Jackson Hole reserves some housing for those who work full time for an employer in Teton County [1]. This strikes me as a reasonable balance between wanting to control housing stock and maintaining access to cheap labour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip
There was good reason to do away with such concepts.
Night and day. Company doesn’t own the home. Company doesn’t own the stores you shop at.
Where is the non-dollar payment?
The law says landlords must rent certain units to people who work locally. The company is never involved except in verifying employment. If the employee wants, they can commute through the pass to Victor, Idaho and earn exactly what they were earning before.
They hire teams of two and force the men to do the manual labor and the women to do the deskwork.
They force the team to work and live on site. As in, to work there yoy must reside there. They make this sound like a bonus - it's not.
Now, when you inevitably decide to leave you must first find alternative living situation, and another job to pay for it while working extremely long hours at this place (sometimes 7 days a week open to close if they cant hire a relief team- and they only hire teams).
This is beyond evil.
When I was about 19 I worked on a rock quarry in Comstock, Texas. We had to live on-site at the 'wetback shack' (owner's words, and most of the employees were indeed illegals driven over from Acuna, Mexico). This was because he wanted to start work at 4am and this ensured everyone would show up- not his only reason however.
We made minimum wage busting and palletizing rock, even if we operated heavy machinery wage didnt change. They charged us $3 per soda or water at the swear to God it literally was Company Store. We also, we found out when we got our 1st check, were charged rent to stay in the shack. I think at what 3.30/hr (one water per hour!) damn near nothing was left. We, my friends and I who had family in Del Rio, Tx, could leave, and we did. The poor bastards who worked harder than anyone and were generally shit on (the illegals) they couldn't leave. The people who were from Comstock outskirts where there were no other jobs or places to rent? They stayed.
This was in 1999.
Tying living in any way with work is disgusting and not in any way shape or form altruistic.
Got it. I see what you mean. No, they are not. Practically speaking, these jobs are not ones that can be done remotely. (But maybe another could.) More practically, absent these measures, those workers are commuting in.
Sure, you're missing the company owning the church, but fewer Americans are religious now. The employer also doesn't own all the local stores, but "It's not a company town because the stores are owned by people that all know each other (due to it being a small town), instead of one individual" is a little too close to be comfortable to me.
If you buy a workforce house, there is obviously no obligation to maintain employment. I’m not sure how it works for rentals.
The alternatives are flying people into company-owned housing, the way they did in Fargo during the oil boom. That seems far less savoury.
Yes. And then be charged with fraud.
Fair enough. I don’t know the text of the law.
Also, the entire county has a population just over 20,000; the city of Jackson, less than half that. This would cause problems for the employer who let it happen as well as the new resident.
Edit: I know HN hates tedious back-and-forths, so let me just jump to the substantive point: any time you have a situation where you have special carve-outs for an essential good, you're not really solving the problem, you're just encouraging people to game it. See the past thread about enrolling in college part time to get health insurance.
The law isn’t code; mental state matters. If you got a job to buy a subsidised house with a plan to quit, in a small town, that will cause you problems. If you provided that sham job, it will cause you problems.
Maybe they hired a great lawyer and never sent any text messages about their brilliant plan to defraud their neighbours. But most probably they didn’t, and that fact pattern would certainly be enough to warrant scrutiny.
Can’t wait until this explodes and we can have sane housing policies again.
The fear-mongering is always about “first they’re coming for companies, then they’re coming for your home property tax!” and people believe it. With that said, I really hope they DO come for home property taxes, as right now it’s a big part of what encourages the wealthy and previous generations to stay put and never sell (or become landlords and move elsewhere) while pricing new homeowners out of the market, as now in addition to the mortgage on that seven-figure starter home they’re saddled with a few-grand-per-month tax bill.
https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/ has more info.
Seems like the fears are valid, no?
> If the local residents are wealthy enough to live in the area, perhaps businesses have to bite the bullet, raise prices locally, and pay more for essential services like bartenders, wait staff, retail, etc
I love your definition of "essential services" are bartenders and wait staff. You sound like a real great person to be planning for critical events, such as wildfires which occur in our area.
Also "If the local residents are wealthy enough to live in the area" - lol, do you realize in our Town of 16,000 people, there are more than 50% of our houses that are NOT locals. On a busy weekend we expand to about 55,000 people. The problem is not the full time locals, but the temporary residents who exacerbate this problem. Their houses remain off the market for local residents to rent because they want to (rightfully so) njoy their second home for a few weeks a year - which precludes a long-term leaser. It doesn't matter how much wages rise, locally - there are CFO's of local businesses who have had to move because they cannot find housing.
Yes, we live in a national forest, so simply building more housing is slowed down by natural beauty and environmental assessments, and the usual NIMBYism too. But the town is quite aligned behind trying to solve this problem somehow.
I am the OP the commenter was referring to. I wasn't going to bother responding to a nitpick on my use of the word "essential" but you summed up my meaning perfectly.
If all the bars, restaurants, cafes, dry cleaners, etc. go unstaffed (as they are right now), headlines start being made. We don't need to lump people into brush-fire fighters and bartenders in terms of who is essential.
To top it off I'm not a city person and I used to live in Truckee, CA, where this poster is living.
Unless you are living with parents, or with multiple roommates, the housing market in these cities will price you out.
We have this same scenario taking place in the area I live, and NIMBY/zoning laws prevent affordable housing from being developed. I've been to town hall meetings where people decry "affordable housing" as bringing Section 8 and "undesirables" to the area. You mention that even the local school teachers have to commute in from over an hour away due to afford a place to live, but it falls on deaf ears.
If the local residents are wealthy enough to live in the area, perhaps businesses have to bite the bullet, raise prices locally, and pay more for essential services like bartenders, wait staff, retail, etc.