The Robber Barons Move to MT
Mon May 06, 2024 7:11 pm
"It’s a familiar sentiment these days in Montana, one of the country’s fastest-growing states. You often hear it in shorthand—in Bozeman’s nickname “Boz Angeles,” for the influx of Californians, or in the popular anecdotes, like the one about a duck hunter ticketed for trespassing on land where he had hunted since childhood, recently purchased by millionaires. “You’ll overhear them talking about how they’re coming on vacation from San Francisco or L.A.,” a Big Sky ski-lift operator told me of the newcomers.
".. Big Sky stands apart for other reasons. The obvious distinction is the Yellowstone Club, a private resort hidden in the mountains above the community that Justin Farrell, a professor of sociology at Yale and the author of Billionaire Wilderness, has described as “the pinnacle, or inevitable telos, of the trajectory of extreme wealth concentration in the United States.”
Illegals flock there for work and the rich are happy to exploit them.
"... Bozeman, the demand for construction workers is virtually endless, a demand that has been met by a massive influx of immigrant workers, largely Hondurans and Venezuelans. I met one woman named Kendi, who now works framing houses for new construction projects in Big Sky. While waiting to cross the border, she sent her children ahead of her; they were held in a facility outside El Paso before the whole family made it to Montana. Some migrants arrive in Bozeman with ankle monitors, another longtime Bozeman construction worker from Mexico told me. “They cut it and throw it into the canyon,”
So then, unable to afford housing, construction bosses pit them up in apartments crammed with a couple of dozen tenants. And the benevolent developers are building workers' slums on the cheap to house their new-age serfs.
"Lone Mountain has spent more than $300 million on community housing and plans to build over one thousand more units. One of these projects is the Powder Light, a drab collection of stacked prefabricated boxes costing $1,700 a month per room, often shared, and backed by Lone Mountain; the 448-bed development was finished in 2023. A current Yellowstone Club employee, who had previously worked for the resort, was one of the first tenants, and he told me he experienced water pooling on the carpets and fuses blowing if the stove and oven were used at the same time. “Everything about the housing here is the most half-assed, cheaply built garbage that you can imagine,” he told me.
I'm sure the nuveau riche are flocking there to combat global warming, so it okay
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/05/sli ... te-equity/
".. Big Sky stands apart for other reasons. The obvious distinction is the Yellowstone Club, a private resort hidden in the mountains above the community that Justin Farrell, a professor of sociology at Yale and the author of Billionaire Wilderness, has described as “the pinnacle, or inevitable telos, of the trajectory of extreme wealth concentration in the United States.”
Illegals flock there for work and the rich are happy to exploit them.
"... Bozeman, the demand for construction workers is virtually endless, a demand that has been met by a massive influx of immigrant workers, largely Hondurans and Venezuelans. I met one woman named Kendi, who now works framing houses for new construction projects in Big Sky. While waiting to cross the border, she sent her children ahead of her; they were held in a facility outside El Paso before the whole family made it to Montana. Some migrants arrive in Bozeman with ankle monitors, another longtime Bozeman construction worker from Mexico told me. “They cut it and throw it into the canyon,”
So then, unable to afford housing, construction bosses pit them up in apartments crammed with a couple of dozen tenants. And the benevolent developers are building workers' slums on the cheap to house their new-age serfs.
"Lone Mountain has spent more than $300 million on community housing and plans to build over one thousand more units. One of these projects is the Powder Light, a drab collection of stacked prefabricated boxes costing $1,700 a month per room, often shared, and backed by Lone Mountain; the 448-bed development was finished in 2023. A current Yellowstone Club employee, who had previously worked for the resort, was one of the first tenants, and he told me he experienced water pooling on the carpets and fuses blowing if the stove and oven were used at the same time. “Everything about the housing here is the most half-assed, cheaply built garbage that you can imagine,” he told me.
I'm sure the nuveau riche are flocking there to combat global warming, so it okay
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/05/sli ... te-equity/