Month: February 2021

by Travis Mateer

A “boom town” is defined as a town facing rapid growth due to sudden prosperity. The historical context usually has to do with the discovery of a precious commodity, like gold. Once the discovery was made, the boom was on.

Zoom Towns aren’t that much different than Boom Towns. The main difference is this: instead of something like gold driving the growth, it’s the town itself that has become the precious commodity. This was highlighted in ANOTHER article about the skyrocketing costs of housing in Missoula:

Kier also noted that the housing-price situation has a huge effect on the Missoula economy.

“Housing supply is at record lows,” he said. “The cost of construction is up and the median sales price hit $350,000. That ‘Zoom town’ thing hit Missoula really hard.

Grant Kier is one of those worthless people who gets trotted out from his perch at the Missoula Economic Partnership to state the obvious for the newspapers. If you want to know what this dude is SUPPOSED to be doing, here is some context from MEP’s about page:

The Missoula Economic Partnership expands prosperity and improves quality of life by engaging in strategic business development, creating pathways for people to realize their potential, and fostering our culture of diversity and innovation.

All these quasi-government partnerships with carefully crafted language are really nothing more than PR nodes for Missoula’s political establishment. When you scratch at the surface, like I do every week, what lurks behind the shiny words they hope to build their liberal utopia with are the same old patterns of corruption and nepotism that always thrive when transparency is a joke and the public is strategically uninformed about the details of the establishment’s schemes.

Here is the harsh reality: no one can stop our Zoom Town from Zooming because our town is an idyllic location for out-of-state wealth to park their meat sacks and wait out the pandemic. And it’s the out-of-state home sales that is REALLY driving the costs of housing:

Brauer noted that an influx of buyers from other places helped push prices, as did a low inventory of homes for sale.

“There’s lots of out-of-state interest, with one in three sales occurring in people from out of state,” he said. “It’s a really vigorous market. Whatever we can do to increase inventory we’d love to see it. We really need more residential housing. Whatever we can do to help facilitate that would be a great help to the real estate industry as well.”

The real estate industry doesn’t need any help. The people being priced out of living in Missoula need the help, but that help isn’t coming, not when our illuminated braintrust can simply switch out cost-burdened Missoulians for deep-pocketed Californians who can afford the ever-increasing property taxes.

I live in the part of Missoula that will be seeing the most growth in the coming decade because west of Reserve street is where there is land to build.

I experience the influx of people moving to Missoula when I take my dog out to the woods for a walk. Parking is getting more crowded and often times I have to drive to a second location in order to get some solitude.

One example of this is the other day, out at Council Groves, my kids and I ran into two people who had three stupid little dogs on leashes and wearing sweaters. They were looking at our big dog (who doesn’t need a leash) as a mortal threat. I am increasingly on the look-out for these obvious newcomers because too often they bring with them attitudes of imposition from wherever they are coming from.

This influx isn’t going to abate any time soon. It’s a part of our NEW NORMAL. That said, we don’t have to just passively accept these changes as inevitable.

If you don’t like the changes happening to Missoula, now is the time to get informed and engaged.

Inaction and apathy are perceived by our political establishment as a green light to aggressively pursue their agenda. If we don’t show them our red lights soon, they will forget we even have brakes on this out-of-control vehicle careening toward their fiscal cliff.

by Travis Mateer

This week’s episode of Zoom Town is a conversation about HOW we determine the value of something and the sometimes ugly dynamics involved in WHO determines that value.

For example, if a member of your family is violently killed at a homeless shelter in Missoula, the legal system is the entity that calculates financial damages in a wrongful death case. Of course, you have to either find a lawyer willing to take the case on contingency, or pay out-of-pocket for the legal costs, which for many people is cost-prohibitive.

Another part of the value discussion includes the challenge of monetizing content because, to put it bluntly, writing blog posts and recording podcasts for free is not sustainable for me. I have a donation button at my about page, books of poems for sale, and a Substack account where I am serially publishing my work of fiction, Zula, but the resources those platforms have produced have been minimal (though I deeply appreciate ANY financial contribution).

To raise money for my reluctant journalism, I am selling an original piece of art at the Zootown Arts Community Center this month for $10,000 dollars. The price of the piece includes advertising spots on ALL remaining episodes of Zoom Town for 2021, starting in March. Since I’m releasing one podcast a week, that’s 44 episodes. Also, 40% of the sale goes to support the ZACC’s programming.

Another part of the podcast conversation is the WallStreetBets/Reddit uprising against hedge fund investors like Melvin Capital. My guest, Tim Adams, is much more knowledgeable than I am about these financial shenanigans, so it should be an informative discussion.

We recorded our conversation last Thursday, four long days ago, so more information has come out since about the players involved. One interesting blog post I ran across is this one by Pam and Russ Martens at Wall Street on Parade. From the link:

Yesterday evening, CNN’s Erin Burnett told millions of viewers that it was “amateur traders” who had taken on the powerful Wall Street hedge funds to pump up the share price of GameStop. The New York Post also called Keith Gill, the man who initiated the frenzy in GameStop shares, an “amateur investor.” This characterization of Gill fits with the broader mainstream media narrative that this is an exciting David versus Goliath story. Unfortunately, the facts keep getting in the way of that narrative.

Wall Street On Parade has confirmed that Keith Patrick Gill, a man holding highly sophisticated licenses to trade and supervise others on Wall Street, is the same man using multiple identities to promote GameStop on social media platforms. Gill, and a member of his family, have confirmed to other media outlets that Gill used the identity of DeepF***ingValue on Reddit’s WallStreetBets message board to promote GameStop and that he used the identity of Roaring Kitty on his YouTube channel and Twitter page to help engineer a short squeeze against the hedge funds that were betting the price of GameStop would fall.

Like many people inspired by these events, I would love for this to be a story of David vs. Goliath, but I’ve seen what happens when people invest too much psychic energy in establishment narratives, like Russian collusion with Trump, a seditious photo-shoot at the Capitol, the efficacy of masks, and the big-hearted efforts of pharmaceutical companies to save mankind from a Frankenstein flu.

It’s important to remember that establishment narratives serve power and cui bono is ALWAYS a worthy line of inquiry when it comes to identifying motivating forces behind surface-level outcomes.

If you DO NOT WANT your establishment narratives challenged by inconvenient facts, then by all means, just keep reading propaganda news journals like the Missoula Current.

But if you want a better idea of what is REALLY going on in your rapidly gentrifying Zoom Town, support independent voices like mine.

Thanks for reading.

by Travis Mateer

I bought an image at the antique mall the other day because I wanted a visual reminder about the history being paved over with Polly Square and other development happening around the baseball stadium.

Upstream of the swimming pool sits the building where the Missoulian newspaper magic was made. That structure–appraised at 8.58 million–has a “serious buyer” and the property will, if everything goes as planned, close in spring.

I’ll make the prediction now: condos.

With change-change-changes continuing in Zoom Town, I’d like to highlight a quote from our Mayor from five years ago regarding development on East Broadway:

“The East Broadway corridor will be unrecognizable a decade from now,” Engen said. “We have a renaissance, as it were, in south Missoula happening around what formerly was the K-mart store. Urban renewal districts are the single most effective economic tool available to cities in Montana.”

How’s that renaissance going, Missoula?