Why I Left Bozeman, or: Who Will Make Our Soy Lattes Now?

When I moved out of Bozeman a few years ago, I did so with a feeling of profound relief. In fact, I felt as if I had waited too long to leave, chastising myself for not doing it sooner. I might have had a few more bucks in my pocket if I had managed to get out while the getting was good, or at least better. 

Even so, leaving Bozeman is one of the best choices I've ever made. 

But first, let's render unto Bozeman what is Bozeman's, to borrow a phrase from the good book: it's a very pretty town. Gallatin Valley is about as beautiful a location as can be found on God's Earth. It's got rugged mountains jutting into a big blue sky. In spring and early summer, when the veil of snow is lifted and everything practically glows green, it's a wonder to behold. Everyone on the planet ought to see it. But there's the problem. Almost no one can afford to. If you're a millionaire, it's an enchanted playground.

Now, however, you've got to wonder if a million bucks would go far enough these days - better plan on being a multi-millionaire.  

As of early 2021, the cost of living in Bozeman is about 121% of the average for the rest of the country. That's approaching Denver, Colorado prices. By comparison, Missoula is at about 104% of the average. But that only tells part of the story - the real estate market in Bozeman is so red-hot that properties and homes are being bought sight-unseen by monied out-of-staters nearly as soon as they are offered on the market. Most Bozeman homes put up for sale have multiple offers on the first day.

While the overall cost of living in Bozeman is a hair under Denver, the median cost of a home - and these aren't giant mansions, mind you, but just unassuming little one or two-bedroom houses, are $484,000. That's more than the median price of a home in Denver; the price of a house in Bozeman is an incredible 187% of the national average - meaning it's nearly twice as expensive to buy a home in Bozeman as it is in an average place. That same home that cost nearly half a million in Bozeman would cost about $180,000 in Oklahoma City, or $286,000 in Tempe, AZ.  

That real estate boom is affecting all of Montana, but especially western Montana, with anything between Bozeman and Anaconda experiencing massive jumps in the real estate properties. If you've been following any of this then you've surely seen numerous think-pieces about how Montana is now a refuge for work-from-home zoom commuters looking to escape languishing urban hellholes and seek out new lives way out west.  

You might think of these folks as the reverse of those pioneers who came West to homestead, enduring lives of back-breaking difficulty, isolation, and danger. Rather, they're a passel of big city folks looking for lives of greater ease in America's heartland - they can live decent, simple, and above all picturesque lives out here in the real America, avoiding the traffic jams, Trader Joe's, infectious diseases, and mass-shooters.  

But I'm not here to complain about them, mostly because Bozeman's problem was dire before they even got here. Plus, who can blame them? It's natural to want to live in a nicer, cleaner, more beautiful place. The problem is the way it bisects Bozeman's culture right down the middle, making it feel like a city occupied by two armies, leaving a lot of people sandwiched uncomfortably in the middle. 

Nothing made it more clear to me than working in the retail sector of downtown Bozeman. I was employed at a well-known record store that had been there for decades (before being priced out of downtown), and even over the few years I was there, I noticed that the people coming into the store were beginning to change. We always had hippies that smelled of marijuana and patchouli - it's a college town after all. And though they smelled bad and listened to bands with names like "King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard," I didn't mind them so much. At least they weren't ostentatiously rich. 

But gradually, we started having a new kind of customer, the type that looked like they were hedge-fund managers living out some fantasy of engaging with the "real America." People pulling out their fancy credit card that weighs about five pounds and seems to be made of some space age metal and ringing up $1500 worth of old Waylon Jennings and Highwaymen records like they were buying a pair of used wranglers.

Once, while straightening up the used records, I overheard one guy complain that, while the San Francisco tech company had a chilled cooler full of trendy micro-brews, the free brews weren't hoppy enough for his taste. I thought, "My god, this guy gets free fancy beer at his job? Everyone at mine has to sneak into the bathroom to sip from their stashed flask!"

So Bozeman became a vacation town for affluent out-of-staters - a nice place to visit, as it were, but a horrible place to live for those who made $11 or $12 an hour. At one point, I lived in an apartment with four or five other guys, and I'm sure I don't have to explain how cramped, smelly and all-around unpleasant that was.

And yet, the simple fact is that someone has to cook the trendy grass-raised artisanal burgers served to tourists with cool haircuts. That's where life in Bozeman becomes untenable because if the people cooking your burgers can't afford to live in the town, it breeds a not-inconsiderable degree of fear and loathing amongst the underclass. I began to feel the way that the regular people in Hawaii must feel - those that have to watch everyone else enjoying their beautiful island vacations but unable to themselves afford a night at the resorts frequented by the better-off.  

Only in Bozeman, they're not vacationers anymore. The cash-rich tourists have bought all the available houses at prices that would make most Bozeman natives spit-out their PBRs in disbelief. I hate to sound hysterical, but it's not unlike being colonized. To return to my earlier metaphor, Bozeman is an occupied city.   

I thought that I noticed a sort of resistance forming, and I couldn't be entirely on their side either. Here's the perfect example. A friend of mine once went to a fast-food restaurant in Belgrade for a burger. Her family lives in a trailer park in Belgrade, which lies some 8 miles outside of Bozeman, serving as a bedroom community for those who can't afford to live in Bozeman proper. My friend ordered her sandwich and was amazed when the pimply-faced 14 year old behind the counter asked her if she was an outsider.  

"An outsider? What do you mean?"  

The little snot persisted: "Where you from?"

"Bozeman."  

"You're an outsider, then."  

And while you can assume that the little shit got it from his parents, justifiably angry over watching their city get taken over by people who could buy and sell them over their extended lunch break, I think that considering someone who lives 8 miles away an "outsider" is pretty preposterous. She made sure to inspect the burger for gobs of spit.

Bozeman and Belgrade are close enough together that you have to stretch the definition of "town" to consider them different communities. Yet in spirit, in median income, and in viewpoint, they may as well be on Venus and Mars. And more and more native Bozeman-ites, unable to pay exponentially rising rents in Bozeman, are moving to Belgrade. Belgraders, in turn, are moving to Manhattan. Manhattanites will have to move to Logan, or Three Forks, or eventually, to Oklahoma City or Tempe, Arizona.  

You might say that I'm complaining rather than offering solutions, and that's where you're right, bucko. If I had an answer I'd sell it to Bozeman for a few million dollars and have a great big keg of extra-hoppy IPA installed in my trendy new office space that looks out at the Bridgers.  

Instead, I moved. In fact, I moved to Butte, forming what may have been a preliminary wave of colonizers heading to the Richest Hill on Earth because, as of this moment, it is cheap enough to allow someone to live here even if they're not a millionaire. But it's only a matter of time before word gets out about Butte, too. 

I fear that, before long, Bozeman will be for the richest of the richest: work-from-home tech warriors who telecommute to San Francisco via Zoom and show off the quaint new cowboy hats they bought, and complain that the kid who works at their new favorite downtown coffee shop - a kid who makes $13 bucks an hour if she's lucky - doesn't know how to properly froth an oat milk latte.  

The $13-an-hour coffee kid, for her part, will spend her fifteen-minute cigarette breaks fantasizing about mansions on fire, class revolution, and which icy route she'll drive to get home to her overpriced Manhattan apartment that she shares with six other waifs and a dog.

Again, I don't come offering a solution - I just want to describe what a strange experience it was to live in Bozeman, wedged between two groups of people who rely on one another and yet seem to intensely dislike one another at the same time.  

The thing is, until Bozeman's richest invent robots to clear their sidewalks, help them try on expensive hiking boots, and grill $18 veggie burgers for them, they'll need the poor. Which means that maybe Bozeman ought to try a little harder to see that the folks who froth their lattes are able to live in town. Because if they have to drive 25 miles to work each day in the dead of winter, braving icy roads in order to make a pittance, they might start to wonder just why they're still doing it at all. And if they decide against Bozeman, they might just light out for Tempe, and Bozemanites will have to pan-sear their own truffle and micro-green frittatas.  

The only other thing I can think of is to pay the guy making the artisanal burger $22 an hour - God knows he works hard enough. 

But I digress because I think I was setting out to tell you how it felt to drive my shuddering, salt-corroded '92 Crown Victoria overloaded with all of my earthly belongings out of Bozeman forever.  

Well, here goes: it felt like a tiger being freed from a cage.