This story by Skylar Baker-Jordan appeared on The Daily Yonder on June 11, 2026.
I live in a ghost town.
No, really.
In March, I took a job editing a local newspaper in Glasgow, Montana. Yet, unable to find a house in town, I wound up living about 20 miles north in Saint Marie – dubbed “Montana’s newest ghost town” in a recent lecture hosted by the Montana Historical Society.
What was once military housing for those stationed at the Glasgow Air Force Base, when the base was decommissioned in the 1970s, the town around it was largely left to decay into the prairie. Saint Marie was once home to about 7,000 people; today, barely over 300 call it home, while most of its midcentury ranch houses and duplexes stand weathered and abandoned.
I have grown to love Saint Marie, but the fact is, I wouldn’t live in a ghost town if I could have found a home in the town I work in.
A new bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), Jim Justice (R-W. Va.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) aims to help people like me do just that. The proposed legislation would allow farm credit institutions to lend on homes in areas with populations of 10,000 or fewer, increasing the population limit from 2,500, which was set by the Farm Credit Act of 1971, The Hill reports.
This is a good start, but it is not enough. The rural housing crisis will not be solved simply by opening more access to mortgages. We must address the underlying issues, including the need to build more affordable homes. After all, a mortgage is useless if there is no house to buy.
Though the American housing crisis has been percolating for decades – beginning with the subprime mortgage crisis during the Great Recession and continuing as new builds skewed towards higher-end homes and zoning laws prevented the construction of multi-family dwellings – in rural America, it became most acute after the pandemic. What should have been an economic boon to small towns instead fueled a shortage of homes, threatening to displace longtime residents, something wholly predictable in hindsight but not noticed by many at the time, including myself.
“Remote working allows small towns and rural communities to finally compete with big cities and suburbs,” I excitedly wrote for Newsweek in 2022. “As the cost of living in cities across America continues to skyrocket, the ability to work from home could transform into an exodus of educated professionals from their urban bubbles into the hinterlands.”
To my credit, that is exactly what happened. Since the pandemic, rural communities have seen an influx of transplants – often remote workers – seeking a lower cost-of-living and a slower pace of life. Rather than building to accommodate these new arrivals, though, demand has outstripped supply.
This has led to soaring home prices and property taxes, which price out longtime residents as transplants are better positioned to shoulder the financial burden.
“Home prices increased at an unprecedented rate following the start of the Covid-19 pandemic,” according to a report by the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies released in December. “The proliferation of remote work, enabling households to live further from their place of employment, contributed to especially sharp home price increases in rural areas.”
In turn, the amount of money needed to live in rural America has dramatically risen in the same period. A study released last year by the real estate company Redfin found that rural homebuyers need to make $74,508 to afford a monthly mortgage payment compared to $36,206 before the pandemic. That represents a 105.8% spike in the cost of homeownership in only six years.
In that same time, Redfin found that rural home prices rose 61.5% despite income in rural communities rising only 33.3% over the same time.
Simply put, rural communities are being priced out of their own homes – and not just by new residents. Last year, Fannie Mae reported that “homebuyers from outside [rural communities] are driving the rise in rural housing demand – with second-home and investment purchasers making up a large share early in the pandemic, followed by buyers planning to move in from outside the region.”
To put this another way, my initial hope that remote work would bring an influx of talent and a robust tax base to small towns has been dashed by the reality of greed. Wealthy investors are buying vacation homes or Airbnb-type rentals in rural communities, pricing out rural residents without ever actually living in our communities.
Perhaps nowhere is this more pronounced than here in Montana.
“It’s harder for a Montanan to buy a home than a Californian or a New Yorker,” More Perfect Union’s Brooke Shuman reported in 2024. This in large part because of wealthy individuals moving into the state, buying up land and pricing out Montanans in the process. In Bozeman, for example, Shuman reports the median price for a newly built single-family home is now over $900,000.
Meanwhile, the housing crisis on Montana’s Indian reservations is, and has long been, acute. From inadequate federal funding for tribal housing agencies, leaving them unable to maintain even the limited housing available, to complicated and confusing land ownership patterns and financing and infrastructure hurdles, “the long-standing housing shortage on Indian reservations in Montana reinforces cycles of poverty by forcing young residents to seek opportunities far from home and by discouraging financially secure citizens from returning to tribal communities,” the Montana Free Press reported last year.
While the circumstances in Indian Country are in many ways unique, the brain drain tribal communities experience is not. If we want rural young people to stay, or to attract professionals to serve our communities as doctors, lawyers, teachers, or police officers, we need places for them to live. Affordable places.
To their credit, Montana Republicans and Democrats have come together to address this issue. In 2023, the bipartisan “Montana Miracle” was passed. These laws required larger municipalities to allow for duplexes in single-family zones, allowed for multifamily and mixed-use dwellings in commercially zoned areas, and mandated that all cities allow accessory dwelling units.
The state continued to try to level the playing field in the 2025 legislative session. One law overrode local restrictions on building heights, allowing construction of buildings six stories and taller. Another raised property taxes on high-value homes; Governor Greg Gianforte, a Republican, estimated that about 80% of Montana’s homeowners would see a decrease in their property tax, an important relief for homeowners whose tax bills skyrocketed as property values increased far beyond what many could afford.
These are steps in the right direction, but they are not enough to address the rural housing shortage. While cities like Bozeman and Butte may benefit from high-rise condo buildings, a place like Glasgow – way up on the tundra – will not. More is needed from both the public and private sectors, including more affordable single- and multi-family housing, relief and protection for renters, and mortgages which consider a homebuyer’s full financial profile – including rental payments, utility payments, and phone payments – to establish creditworthiness, as opposed to simply what is reported to credit bureaus.
If we want rural communities to thrive, we must enact sweeping changes at the local, state, and federal level. We must offset the rising costs caused by millionaires and billionaires snatching up homes they won’t occupy for most of the year and driving up costs for the rest of us. And we must build – yes, in your back yard, and in mine.
The cost of inaction is not more people living in ghost towns like Saint Marie. The cost of inaction is more Saint Maries – once-thriving rural communities that simply no longer exist.
The ghost town is an icon of Western history. Let it remain that. Invest in rural housing now, or the ghost town’s past may be rural America’s prologue.
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.