I’m omitting locations here so these stats aren’t cited, but anyone familiar with the area will know exactly where this was.
The 2021 housing boom destroyed my hometown. When COVID began tearing through American cities in 2020, tens of thousands of people fire-sold their properties in Seattle and Los Angeles and Denver and fled to where I lived. In 18 months our median home value more than doubled, and suddenly a rural town in Montana had a higher cost of living than San Fransisco.
Because the vast majority of these new homebuyers were independently wealthy, their money never touched the local economy—they didn’t join our workforce, they don’t shop local, they don’t go out to eat—so as home prices and rent skyrocketed, working people paid the price. Wages couldn’t afford groceries or an apartment anymore, and I watched our homeless population explode. Many of the folks who fell through the widening cracks of poverty were people I knew personally.
As this chaos metastasized through our working poor, our only homeless shelter overflowed into neighboring parking lots; the banks of the flagship river that flows through our town became cluttered with dirty needles and trash. Meanwhile, our city council pledged millions in public funding to a billionaire event promoter and built a new luxury hotel downtown.
I saw the gory details because I was there building the houses during the day, and going home to my apartment by the river at night. As hundreds more people were laid off left and right during the nascent lockdowns, my job—residential subcontracting—was unsurprisingly deemed “essential.” I was kept around by the state to build extravagant bathrooms and kitchens for these people to make them even richer. I didn’t just build their unimaginative millennial gray showers; I built their equity, inflated their appraisals, drove rent even higher.
(By the way, I’ll tell you a secret as a real estate insider: the vast majority of homeowners are spending their parents’ money. It’s not actually a work ethic thing. Shocking, I know.)
I hated them. I still hate them. I hate everyone in home construction, honestly. Of course I feel kinship and class solidarity with the other subcontractors on site with me—plumbers, carpenters, electricians, sheetrock guys, etc—but I hate the people we work for. I hate the soulless real estate agents and slimy bank appraisers who poke around the job site in their cheap suits that they tailored to look expensive. I hate the fake, pseudo-corporate tone of emails and Zoom meetings with general contracting offices who “just want to check on the bottom line.”
How can I not hate them? Behind healthcare, housing is the most succinct summation of capitalism’s cruelty that I’ve seen. Contained within it is everything that disgusts me about our society, because you simply can’t value property and humanity at the same time. To commodify a place to live, you have to view certain people as subhuman, less deserving of it; and to have it, you have to feel like you earned it, like you’re most deserving of your new million dollar home while people starve. You are more deserving of warmth in a town that hits 20 below every winter. Yes, it’s unfortunate that human beings are living in tents and cars and scavenging trash cans for food, but that’s just how things are. I don’t understand how these people are able to sleep at night.
Maybe I’m susceptible to the same psychological decay because the people I build houses for aren’t really people to me anymore, but what makes them deserving of humanity when they doesn’t value mine? I look at real estate firms, property developers, home buyers, and I see gluttonous pigs, more swine than human, suckling on our labor until they’re bloated and disgusting. They’re tapeworms—eggs laid in shit—lodging themselves in the gullet of working people to parasitize everything they can in the space between our paychecks and our homes. They’re fucking repulsive. “God knows we don’t need another oyster gray house on this street” says another small pudgy white man as he and his friends pace the job site, watching his serfs build his pathetic little kingdom, trying not to get sawdust on his shoes.
My career in home construction has always put my status among the exploited working class at odds with my complicity in the housing crisis. I’ve never felt good about working for these people. I charge them exorbitant amounts of money and spend it on mutual aid, I commit all of my free time to organizing with a focus on tenant advocacy, but the bottom line is I’m giving these people more than I could ever take from them. They pay me a wage that’s worth less and less every year, money they’ll make back in equity next quarter, and in exchange I trade them my skills, my strength, my joints, my youth, pieces of me that I’ll never get back.
That’s not to say I don’t enjoy my work. I actually find it very rewarding. I’ve spent years training both my eyes and my hands to see the small things and make them perfect. Every time I pull off a tricky project or bring a client’s vision to life, I see in its reflection the thousands of hours I’ve spent honing my craft, challenging myself, succeeding many times and failing even more. My work is artisanal, handcrafted, meticulous, and I take pride in that. I’m still far from mastery, but much closer to it than most. It’s just bittersweet that the reward for it is watching people I went to high school with get strung out by the river.
I live in Bozeman, have for 24 years. During the winter I work at the Yellowstone Club, in large measure because they’re the only game in town that meshes with my work as a fishing guide during the summer. Everything you’ve said is true, and you’re not alone in feeling as you do. I can assure you of that!
You know I worked in construction as well but I was just a lowly office person. But it's disgusting how these people operate. You harbor the feelings that I used to harbor, the resentment byw, editing for clarity, and now I'm just so emotionally dead lol. I would have liked to be able to go back to school and said go into the construction field. But here I am unable to even go back to school and meanwhile I know that there are people out there that cut down 200-year-old trees and 400 and 600-year-old trees and then they just pay a fine because that's all that those trees were worth to them was some pocket change of millionaires.
It's grotesque and what's even more disgusting to me is how banks basically disallow the building of homes like small two bedroom two bath home, you're SOL.
Constantly seeing these fancy renovations as well as just awful. I can't tell you how many ugly fake ghost wood floors I've seen just threw all these new homes. I prefer carpet because it's soft, but that's not what is the hot commodity right now.
I felt this post in my soul. This was just a truly a good post. I think I've written something similar before.
I don't know how these people even exist and go home at night and sleep well. And you know I wanted to move to montana. It was a dream state for me and so was Colorado. And now it's will forever just be a dream.
Edited for clarity and to say thank you. I just started my own substack, because, if 420blazeit69 can do it, so can I.