Did You Know There's An Oil Boom In North Dakota? Plenty of Jobs, Few Places To Live.

Fascinating article though incomplete. It only barely mentions how locals are dealing with skyrocketing rents due to Oil Boom.

This also has overtones of the Great Depression as unemployed workers rushed to California.

Also, imagine what North Dakota will be like AFTER the Oil Boom finally goes bust.

A State With Plenty of Jobs but Few Places to Live
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/21/us/21ndakota.html

WILLISTON, N.D. — When Joey Scott arrived here recently from Montana, he had no trouble finding work — he signed almost immediately with a company working to drill in the oil fields. But finding housing was another matter. Every motel in town was booked, some for months in advance. Every apartment complex, even every mobile home park, had a waiting list. Mr. Scott found himself sleeping in his pickup truck in the Wal-Mart parking lot, shaving and washing his hair in a puddle of melted snow. “I’ve got a pocketful of money, but I just can’t find a room,” said Mr. Scott, 25.

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.

snip

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.

snip

If the problems are bad for oil workers, who are well paid, they are worse for locals in less lucrative jobs, who have seen their rents soar.

There are still some houses for sale here, but many of the newcomers arrive from grim chapters — foreclosures, bankruptcies, layoffs. They have little hope of qualifying for mortgages.

snip

Reverses the trend of tiny, graying, dying towns, at least for a little while.

It sure doesn't sound like this was well planned out. Which usually equals a messy clusterf*cuk.

OTOH, maybe the buffalo will have a chance to roam, eventually.

:shrug:

going through boom and bust with oil, gas, mining. But I can't help but think of the revenue for these small cities and towns, that they wouldn't otherwise get. Just a little injection of fresh blood and money that might keep a small business going, a library open, a senior center open, a rural school open, for a little bit longer.

locals constantly get the shaft. The real estate prices here are high cause of the scenery and proximity to NYC. And while there's been land preservation, there's still high rents/home values and price gouging on all consumer goods and gasoline.

Sigh.

A mixed blessing.

Lots of oil and high-paid oil workers up there. But I think a place like Calgary is much better equipped to handle it than Williston, North Dakota.

an expensive extraction process that, if the estimate of 4.3 billion barrels is correct, will yield roughly around two months worth of oil at the global rate of demand.

before we went whole-hog down the Petroleum Trail, it would have been.

Now that massive amount is more like a drop in the leaky bucket.

the town, they call us...gypsies, tramps, and roustabouts...

Wanna make a bet that if Joey joins a local Prayer Group, his housing problems would be over shortly...or is it that he just won't part w/his pocketful of money for a hypocritical short-term image of security and the "right way to live."

Oh, northern Dakotans, protect your daughters from the 25 year olds coming to a town near you...


Whether your work is physically demanding or mentally demanding, we're all just Kleenex workers now...why shoot for the long-term by signing a 12-month lease or a mortgage.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8186782