Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide

PRAY FOR FLATS

Montana, whose fishing rivers were locked up by billionaires decades ago, is now being eaten by Zoomer techies.

All around the [Yellowstone] Lodge, along Montana Highway 35, from Kalispell to Whitefish, are what the locals call “COVID homes,” prefabricated track houses that line up along what used to be a timber farm — all of which were built last year and sold at around $550,000. 

“Most were bought sight unseen for cash deals,” said Doug Averill.

While this may be good for realtors, locals are shell-shocked at the price hikes due to what the Flathead Beacon called the “COVID migration” from states like New York. “(The housing crisis) is happening all over Montana,” one Whitefish local told The Post. “No one who is from here can actually afford to live here anymore.”

According to Realtor.com, just before the pandemic in December 2019, the average home price in Whitefish, a town of 7,700 people just south of Glacier National Park, was $369,450. A year and a half later, that has almost doubled — and the average home price is now $704,000. Local average wages in Whitefish are just $30,642, according to bestplaces.net. 

These are people who have cheered the lockdown of ordinary people while they themselves got richer, who move to rural areas and immediately post it, vote for gun control, and politicians who will ruin the local schools and the country and in general, just won’t leave the rest of us alone. I don’t want to live anywhere near them, and that’s getting increasingly hard to do.