If you move to Wyoming, or North Dakota, or any energy boom state to work in oil or gas production you probably know to expect long hours and a big paycheck.
And you may even know enough to expect to be sleeping in your car. Housing is a perennial issue in boomtowns, one that pits the needs of energy workers against the interests of long term residents. As Wyoming Public Radio’s Miles Bryan reports, it’s not an easy fix. He has the story of how the boom is playing out, in this tale of two Wyoming towns.
When Richard Kail retired to the Northwestern Wyoming town of Pinedale in the late 1990s it was a sleepy place mostly getting by on jobs in tourism and government. Kail bought some apartments and a hotel in Big Piney, about 30 miles south of Pinedale. He did steady business--nothing special. That is, until around
2005, when he started to get a lot more calls.
“They would be willing to pay 2 or 3 times what we were charging.”
By the mid 2000s a new technology called hydraulic fracturing had opened up thousands of natural gas wells around Pinedale. Hundreds of energy workers descended on the area--all looking for a place stay.
“There were continually calls. They were willing to pay just about anything you ask them for it... There was a real frenzy for finding places.”
The area just couldn’t handle the demand
“At the end of the day we just couldn’t pull it together here.”
Steve Smith was the Mayor of Pinedale back then. The town scrambled to react to their boom, but there was never enough housing to meet demand. What got in the way? Smith says, first, the free market.
“Everything was going up and up in Pinedale. Folks that had lived here for a long time that might have been valued for 100 or 150 thousand dollars now selling for 300 thousand dollars. In that market it is very difficult to find land to put in attainable housing.”
“Attainable” housing — that’s the term used for places that are not necessarily cheap, but are available. The second issue is the sewer lines and roads and stoplights: all the stuff a town has to build along with housing.
“Previous administrations had long term plans to improve infrastructure. But when you have this many new people coming, and this much new traffic on your roads...it took us some time to crawl out from behind that eightball...”
The third big issue, which was more of a question for Pinedale, is a little more abstract: do you make the energy workers a part of the town, a part of the community, when you know most of them probably aren’t going to stick around? For Mayor Smith, the answer was yes.
“I wanted those people coming in to our community to be part of our community. To pay sales tax and property tax and enroll their kids in school. I thought that was important, and I still do.”
Smith says locals welcomed the idea of their bars and diners filling up with energy workers. But when it came to housing he was overruled. The town ultimately decided to restrict new housing in order to protect real estate values for long term residents when the boom inevitably went bust. Fast forward 4
years and the same scenario is playing out again, this time in the Northeast Wyoming town of Wright.
“You always want to have a waiting list. You always want to have not have enough housing.”
Roger Jones has developed apartments and townhouses in energy towns in Wyoming and the Dakotas. Right now he’s building some apartments in Wright, which is currently seeing a surge in oil development. But because these construction projects take an average of 1-2 years, contractors often underbuild because
they don’t know how long the boom will last. This time last year crude oil was selling for over 100 dollars a barrel: now its around half that.
“3, 4 months ago I would have thought we are pushing on. And then the oil prices go down, and now we are concerned.”
Unlike the boom in Pinedale, the sheer size of which caught everybody off guard, Wright has had plenty of lead time to track the growth of oil and gas work. Mayor Tim Albin says he wants to see the energy workers in the area living and shopping in Wright, but he says the town has to invest long term first. That’s meant using oil tax proceeds to building an almost 10 million dollar recreation center, but taking it slow with housing.
“We want to build for the future and have our town be a permanent structure. We are not trying to just build stuff to handle the overflow and then go ‘we don’t care what happens in two years whether it folds or not.’”
When small Wyoming towns like Pinedale or Wright are hit with a boom they a know a bust is probably coming too. Even with plenty of foresight its hard to get around the fact that investment in the needs of energy workers might not be a good investment for the town. Pinedale innkeeper Richard Kail might
have said it best.
“ I mean this happens, everyplace. Nobody is prepared. Those things just happen and they adjust and...it’s a bitch.”
For Inside Energy, I'm Miles Bryan.
Inside Energy is a public media collaboration focusing on America’s energy issues.
