Bakken Housing in Sixty Years of Boom and Bust

I don’t usually make a big deal when an article or chapter that I write appears in print. After all, it feels a bit like telling everyone that I’m just doing my job and despite the appearances of this blog, I’m really trying to spend more time promoting and publishing the work of others.

That being said, I’m really happy with the chapter that I wrote with Bret Weber and Richard Rothaus. It appeared this week in Kyle Conway’s edited volume, Sixty Years of Boom and Bust: The Impact of Oil in North Dakota 1958-2018.

You can read our chapter here.

I distinctly remember wiring the first draft of this chapter while sitting on the relatively uncomfortable couch at Renos Apartments in Polis on Cyprus. For some reason, I had struggled to think of something compelling to say for this chapter. The volume brings together chapters from a book published by the University of North Dakota Press in 1958 called the Williston Report with a series of new chapters written by experts on the contemporary Bakkem oil boom. Since the Williston Report  deals with housing in a number of different contexts, we had to disentangle the authors’ observations and judgements on Bakken housing from across multiple sections of the book. 

More significantly, we had to figure out how to update their observations both in terms of the ongoing discussion of housing and its relationship to social justice and in terms of the specific situation in North Dakota’s Bakken oil patch. This means attempting to understand how the view of housing as an investment in the 21st century shaped attitudes toward housing in the Bakken in the context of a highly mobile and increasingly precarious workforce. In short, we consider how different attitudes toward housing and home shaped the Bakken situation in the 21st century. This was particularly appropriate because the 1958 Report was written at a time when many mid-century attitudes toward housing, suburbanization, and associated values were coming into sharper focus.

And, we did this all in a dense and disjointed body of Caraherian prose that is sure to force the reader to search long-delayed predicate and play “find the verb” amid the dense forest of subordinate clauses, appositive remarks, and various particles. We use the word “indeed” far more than is strictly necessary.

If you can wade through what passes for academic writing, my hope is that you’ll find something of interest and maybe even value in our contribution to this book. Even if you don’t, the download is free.