The most expensive place to rent new housing in the US isn’t Miami, LA or even New York. Thanks to the fracking boom, it’s Williston, North Dakota, where Walmart pays $20/hour and new arrivals sleep in shipping containers. How does a city cope with a modern-day gold rush?
‘Dropping dead is my retirement’: the gold rushers of Williston in pictures
Anyone who happened to pass along the northern slope of the Missouri river valley on US Route 2 in 2008, at the start of the global economic recession, would have seen a small city, suffering from the same malaise that was afflicting every other ranching-and-farming community scattered about the immense expanse of the US great plains.
Young people were leaving Williston, North Dakota. The remaining residents were aging and dying off. No new industries wanted to move to an obscure corner of what was already one of the most obscure US states, plagued by a midcontinental climate where the average January night dips down to -18C and the normal July highs are 29C.