Montanans Deserve Better

— March 17, 2025 —

Montana is one of the least affordable places to live in the United States. How did we get here?

We've been “Yellowstoned.”

While the television series “Yellowstone” is undeniably entertaining, many of us can’t watch an episode without shaking our heads. It’s not the real Montana: ladies smoking a cigarette while bathing in a horse trough, ranch hands releasing a bull into the local bar at midnight, or cows calving in tall green grass with the sun shining on the rancher’s shoulders.

"Yellowstone" paints a fictional version of our state, a new Montana.

The reality is that no one can buy a home here for less than $400,000 because wages do not support the cost of housing. Our kids cannot build lives next door to us. The next generation is inheriting an unsustainable Montana, a place that’s exclusive, unwelcoming, and built on shifting river sand.

Perhaps we need to find the source of this new, unaffordable, unttainable life in Montana? We have a governor who came to Montana looking to make money and he accomplished this. Born in California in 1961 and raised in New Jerse, the engineer/frat boy who loved to play squash moved to Montana in 1995 and built a business that employed around 1,000 people in the Bozeman area. Kudos to him.

Unfortunately, he brought his California and New Jersey mindset to Montana, as many transplants do. They come for our beautiful scenery and quiet mountain towns and end up wanting a Starbucks on every corner and a neighborhood full of millionaires. That's where we are in Montana, especially on the west side of the state. As you travel east, you may not see the traffic and tourists, but you are starting to see the price creep, or leap, making the cost of living nearly unmanageable.

It’s not like the governor fails to be generous. He gave Montana State in Bozeman $50 million (read: tax write-off) to have his name put on a building. But did that help Montana as a whole?

If the leader of our state is the job creator he claims to be, where are the jobs?

Where is the investment in rural Montana?

Plants are shutting down while the rich guys are getting tax breaks. If you're going to subsidize something, subsidize the sugar beet plant in Sidney and keep Montanans employed. Entice call centers and manufacturers to come to our state and employ our hardworking Montanans.

Gianforte campaigned on his history of job creation, but he has not proven that he is committed to making that happen for the regular Montanan.

Like his clone and counterpart in the U.S. Senate, Steve Daines, Gianforte has no clue what it takes to support agriculture and understand what our farmers and ranchers need to remain in business for generations to come.

Daines trips over his words to hold up Trump's failing administration while completely ignoring what we want and need here at home.

Worse yet, Gianforte spread his sunny California mentality by developing legislators like Ryan Zinke and Troy Downing and doubling down on Tim Sheehy when he should be holding our Congressional delegation to account for undermining the people of our state, from their housing and jobs to the very quality of life Montanans should enjoy.

We've been Yellowstoned by our very own governor and legislators.

They’ve left us with a cost of living crisis, unreasonable home prices, and no new job opportunities. This wouldn't be a big deal if we all owned an imaginary million-acre ranch in the Bitterroot or Bozeman, spending our mornings smoking a cigarette in yesterday's makeup, nursing a hangover in our pajamas on the front porch of our gigantic log home.

Our reality is that Montanans are being priced out of being Montanans, and pretty soon, Gianforte and Daines will get what they apparently want: their own real-life Yellowstone.