going Amish, that’ll show eml!!!
W e can all bitch and whine, but that will not help the situation. The halcyon days of housing opportunity are gone and they aren’t coming back.: blaming others won’t bring them back. Only when this reality changes and folks realize we can’t always get what we want will change slowly occur, It won’t be soon and it be easy. We all need to lower our expectations and accept that we got this way over 20 years and we won’t escape it anytime soon.
As a Floridian Flatlander who visits and loves the West, I was interested in the overall premise of the article. It started good, but quickly faded into a diatribe against high-earners and good investors. The wealthy folks buying up land and homes for high prices are not the problem, but rather they are the result of “progressive” policies which, ironically, always favor the upper class at the expense of the lower class. Its the same story, no matter the time period or the location. Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and other places in the “West” have been inundated with those people who flee states like California, Oregon, Washington, etc. because they’ve become terrible places to live. They come to a new place and keep the same ideology and are slowly eroding the things that made the new place so attractive.
The market will correct itself if you let it. If you let it happen organically, everyone from the top to the bottom can and will benefit. But if local lawmakers start to meddle in this and determine that “housing equality” is required, then they will force a market correction that is more painful to the economy and more beneficial to the upper class. As a middle class dweller, I look forward to being able to snag a cheap vacation home in the West in the next 10-15 years once the hipsters and progressives abandon ship.
I live in Oregon. It’s a great place to live. If people want to believe it is a terrible place and move or not come at all I certainly won’t discourage them.
Yeah the popular hiking, fishing, biking spots are over crowded. That’s because 90 percent of people are too lazy to find the road less travelled, which there is plenty of in any western state.
Sometimes, when serving dinner to my four-year-old, she says “I don’t want that”, in that snotty way that only a four-year-old can. And then she makes it clear that she will be having ‘fill in the blank not-nutritious-thing’ for dinner. So entitled.
That is what this article is: “I want a thing that I can’t afford and it’s someone else’s responsibility to give it to me.”
We moved out of the Puget Sound (Washington State) because the goal of home ownership could not be realized in such a competitive market. Of course, we were disappointed; we lived five minutes from one of the country’s premier mountain biking trailheads, 30 minutes to skiing, and our housing community had 24 miles of hiking trails. I feel sadness every day over it. So… Should I become resentful and look for some else to blame? Or, make the best decisions I can and take responsibility for those decisions?
You are not entitled to your mountain town, or even home ownership.
Love to visit the West – especially Montana and Wyoming. But neither is a place I would care to live. No offense. They’re too cold, too wild and too red.
Again, my concern is carbon footprint this housing issue in remote locations create globally and the reduction in Public Lands and PL being raped, pillaged and Plundered by the greed of a few.
I worked in a house recently, 6 bedrooms, 4.5 baths, 5 TV on, 4 computers and only 4 in family. If they can afford all that they should be taxed a carbon tax. Rich does not grant anyone the Right to trample on others Rights to clean air, water and Wilderness.
How many bedrooms and bathrooms should they be allowed to have before carbon tax sets in? Computers? TVs? Is a 1:1 ratio acceptable, or no?
How much is enough? When does enough become Bling and not functional? How many TVs can one watch? How.many computers can one use at a time? 4 family members and none are in same room with each other…when does Bling become anti social, when there’s enough? How many rooms need to.be climate controlled before Comfortable? How many homes can one live in? Vacation homes? Vacation homes have denied others and myself access to fishing recently. And hunting access. So the few because they have money can deny the rest of us? Where are the Moral Compasses? Greed dressed as success is still greed and selfishness…Me has become more important then We…and this vitus has proven that. Collectively.
Too many ticks on the Moose…nature has attempted to rid planet of parasites but we even defeat that and fail to listen…because of our Wants…
If nothing else remember this…every dollar has a carbon footprint.
Vacation homes did not deny you access to fishing. Property rights may have denied you trespassing at a specific location, but Montana is full of accessible fishing. You were not denied access to fishing. You were denied access to a specific location because of your Wants. How many fishing spots can you fish at one time? How many fishing spots is enough? You may be too greedy and selfish and have attained the ME more than We enlightenment.
True, access wasn’t denied, only have to travel 6 miles up stream now. Not sure downstream, and my understanding from BCH&A is that there are plenty of access denied areas in Mt…I don’t recall as it been 30 yrs since I lived in Polson…, and some western states do have private river sections that aren’t open to public transit or fishing. And water as in air don’t recognize boundries…
Fantastic article! Well thought out and written!
“Tax the wealthy — and the high-dollar real estate transactions — and put the revenues into building affordable housing.” You hit the nail on the head!
Goddam rich bastards.
I think you are missing the impact of the weekly/nightly rental market. This is falsely inflating the real estate market and ruining the community. There are 1 bedroom apts. generating $6k a month. So people are buying up homes and renting them. The local job market can’t keep pace with the rental prices so locals are forced out. This is happening all over the country unfortunately. The culture and attitude the locals created is part of what makes these places desirable. If you gut the community, you are left with a soulless tourist trap.