Photo: Tim Mossholder / Unsplash

Affordable Was an Oxymoron

Gregg Zart arrived in Williston, North Dakota, in February 2012 with a job offer and no place to sleep. He was a graphic artist who had been laid off from a sign shop somewhere in the lower forty-eight — one of the newly unemployed who heard about a place on the northern Great Plains where unemployment was functionally zero and rig workers were earning forty-two dollars an hour. McDonald's was offering eleven and couldn't find takers. The oil boom had turned a farm town of twelve thousand people into the fastest-growing micropolitan area in America, and every apartment, every trailer, every spare bedroom with a door that locked was spoken for.

Zart called every apartment complex in town. The waiting lists were a year out. He slept in his van for six weeks. Then he found a trailer — small, cold, parked in a lot with dozens of others that had appeared on the prairie like mushrooms after rain. He lived in it for nine months before an apartment opened up at the Walmart Supercenter where he had found steady work within seventy-two hours of arriving. He documented it all on YouTube: the traffic jams on two-lane roads built for farm equipment, the winters that dropped to forty below, the particular absurdity of a town where a traveling barber could earn $180,000 a year while a schoolteacher couldn't find housing she could afford.

The man camps materialized first — rows of modular units and shipping containers converted into dormitories, stacked on unpaved lots at the edge of town. They were temporary housing for temporary workers, men who had left families in Texas or Louisiana or Ohio to chase six-figure salaries on the rigs. The camps operated outside the town's residential zoning. They had their own generators, their own water, their own waste systems. At peak, Williston's man camps held an estimated 3,500 beds. The workers ate out every meal. The bars stayed open. The gas stations ran twenty-four hours. The town felt like it was running a fever.

But beneath the fever, something quieter was happening. Long-time residents — retirees, young families, people who had lived in Williston when rents were $400 a month and a house cost less than a pickup truck — were watching their landlords discover that oil workers would pay three times the going rate. Rents tripled. Leases were not renewed. Eviction notices arrived with the efficiency of a market finding its price.

Three days. That's how long a North Dakota landlord has to wait after a missed payment before filing to evict.

0.002% to 7%

The numbers are from Princeton University's Eviction Lab, published in the journal Society & Natural Resources in 2024. In Williams County — of which Williston is the seat — eviction filings were 0.002% in 2010, the year the Bakken boom began accelerating. By 2019, the filing rate had exceeded 7%, a level comparable to major cities like New York and Philadelphia. In the same period, fracked oil production in Williams County grew from 300,000 barrels per month to 7.5 million barrels per month. The correlation is not coincidence. It is mechanism.

That's the mechanism. A commodity boom attracts high-wage workers who bid up rents. Landlords, following rational economic incentives, re-price their units to the new market. Long-time renters, whose incomes are not connected to the oil industry — teachers, retail workers, retirees on fixed incomes, healthcare aides — cannot match the new price. They fall behind. They get evicted. The wealth from the boom concentrates in the hands of rig workers, oilfield service companies, and landlords. The displacement concentrates among the residents who were there before the first well was drilled.

The local housing authority ran into its own structural limit. As rents soared, the cost of Housing Choice Vouchers — the federal subsidy that covers the gap between what a low-income renter can pay and the market rent — rose proportionally. The Williston housing authority hit its budgetary capacity with only 50% of its authorized vouchers in use. The subsidy program was designed for a market where rents were affordable and vouchers provided a modest supplement. When rents tripled, the vouchers became mathematically insufficient: the per-unit cost consumed the budget before the program could reach all eligible households. Federal resources that were adequate for a farm town were not adequate for a boomtown.

So we're running a housing subsidy program designed for $400 rents in a market where rents hit $2,000. And calling the program insufficient.

The bust revealed the second half of the mechanism. During the boom, the city and county encouraged permanent housing construction to replace temporary man camps. Investors built luxury apartment complexes on the assumption that the boom would last twenty years. Williston itself issued $226 million in debt to fund the infrastructure those apartments required. When prices collapsed, the workers left. The apartments remained. The debt remained. The city was left with infrastructure obligations calibrated to a population that had already departed, and a housing stock that was simultaneously overbuilt for the bust and unaffordable during the boom.

As of September 2023, evictions in Williams County were at an all-time high — years after the peak of the boom. The Princeton researchers noted that the effects of the boom on housing instability persisted long after oil production stabilized because the structural changes to the rental market — higher base rents, weaker tenant protections, housing authority budget constraints — had become permanent features of the post-boom landscape. The commodity cycle moves on. The displacement it produced does not.

The Renter's Side of the Boom

Williston's signal is not about oil. It is about what happens to renters when a commodity boom hits a place without tenant protections. The mechanism is identical in every American extraction boom: Midland, Texas, during the Permian Basin surge. Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, during the Marcellus Shale development. Minot, North Dakota, during the same Bakken cycle. In each case, the influx of high-wage workers priced out existing renters, and the regulatory framework — which had been designed for stable or declining markets — had no tools to prevent the displacement.

The Princeton Eviction Lab's research on Williams County is part of a broader body of evidence on what researchers call "resource curse housing" — the phenomenon in which communities that sit atop extractable resources experience housing cost spikes that exceed the local population's ability to benefit from the resource wealth. A 2021 study in the Journal of Rural Studies found that fracking-adjacent communities experienced rent increases 2 to 3 times faster than non-fracking communities, with the steepest increases in the first three years of production growth. The same study found that low-income renters were 4 times more likely to be displaced than homeowners during a boom cycle.

The pattern connects to a prior IN-KluSo signal in the CORE division. In Muskegon, Michigan, an $80 million environmental cleanup produced a 6-to-1 economic return — but the value concentrated in luxury waterfront developments while working-class residents watched from behind construction fences. The mechanism is the same: investment produces value that concentrates among those positioned to capture it (oilfield workers in Williston, waterfront developers in Muskegon) while the costs (eviction in Williston, displacement in Muskegon) fall on residents whose incomes are disconnected from the source of new wealth. The boom is geographic — it happens in a specific place. The benefits are selective — they accrue to those connected to the specific industry. The costs are distributed — they land on everyone who rents.

Williston's welcome sign still reads "Boomtown, USA." The eviction rate is still at historic highs. The sign does not mention who paid for the boom or where they went.

Alternative Explanations