The rural housing crisis out west

High Country News reported a few weeks on the housing shortage in the American West.  Here's the lede from Kylie Mohr's story:

Housing is getting more and more expensive in the West, and not just in the region's resort towns and booming tech hubs. A new report from Headwaters Economics, a community development think tank, digs into recent trends on record-breaking housing costs. “What was very apparent to us is that these unprecedented price increases that we’ve been seeing lots of anecdotes about aren’t isolated,” said Headwaters Economics researcher Megan Lawson. “It’s incredibly widespread. It’s not just limited to the Bozemans and the Boises. It’s ubiquitous.”

Nationwide, 607 counties saw a record rise in housing costs between 2020 and 2021, 134 of them in the West. Why is the West affected? Lawson ticked off a few hypotheses: Local housing stock is expensive relative to local wages, but it’s generally affordable to people from bigger metropolitan areas. At the same time, the pandemic is driving migration to areas with amenities and a high quality of life. It’s created a perfect storm of growing demand — and that drives up prices.

And here's a story from the Colorado Sun out of Silverton, population 637, in San Juan County in the southwest corner of the state.  Shannon Najmabadi reports under the headline, “Glorified homelessness”: Even tiny Silverton is experiencing the housing crisis that’s crushing mountain workers."  The subhead is, "Colorado’s housing shortage is exacerbated in remote Silverton, where there are no suburbs to commute from and little space to expand."  The story suggests that rents have as much as doubled in a year.  

Here's a resource on the rural housing crisis in California.  

Postscript:  This story illustrates another downside to the West's rural housing crisis--building and buying in the wildland-urban interface, which is particularly susceptible to fire.