Find Us On:
Subscribe:
Subscribe:
ECONOMICS 
FEATURED ECONOMIES 
BUSINESS TODAY 
North Dakota has a novel problem: plenty of jobs, but nowhere to put the people who hold them.
The same forces that have resulted in more homelessness elsewhere — unemployment, foreclosure, economic misery —
have pushed laid off workers from California, Florida, Minnesota, Michigan and Wyoming to abundant jobs here, especially in the booming oil fields.
But in this city rising from the long empty stretches of North Dakota, hundreds are sleeping in their cars or living in motel rooms, pup tents and tiny campers meant for weekend getaways in warmer climes.
They are staying on cots in offices and in sleeping bags in the concrete basements of people they barely know.
North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, 4 percent,
but advocates for the homeless say the number of people they see with nowhere to live — a relatively rare occurrence here until now —
grew to 987 in 2009 from 832 in 2008, an increase of about 19 percent.
And the problem is certain to worsen this summer as oil companies call for more rigs and thousands more workers.
“It’s hard to know where this might end,” said E. Ward Koeser, the mayor of Williston, who met this month with the governor of North Dakota to plead for state help with the housing crisis.
“It’s the one thing that sometimes wakes me up in the morning and doesn’t let me go to sleep,” he said, acknowledging that most mayors can only dream of having such a riddle.
Still, where will all these happily employed newcomers live?
“I don’t know,” said Mr. Koeser, whose city had about 12,000 people at last count, but may now be closer to 15,000. “We literally have no place.”
Cranes dot the city, proof that a building boom is under way, but not fast enough.
While the rest of the country was sinking into recession, North Dakota never did.
Other states nursed budget deficits, but North Dakota, even now, has a surplus. The state has a wealth of other jobs.
A rise in oil production here, especially, served as an antidote to any whiff of what the rest of the nation was witnessing.
Beneath an enormous expanse of land here, workers have pumped an ever-growing amount of crude oil from a formation called the Bakken, thanks in part to new horizontal drilling technology.
Government estimates put the potential recoverable oil from the Bakken, which stretches into Montana, at 4.3 billion barrels.
Now, 109 oil rigs — with scores of workers for each — are drilling in North Dakota, and some officials say that figure could reach 150 this year.
In one of the least populated states in the nation, this sudden overcrowding has upended some axioms of ordinary life.
In motels here, some people have stayed so long that they know their neighbors down the hall. Dinner comes from a microwave.
“It’s a horrible way to live,” said Chris Rosmus, a Minnesotan who moved into the Vegas Motel for a month and stayed a year and a half ...
Families have been pressed and strained. Mercedes Allen, her boyfriend and their 4-month-old baby, Hunter, moved here from California. Their stay with relatives stretched on awkwardly.
Her boyfriend was hired to the first oil job he sought, but the living arrangements — with four adults, two children and two babies all under one roof — grew tense.
By early April, Ms. Allen said, her relatives had given her a week to move out.
“It hurts to have to say, ‘I found nothing again,’ ” Ms. Allen said, as her week was running out.
Pointing out once AGAIN both the economic inefficiency AND the human suffering caused by this on-going - yet eminently solvable - problem of IN-equality of income and distribution of resources in the US.
