More on rural gentrification in the mountain West, from In These Times

Two headlines from In These Times this week were "In Montana, an Avalanche of Wealth is Displacing Workers," and "The Vail-ification of the West."  Both stories are by Joseph Bullington, who grew up in Montana and edits Rural America In These Times.   Here's an excerpt from the first story: 

The Covid-related explanations emphasize the pandemic, which provoked a surge of interest in living rurally, particularly in the West’s so-called vacation communities. A rush of remote workers and second-home buyers, able to outcompete locals in cramped housing markets, drove down the available housing stock and drove up prices. Real estate speculators soon followed. As Guyer says, ​“When the speculative real estate investors arrive in a place like Livingston, your average home buyer just can’t compete.”

In truth, the pandemic land rush is only the most recent episode in a much longer story.

Where I’m from in rural Montana, the towns mostly come in two types. Some lie where they fell when an extractive industry — copper or coal, gold or timber — pulled up stakes and moved on, taking the money and leaving a pit of economic ruin (and maybe a pit of poisoned water on the edge of town). Other towns, due to some alchemy of proximity to an airport, an interstate and a famous national park, have attracted the interest of the outdoors industry. Instead of digging ore, workers in these towns spend their days in a different kind of extractive industry — prying a living from the wallets of vacationers and second-home owners.

Here's the lede for the second story:

Welcome to Colorful Colorado,” reads the sign beside the highway as the road climbs from the alkaline flats of New Mexico into the foothills of the San Juan Mountains. But the landscape holds no color when Ana and her family cross the state line in the predawn dark.

When the family arrives in Durango at 6:30 a.m., Ana’s husband goes to his construction job installing heating and A/C ducts. Ana waits at her sister’s house until the bus comes to take their son to school. Then, Ana goes to work, too, cleaning houses.

This whole tiresome routine is new. Originally from Chihuahua, Mexico, the family lived for seven years in Durango, where they found work and a supportive immigrant community. But a recent influx of second-home buyers, wealthy retirees and highly paid remote workers rapidly drove up housing costs here, which pushed Ana and her family not just out of town but out of state — to a trailer park an hour south of Durango in Farmington, N.M., where rents are cheaper. (I’m not using Ana’s real name because she fears what might happen should the Durango School District discover they no longer live in the area.)

They are hardly the only ones making this daily commute.

Don't miss both stories in their entirety.  They don't being new news beyond what's been covered on the blog for many years, but they're both terrifically well done, with a focus on low-income workers struggling to stay housed in a booming ecotourism economy of wealthy folks, most owning second homes.