It's only community if everybody has a place

Walking composition

Those who’ve read the introduction to my book No Trespassing will know of the Badger-Two Medicine area in northwest Montana and the 40-year fight to retire oil leases there. Two days ago an announcement came out that the last remaining lease is being retired. This article in my local paper details the purchase agreement over the lease; I hope to hear more while attending the Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance’s annual Gathering in a couple of weeks.

5% of On the Commons revenue this quarter will be given to the People’s Food Sovereignty Program.

I was working on an entirely different essay this week partly about staying at the American Prairie with my sister and her family over Labor Day weekend—which has become an annual ritual for all of us—combined with something that’s been on my mind a lot and that came up in the comments last week, which is the question of, “Who gets to say no?”

But that essay is currently at 4000 words and I could see the prairie section needed to be removed along with other heavy revisions. Plus I linked to the more comprehensive essay I wrote about American Prairie two years ago (then called American Prairie Reserve), and if you’re relatively new here I do recommend reading it. It has much better photos than I took this year, and gets into what I think is one of the least-understood sources of societal tensions: identity. In American Prairie’s case, cowboy and settler identity.

This current essay was exploding at the seams and it was about time to go dig potatoes and pick some cucumbers for dinner anyway and then the Neighborhood Bear Report text thread popped off with news of a black bear and three cubs in the adjacent four-acre nature preserve, which has a lot of apple trees. The Neighborhood Bear Report is always a source of good humor (except for that one time the guy at the end of the road sloppily shot at a bear who was getting into his outdoor chest freezer and ended up just pissing the bear off) and sometimes cute photos, and also prompts my annual season of “Should I really let my kids walk to school?” The answer to which is always yes. We’re all at far greater daily risk from people inattentively driving enormous vehicles around anyway.

So that one will wait for another day. Who gets to say no is integral to colonialism, imperialism, exploitation, and extraction, and is a question that matters enough to explore fully, though in less than 4000 words.

It is related to something that’s been on my mind, which is slightly Montana-specific but I think in the end applies wherever you live: who has a say in shaping community.

A couple of days after I returned from my trail crew in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, my sister and I attended a meeting at city hall scheduled to cover Montana’s new law regarding cities’ required Growth Policy plans, and its limitation of public comment on developments after plans are adopted. It was sobering to listen to—and to see the statistics of median home prices, rents, and incomes from 2007 compared to now—and heartening to see the huge turnout. There is a lot of work to be done and I hope people manage to maintain that level of engagement.

Afterward, I went and pulled up an interview that journalist Kathleen McLaughlin published almost exactly two years ago on rural gentrification and small towns in the American west, with author of Pushed Out Ryanne Pilgeram. That interview has stuck with me and I think of it often, especially after meetings like this one:

“It seems like we aren’t asking what communities want, we’re waiting for developers to come in and tell us. Even when the city (of Dover, Idaho) tried to push back, the developer took them to court. . . .

We need to plan for growth, and for climate change, people who do remote work, people are going to come to Montana and the West. I think we’re at this moment where people can see how fragile the service economy is and we have to build communities where everybody has a place.”

During the Q&A portion of this meeting, one woman took over the microphone to ask if people from outside our city’s zip code would have a say in the Growth Policy and then asked if “we” really want people from “outside” (aka “them”) to have a say in the town’s growth. Thankfully, a woman in the front row responded immediately: I work here, she said. I’d live in town if I could afford to but I can’t.

What does it take to build communities where everybody has a place? It probably starts with one where everybody has a say.

---

A few weeks ago my father, younger sister, and I were hanging out together and rambled into telling funny stories about houses we used to rent when I was growing up. We lived in Belgrade, Montana, until I was 10, and after that moved around frequently enough that I attended 6 schools in 6 years and my sister says we moved house 13 times (I only kept count of schools, not homes). Each of those rental houses had its own idiosyncrasies, creating its own set of quirky, colorful memories.

One of them was a place outside of Polson, down a little hill—the kind of place where the directions included “turn left at the second potato barn.” Our phone was a party line that always seemed to be occupied, and we hadn’t had a phone much of my life before that (we first got a landline when I was 9), so I’d ride my bike two miles over hilly gravel roads to my nearest friend’s house, where we read Anne of Green Gables and played basketball in her family’s alfalfa field.

My sister and I shared a tiny room with concrete walls. It was almost brutally cold. Probably more so for her since I had a mattress and she slept on a foam mat on the floor.

My father was telling us that the reason the house was so cold was that its only heat was an inefficient wood stove in the main room, and the only type of firewood he could find when we moved there was damp birch, which to put it mildly burns like crap. Not to mean any disrespect to dung fires. I’m sure they’re more effective.

We were laughing about that house and how cold it was, and the tiny one-bedroom apartment we briefly lived in in Chico, California, when we all stopped and I said, “There’s no way we’d be able to afford that place now.”

And we couldn’t. The housing prices where I live—across the county, not just in my currently insanely expensive town—are astronomical. I’m guessing that we probably wouldn’t have ended up homeless. We might have, but my financially stable-enough grandmother often helped us out. Maybe we could have moved into her tiny house in Great Falls, but no way could my family, living on food stamps and the free lunch program as we often did, have afforded rent right now, much less down payment for a mortgage.

Too many people who have the power to make decisions about inequality, poverty, housing, and all the rest of it have never faced caring for children without a roof over their heads, never had to choose between medicine and food, never been subjected to the exquisitely contemptuous social dismissal that comes with being poor, much less without a home—never experienced being a political tool, but never a human being worthy of mutual respect. They’ve never felt the seams of a ragged safety net rip, never known what it’s like to live without that net at all, never tried to survive in the economic cracks of a society. Some of them don’t even believe those cracks exist.

---

There was an article in The Atlantic a few weeks back profiling some changes in zoning laws and approaches to housing in Montana that—I say this with all possible respect that I once had for The Atlantic and continued respect for the editors I’ve published with there—idiotically claimed something along the lines of “Montana might have solved housing.”

The article featured a number of recently passed laws, some of which are needed (I’m all for density and infill and rethinking what people mean when they say “neighborhood character”), but most of which are simply a wish list from developers and those who profit from real estate transactions. None of these laws will show whether or not they have improved—much less “solved”—our dire housing situation for years to come, nor did The Atlantic bother to interview even one person who’s, say, had to move away permanently due to rent increases, or any unhoused person, or anyone living in an RV or camper in a family member’s yard. The Missoulian had a good critique of the article (though I object to the defamation of chokecherries in the headline):

“Positing that a simple ‘let developers do what they want’ policy will fix Montana’s housing crisis shows the thinkers can’t see over their own castle walls.”

The law under discussion at the Growth Policy meeting was one of those. While it promotes—one hopes—intensive community engagement in development of a growth policy and development vision, it then prohibits any public meeting regarding specific developments once the Growth Policy has been adopted. My understanding is that, if the development fits within a city’s growth policy plan, city staff are required to approve it and no public discussion is allowed.

I can see the argument for this being that it then prevents people from turning out to NIMBY down, say, an affordable housing development. But it also prevents people from being able to object to, say, a low-rent apartment building being torn down by an absentee developer to be turned into “lifestyle condominiums,” which is currently my least-favorite local development followed by the second and completely unnecessary “boutique hotel” being built downtown.

Some people whose opinions I often turn to supported this law, so I’m reserving some judgment. But fundamentally, we will never solve problems of inequality by giving more money to the wealthy, nor will we solve them by blind faith in a free market that expects profit-seeking will eventually persuade developers to build places people can actually afford to live in.

Trickle-down economics hasn’t worked in the 40 years since it was first grafted onto the American psyche, and trickle-down housing isn’t going to fare any better.

My sister asked probably the best question at the meeting, which was whether or not the state would strike out any Growth Policy regulations our city adopted that the state legislature didn’t like, and the answer was that nobody knew. It was a necessary question because the last time my city passed measures to get developers to include a percentage of affordable units in their developments, the state legislature promptly made that measure illegal. Which really means that any city’s Growth Policy plan is only good so far as it can meet with state legislative approval. Given the current legislature’s track record, I’m not loving our odds of “solving” anything. If I’m wrong, I’ll gratefully eat my words.

If you’re in Montana, this law applies to where you live. If you have time and/or energy, I encourage you to start looking into what your own place is doing with its Growth Policy plan.

If you’re not in Montana, well, community engagement still matters. It often doesn’t go anywhere. It’s often frustrating to the point of breaking my own exhausted brain. I understand why people give up. Societal trust has been broken and eroded across the board, and I personally find it rare to meet people at any level of government who are willing to listen rather than just wanting to tell you what they think. Truly listen, not just nod along to show they’re “listening.”

But I’ve also been involved in local civic work for a good few years now, and I know who shows up at these meetings every time, whether it’s the planning board or the board for the dog park. For the most part, it’s people who are willing to deal with the tedium and the finicky details and the sacrifice of time because they’ll benefit. And having attended and participated in these things for years, I can only pass on Pilgeram’s advice that she shared with McLaughlin two years ago:

“For places like Butte or Helena or Hungry Horse, one of those places that’s the next to fall, organize now. Build a group of concerned citizens who do the work of meeting regularly, who have a vision, who show up at city council meetings. So much of this happens in the dark, but it’s important to have a group of people who are willing to be witnesses and are willing to speak up, to essentially pretend to have more power than they have.”

I’ll add to that encouragement to read this op-ed in my local paper by the person who runs the Flathead Warming Center, the low-barrier houselessness shelter I’ve talked up before. She’s one of my personal local heroes and is probably the first person I’d turn to for input on what people actually need:

“We urge the [County] Commissioner to stop grouping everyone who is unsheltered together and labeling this group without any genuine attempts to understand the difficult and complex issues that the homeless community experiences. We implore him to stop implying that those struggling in our community must have a character flaw, only needing to find purpose in one’s life. This is a hurtful narrative that furthers the stigma of mental illness in our community. We invite him to listen to — and learn from — what is actually happening.”

If nothing else, maybe we can all be witnesses in our communities. Failure is possible, but so is success.

There are possibilities for more, if we’re patient and persistent and keep showing up for the places we love while working harder to ensure that everyone’s voices are heard and everyone’s needs are considered. Listen to people who know where the cracks are not because they’ve read an economic theory about them, but because their bones know what it’s like to try to shape a life within them.

---

Driving home from American Prairie toward the Rocky Mountain Front. Who could ever tire of this sky?