by Travis Mateer
No, you can’t make this shit up.
But you CAN anticipate this bullshit, like I did two years ago, when I asked the following question: Should Missoula Be Rolling Out The Red Carpet For Cognizant Amidst Our Housing Crisis?
Obvious I think the answer is NO, but I’m just one of those pesky gnats buzzing the edges of the privileged hypocrites who can’t find housing for their salaried employees. You can file this under boo-fucking-hoo:
Davis, one of the panelists, offered one example she had just come across at a meeting in Kalispell. She said Applied Industrial Technologies, a significant employer in the Flathead, could hire 200 workers tomorrow at salaries of $60,000 to $130,000, but there are no homes for them to move into.
It’s really adorable that ATG (acquired by Cognizant) has a non-profit ED (Andrea Davis, Homeword) complain for them on this panel. That’s not the case for an eager tenant of the Riverfront Triangle, onX. No, they’re gonna do their complaining DIRECTLY in this Missoulian article:
Weber said onX has offer letters out to about 20 potential new hires right now.
“Our most recent hires have had a lot of difficulty finding housing,” he said. “Which I think we all know, (is) dependent on that. We’re a tech company, so remote has been an option.
Weber said one new employee who is trying to move from Seattle to Missoula has had condominium groups sign a lease and then resend the offer twice.
He said the company could easily hire almost 100 new people over the next year, including customer service representatives, software engineers and other “high-value” jobs.
The complaining just goes on and on. It’s a bit nauseating.
Back to the panel, here’s the lineup, including a URD manager, doing the complaining. This one is REAL rich!
At the meeting the three presenters, Davis of Missoula, David Fine of Bozeman, and Jesse Jaeger of Missoula, offered perspectives on the housing market from their different vantage points. They also shared possible solutions for lawmakers to consider going into the 2023 legislative session.
“We must prevent Bozeman and Montana from merely becoming a playground for the wealthy,” Fine said.
In Bozeman, the median sales price of a single family is fast approaching $1 million. Fine, program manager for six of Bozeman’s urban renewal districts, said the median cost of a single-family residence is $812,000, or $112,000 more than it was in October of 2021, and police officers, firefighters, construction workers and nurses can no longer afford to live in the city.
I know I’m beating a dead Paddlehead Moose when I say Urban Renewal Districts are FUCKING DRAINS on a city’s ability (through its general fund) to deliver essential services for bustling ZOOM towns, like Missoula and Bozeman, thus a contributor to HIGHER property taxes, which leads to MORE EXPENSIVE housing.
But don’t tell that to Ellen Buchanan. She’s busy spending public money to make propaganda like this:
It’s simply galling how those who make housing in Missoula MORE expensive get panel-platformed to bitch and moan about their HIGH-END employees from Seattle having condo-leases rescinded.
Boo-fucking-hooing might have to be a repeating segment here at Zoom Chron.
Stay tuned!
JC
Friends in the medical field are commuting from Butte to work in Bozeman. Friends in the medical field are working 60-70 hrs/wk in Polson because they can’t hire due to expensive housing.
Goodwill closed in Bozeman – GOODWILL! Because they cant staff due to housing.
But yep – yay tech!
I was blown away by Kevin’s assertion in your documentary that MORE THAN 40% of Missoula’s population is composed of (what I’d term) the “Lazy Classes” who earn more than a million-per-year “passively from stock dividends and rent collection.” So nearly half of Missoula has filled up with trust fund babies who daily shit on the lives of locals? These affluent Evian-suckers contribute absolutely NOTHING to our society but are all-too content to greedily lap up everything that hasn’t yet been exhausted. Meanwhile, local shop owners bitch about not being able to find minimum wage employees anymore, because if people earning $60k+ can’t find a home, how in the hell are the working classes supposed to maintain? Hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when that slug Ellen Buchanan and her “free money” cult keep taking your boots away and calling it progress.
The only other demographic I can think of that’s left in this gentrified valley who haven’t felt the overwhelming destructive power of this institutionalized REAL ESTATE THEFT are retirees who don’t have to compete for wages because they’ve got guaranteed monthly income from Unkie Sam. And since nobody seems willing to devour them, the super rich have already won, because they can always displace another local to suit their own needs, or employ the efforts of our local bureaucrats to do so vicariously while PRETENDING they actually care about the results that this CLASS WAR have on lifelong Missoulians. And with the exception of certain journalistic efforts, it would appear that, overwhelmingly, only CUCKS and KARENS remain in the modern Missoula of 2022; people content to complain about the problem but unwilling to act (in even the most inconsequential ways) because they secretly enjoy their servitude, and constantly sing that all-too-familiar excuse of, “We can’t do anything about it anyway.” I hate to say it, but Missoula is becoming more and more of a SHIT HOLE thanks to other parasitic slugs like John Engen and his loyal lapdog Jordan Hess.