Homeless in a Boom State
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.
Mobile homes and so-called skid shacks line up in a mobile home park in Williston, N.D. The park’s new owner has said he plans to update and expand the park.
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.
This would seem like a perfect situation for tiny/small house builders to move in and show what could be done. What do you think?
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11 Responses to “Homeless in a Boom State”
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Sounds like a great opertunity if you can take it. Buy some property, and start renting it out. I can’t imagine buying a descent RV or building a mobile house being any more expensive that two or three months in a hotel, and you can still park in a walmart parking lot.
Yeah live in a Walmart parking lot, rape the land, then pack up and leave a poisonous mess.
Sounds like somebody could give these poor workers a shot at tiny houses, which would give them their own safe little shelters that are movable in case of a bust. Once built, it’s built, that’s it, and the workers are less likely to be gouged by, say, company stores and company housing.
You know, this would be a great place for shipping container homes, too. There’s all sorts of options that could be made available to these people. With the economy the way it is, people really NEED to be able to take their homes with them.
Oh, by the way, anybody who wants to look up gypsy wagons and vardos should be aware that the French word for vardo is “roulotte”. It opens up a whole new WORLD when searching for them online.
I would think out of work builders all over the country would be packing up their trailers and RVs and heading out there to build new homes for the workers.
Even tiny houses need infrastructure (water, roads, electricity, schools) even if it is less than large houses.
They build RVs with storage and water tanks. An RV park could serve as a first stop for thees people.
FEMA has been selling off their old Hurricane Katrina trailers for a while now. Too bad it would be cost prohibitive to ship hundreds of used trailers to the opposite side of the country. Maybe they could ship them by train?
The FEMA trailers are poisonous, overpriced, and shoddily-built. They’d be better off with some of Jay Shaefer’s tiny houses.
Container houses would be a great idea for this kind of thing. I bet they even have them there already.
Ginmar: I also immediately thought of container housing and the Tiny House movement when I saw earlier articles on this boomtown’s housing shortage. It’s a tremendous opportunity.
I can see a great opportunity for design and building insulated housing but I envision a movable community of everything you could need in a mobile but warm and inviting, solidly build housing development. Unique and well built; eco-friendly and cost saving. The ‘tiny home’ movement is perfect and the land on which to park could be landscaped to include laundromat and grocery; hardware and housewares and they could all be ‘mobile’. Daycare and other services could be incorporated into a new way of living. Alternative building materials could be used. It is a challenge for those up to it.