The people who feed, clothe and clean up after the West’s rich newcomers can’t afford to live alongside them. How do you commodify an entire region into a playground for the rich and keep workers around to make the lattes and paint the houses?
From Walmart, you can follow a veritable trail of lived-in cars and ramshackle RVs a half-mile to the Bozeman homeless shelter. One August evening, I meet shelter director Jenna Huey on the front steps. She tells me HRDC created the shelter after a person was found frozen to death in the U-Haul where they were sheltering in the winter of 2010. The number of people seeking shelter here has doubled in the past three years, from 197 to 409.
Brian Guyer, Housing Director at HRDC, points out that shelter numbers only capture some of the region’s homelessness. “If we’re seeing those numbers increasing at the warming center,” he says, “we know there are also more people couch surfing, doubling up, living in their car or RV, more people finding a little spot on public land.”
Many of those people are, like Archie Martinez, employed, Guyer says.
