The state with America’s fastest-growing economy, North Dakota, has attracted thousands from across the United States and abroad since the late 2000s, as oil companies have set up (environmentally questionable) hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, operations that extract tens of billions of dollars’ worth of oil and gas from the Bakken shale.
People are lured from all over by tales of $300 signing bonuses for fast-food workers and gas station attendants who make $50,000 per year. At a time when the unemployment rate in the rest of the country is hovering at 6.6 percent, North Dakota’s unemployment rate is only 2.7 percent.
The catch is that amid all the boom time plenty, there is a severe housing affordability crisis. North Dakota saw a 200 percent jump in homelessness last year, the biggest increase of any state. There are now 2,069 homeless people in this state of 699,628, according to HUD data. That translates into 28.6 homeless people per 10,000. The national average is 19.
Michael Carbone, executive director of the North Dakota Coalition for Homeless People, explains:
People are coming because it’s widely publicized that we have jobs, but it’s not widely publicized that we don’t have housing.
Williston, ND is perhaps the most extreme example of a phenomenon that researchers say has followed frackers across the country. As the shale boom draws great numbers of people to sparsely populated and remote areas of the country, demands are placed on limited housing stock, so rents climb.
Energy firms—where workers can earn $100,000 or more working in shale oil and gas fields—often build or rent housing for their employees, but service jobs do not come with the same perks.
Williston saw its population more than double, from 14,716 in 2010 to an estimated 33,547 last year. The number of homeless in the area is 986, more than 47.6% of the state total.
Local rents have skyrocketed. One-bedroom apartments, which a few years ago rented for $500 per month, command as much as $2,000 per month now. It is currently difficult to get a real estate agent on the phone, and waiting lists for apartment houses and RV spaces are overflowing. People now rent out rooms in their homes for as much as $1,000 a month. Starter houses sell for $300,000 or more.
And here’s the shocker: in frosty Williston, where temperatures can drop to minus 30 degrees, and where 48% of the state’s homeless reside, there are no homeless shelters—and the city says it does not have the resources to cope with its expanding homeless population.
Williston mayor Ward Koeser recently asked the city council to use the local National Guard Armory as a shelter, but councilors declined, deciding the city, which has a 2014 budget of $233 million, could not afford to pay the $450 a night needed for security.
North Dakota expects to generate more than $5.28 billion in oil and gas tax revenue during 2013-2015. Williston’s share is about $32 million a year. Overall, North Dakota’s take from all taxes, including local property taxes, is $11.1 billion.
In the U. S. Congress, North Dakota Democratic Senator Heidi Heitkamp recently introduced a bipartisan housing finance reform bill that would fund programs for the homeless in her state. The bill is still in committee.
Heitkamp said:
Homelessness, a quickly growing problem in North Dakota, hasn’t received the attention it deserves.
In Williston, people who cannot afford or find housing sleep underneath bridges, inside grain bins and in the stairwells of some hotels. Recently, in nearby Watford City, a homeless man living in a dumpster burned his hat, scarf, blankets and boot liners to stay warm. His two frostbitten feet eventually had to be amputated.
Mario Solano left his home in Miami to travel to a new life in central North Dakota. At first he found temporary jobs driving trucks for oil and gas companies. Eventually, he found permanent employment working as a ranch hand in Williston, making $14.50 an hour, which he thought was enough for a place of his own.
But excessive rents killed that idea and forced him to live in his car. He now parks and sleeps in a gas station parking lot, showers at the gas station, has breakfast at Hardee’s or Walmart and shows up at the Salvation Army to get vouchers for prescription drugs and canned food. A nearby family of five live in a van.
Captain Joshua Stansberry of the Williston Salvation Army says:
The common scenario is that these people spent their last dollar to take a bus to come here to make a better life for their family back home. But with the high cost of living, they are forced to live a transient lifestyle.
Not just workers are affected. Student homelessness in North Dakota increased 212% last year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
In Watford City, for example, 25% of the kids, or 263, are homeless. Teachers have had to deal with students who have no kitchen table or desk to do their homework on. Class sizes have swollen from an average 16 children per teacher a few years ago to as many as 28 today.
The Salvation Army in Williston is now buying one-way bus tickets for people to go back home.
