The airport – with a renovation under way – gets a steady stream of private traffic ferrying the rich to their homes at places like the exclusive Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, about an hour south, where stars like Justin Timberlake and Tom Brady own multi-million-dollar piles.
“Any given day out at our airport, there will be 80 to 100 private jets on the tarmac, primarily Yellowstone Club guests,” says Corner.
During Covid, local buyers were systematically outbid by cash offers from out of state. So many people bought homes sight-unseen that the state realtor association added a new disclosure form to its contract library. And while Montanans were finding it impossible to get onto the property ladder, others were finding it equally unfeasible to even still rent.
“Every developer in America heard about the exorbitant rental rates in Bozeman and how attractive it was to develop here,” Corner says. Apartment blocks and townhomes began materialising everywhere – fast – with rent for one-bedrooms coming in at $2000 a month or more – something no locals could afford, particularly those on single incomes.
It was on this wave of frustration that Mayor Morrison swept to victory in November 2023.
Now 30, the mayor lives with his fiancée – and two roommates. Before that, about 10 years ago, he rented a room in a duplex for $333; that same room now rents for $900, he says.
Morrison, who grew up in eastern Montana with a nurse mother and incarcerated father, was a founding member of Bozeman Tenants United, the union chapter that has since helped the mobile home parks strike. His mayoral election, he says, was a referendum on housing policy and local government’s perceived abandonment of the average Montanan.
“It really was this huge groundswell… that was clearly saying: We want one of us to represent us in City Hall,” he says.
He sees “a lot of hopelessness out there for the ability to stay in this state, stay in this city in particular,” he says.
Many homeowners have sold up, cashed out and fled the state; renters who’ve stayed are working two to three jobs or living with roommates. They’re moving further out of Bozeman and commuting on mountain roads. Some couples are putting off having children, the mayor says.
Even Folger’s trailer park – where she has lived in her three-bedroom, two-bathroom home for 17 years – is not immune. Her lot rent has nearly doubled since moving in, even accounting for inflation.
“There are so many people here [for whom] this is their last stop,” says Folger, 73, a former Bozeman city grants administrator who now works part-time at Whole Foods (which opened in 2023, the first one in the state). “They have no place to go. They don’t have the money to pay the rent. There’s no housing for them that they can afford. There’s nothing.
“Where are they going to go?”
She and other residents of two mobile home parks unionised in May to stage Montana’s first rent strike in 50 years, according to the fledgling, youth-filled local tenant union that helped them organise. The strike was a response to an almost $100 hike in monthly plot rent – the rent mobile home owners pay to park their home.
The park was soon sold, and is now being managed by a company out of California, leaving the fate of residents – and their mobile homes – in doubt.
“You can’t move a mobile home that’s been sitting for 25 years. It will disintegrate,” says Mountain Meadows resident Ben Moore, 35, who first moved to the park with his father in high school. “The only equity I have is in this trailer. It’s the same for a lot of people … even if we could move the trailer, where are you supposed to move it to?”
Although some residents have agreed to new terms with management, others say the fight isn’t over.
In addition to the election of their young mayor, Bozeman local Katie Fire Thunder, 25, was appointed in December to the Montana House of Representatives. Sam Forstag, a 31-year-old union leader and former smokejumper – a person who parachutes in to fight forest fires – just won the Democratic nomination for Montana’s 1st congressional district, defeating a more establishment candidate.
“Young people have seen, right in front of our very eyes, the way that our leaders currently are not making decisions that are protecting us,” Fire Thunder says.
“They are making reactionary, short-term decisions that are benefiting… the wealthiest in this state, while we are all watching and are like: This is not how Montana works or Montana runs.”
The coffee shop she’s sitting in, near MSU’s campus, is not even 1.5 miles away from JW Heist, a swanky Main Street eatery downtown – where the previous night, diners at the ornate wooden bar included a medical sales rep, an out-of-state property investor and a Colorado dad in town for his son’s MSU orientation.
Looking at the whiskey list – with the most expensive pours costing $170 – the Colorado man noted he’d “seen these elsewhere for a quarter of the price.”
The blonde sales rep seated next to him answered wryly.
“That’s Bozeman.”
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Image source, Getty Images
