These people are struggling to find a home
while being surrounded by billionaires.
- I pay $1,700 for this.
That’s Jackson. The rent is very expensive.
- Jackson Hole is known as a playground for the rich.
It's been home to former Vice President Dick Cheney
and movie stars like Harrison Ford and Sandra Bullock.
And today Teton County, where Jackson Hole is located, is the richest county in the U.S.
And it's also the county with the highest income inequality.
- I've been at the homeless shelter for a while.
It's intimidating and it's not what the rich person wants to hear.
- There's a housing crunch in Jackson Hole.
There are apparently 2,000 folks on the housing waiting list.
You know, the pay for the area it’s, you know, in the upper $20s per hour.
It's great money.
Nowheres to live.
- But even in a place desperate for more housing,
there's small but vocal opposition to affordable housing projects.
This is crooked and you know it.
And I want you to know we're going to sue you.
We were going to sue to stop this.
- We're in Wyoming to learn how the working class
is struggling to survive in Jackson Hole.
And why the least populated state in the U.S. has a housing shortage.
- Patrick Morris has lived in Jackson Hole since 2013.
He's currently experiencing homelessness.
There is a daily fee to stay here.
Currently it's $15 a day.
- Patrick is staying at the Good Samaritan Mission,
the only shelter for the unhoused in all of Teton County.
Currently, Patrick is also working as its culinary director.
- There are probably 15 to 20 people a night.
You know, seven nights a week.
There's times where I serve 40 people all night.
- Patrick says he's been through what he calls "the Jackson shuffle."
Between 2013 to present day,
I've probably lived in about 15 different places in Jackson.
- And for most Jackson residents, that much moving isn't uncommon.
Yeah, rent gets raised, you know, 1,000% with no notice and you can't afford it.
There's no regulations here in Jackson.
- Like many workers in Jackson, Patrick's previous housing was tied to his employment.
Companies have started providing housing for employees
because they know rent is so expensive.
But that quickly became a problem,
because when Patrick wanted to quit, he became homeless too.
I was getting overworked
and they wouldn't promote somebody else
to take off some of the, you know, work that they were putting on me.
I was working 70 hours a week,
not getting paid overtime.
So I told them,
I said, "Look, it's not working out.
You know, I'm getting overworked."
They said, “Well, you can't stay in the employee housing
if you don't work the hours we tell you to work.”
And they basically made me homeless.
- So he came here, to the Good Samaritan Mission.
- About 40-some beds or say.
There's five female dorms upstairs.
And then the rest are men's dorms.
- Currently, the Good Samaritan only has space for single men and women.
Right now, unhoused families have no shelter in all of Teton County.
The Good Samaritan is a working shelter,
which means that everyone who stays here long term has to work full time.
But that's not difficult.
There's no shortage of jobs in Jackson Hole.
And wages here start at $20 an hour.
But in Jackson, the wealth inequality is so vast
that $20 an hour is not a livable wage.
So how was it that this mountain town became home to the ultrawealthy in the first place?
This land was originally home
to the Eastern Shoshone and Shoshone-Bannock tribes.
With the rise of the fur trade in the 1800s,
the two tribes were pushed onto smaller reservations
and white settlers started building homesteads.
When Teton County was formed in 1921,
30 years after Wyoming became a state,
it was actually too sparsely populated and the land deemed not valuable enough
for it to meet county requirements.
But then in the 1950s, Jackson got its own commercial airport.
And a decade later, it got a ski resort.
That, combined with the expansion of the Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks,
brought a lot of tourists.
But those visits to this majestic natural beauty
then led to permanent residency for the American wealthy for two reasons:
taxes and technology.
There's no other way to say this:
Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is a tax shelter.
The state collects no income tax or capital gains tax,
there's no tax on corporations, and the current sales tax is 6%.
The valley has attracted many investment bankers from New York and other states to relocate
and enjoy the outdoors.
The second big reason Jackson Hole became wealthy
is because of technology.
Bankers were telecommuting and taking conference calls from the ski slopes here
even before the pandemic.
And now as work-from-home policies at many companies have expanded,
it's caused even more people to relocate to Jackson Hole.
Today, Teton County has the highest concentration of wealth per household by a large margin —
nearly $100,000 more than the next county on the list.
But that wealth isn't distributed equally,
especially when it comes to Jackson's immigrant population.
This is my kitchen. It is very small, but it is enough for two people like me and my little son.
- Ligia Galeano is a single mom who lives in Jackson with her 8-year-old son, Damian.
She came from El Salvador six years ago
to be with her son's father.
But they're no longer together.
Here we have a small television where we share moments watching movies or funny shows.
- It's not a large place,
but Ligia says she's very grateful for it and her current landlord,
because she didn't always have a place to stay.
I've been looking for housing for one year.
I lived in the living room in the houses of some friends,
I lived in an uncomfortable room, I experienced something very unpleasant.
At some point I thought I had to live in my car for a few days,
because I didn't know where I was going to be.
- According to recent figures, Jackson is more than 20% Latino.
Ligia says the housing situation is much harder for Latinos
because the majority of them are undocumented.
And because many don't have savings.
It is very difficult because
we have to save at least $7,000
to find a place to live.
Because we have to pay the deposit, the first month, the last month,
and we are not talking about $1,000 rent, we are talking about more than $1,000.
So that is something very high, the cost for housing.
- Currently Ligia works at a party rental store.
Ligia has working papers, but that means that it's hard for her to leave Wyoming.
I would have to go through a very long procedure
to let the court know that I am moving from one place and explain why I am moving elsewhere.
- Plus, she says that Jackson is a great place for her son to grow up.
I really don't want to go back to El Salvador.
I had a very difficult and very long trip.
Very ugly and unpleasant circumstances that I went through.
I want him to grow up here, for him to have a better education, a better future in this place.
- But her biggest worry is time.
Her lease is until April but she doesn't know if she'll be able to renew it.
Sometimes he has woken up at night worried and scared,
saying, “Mom, when they tell us that we have to leave this house, where are we going to go?”﻿
- Currently the U.S. is in the midst of a national housing shortage.
According to Freddie Mac estimates,
the country needs 3.8 million new homes to keep up with demand.
And while there's a lot of construction happening in Jackson Hole,
it's a type of construction that's going to make the problem even worse.
The only people who can afford to live here are millionaires.
And the influx of all this wealth has even caused small homes like this 2-bedroom, 2-bath
to be listed at $1.5 million.
While Wyoming may be the least populous state,
Teton County doesn't have a lot of empty land to build more housing.
Jackson is surrounded by
Grand Teton National Park,
and about 40% of Yellowstone National Park
takes up a big chunk of Teton County too.
Jackson has a worker shortage.
Businesses are struggling to find workers
because they can't afford to live here.
But even proposals for small, affordable housing projects
have had a lot of opposition.
We have very few items of heritage left in this community.
I'm adamantly, adamantly opposed
to giving up one square foot
of the rodeo grounds,
fairground.
- This is a recording of a public meeting
about a new 48-unit affordable housing project in Jackson.
The project is looking to build housing next to the town's rodeo and fairgrounds.
And while the actual apartments
won't be built on the rodeo grounds,
the construction will mean that a multiuse exhibit hall
will be relocated onto the fairgrounds next door.
I came in 1977,
and since 1977 we have had a housing problem.
It's never gonna get fixed.
It's never gonna be what the town needs.
What the town needs is our fair and rodeo arena.
- There's a reason that one of Wyoming's nicknames is the Cowboy State.
The people in town take the rodeo seriously
and don't want it affected at all.
I going dedicate myself to making sure
whoever votes for this does not get reelected.
- Even after the public comments and spirited town halls,
the Jackson Town Council voted to approve the housing project,
but construction won't start until 2023.
- That’s not a good sound.
Not what you want to hear.
- Nikki Kaufman moved to Jackson Hole six years ago.
- I came to be a ski bum, and I worked at a ski shop and I worked at a taco shop,
and I thought I'd be here one year
and then move to a city —
New York, San Francisco.
And I fell in love with the community.
I fell in love with the people.
- Nikki is now organizing with the local nonprofit Shelter JH
and asking residents to vote for candidates who are for more affordable housing.
Hi, Katie, this is Nikki.
I am calling on behalf of Shelter JH tonight.
Hi Kenan, this is Libby calling on behalf of Shelter JH.
My name’s Miles, I’m calling on behalf of Shelter Jackson Hole.
Shelter JH has actually endorsed candidates this year.
So if you want to see who we think
the housing champions you should vote for are,
you can visit our website, it's shelterjh.org.
I have been directly affected by the housing emergency here in Jackson.
I moved seven times in six years
until I finally, would say, I was pushed out.
I ended up actually moving to Victor, Idaho,
which is about a 45-minute drive from Jackson
over a pretty steep mountain pass.
Jackson Hole is a playground for the wealthy.
There is absolutely no denying it.
And it would be gatekeeping to say that
not anyone can come here
and take advantage of how incredible this place is.
The problem is the disconnect between
the new people moving in and the issues at hand.
People want to go out to their favorite fancy restaurant
and then they get upset
when their food takes two and a half hours.
And they cannot get from A to B in terms of
"I’m waiting for my food more often than I'm not.
I wonder why that is?
I'm going to go back to my multimillion dollar-home with my housekeeper,
and my lawn mower,
and my yoga teacher in-house,
and everything is hunky dory."
- People really have yoga teachers in-house?
Yes, and facialists and— yeah.
I did not know wealth until I moved here.
- So how do you combat all this wealth to build more affordable housing?
The next morning, I met up with Jessica Sell Chambers,
who sits on the Jackson Town Council.
- In 2016, when I first really jumped into the political arena,
it was because the housing situation was getting so bad.
- Jessica is not up for reelection this year,
but she's been pushing for more affordable housing in Jackson.
Your rent's increasing by 100%,
and you can expect it to increase another 100% by the end of the year.
So it's like your rent goes from $2,000 to $6,000.
You can't go anywhere.
- Jessica voted to approve the controversial 48-unit affordable housing project
near the rodeo grounds.
The biggest hurdle
to affordable housing here was NIMBYism,
which stands for Not in My Backyard.
I think a lot of people don't realize how insidious NIMBYism can be.
They don't think that they're NIMBYs,
but really what it comes down to is
everybody has some creative reason, some very important reason,
why they can't have affordable housing in their backyard or near them.
- And in Jackson's case, it was the rodeo.
But Jessica says the other big thing standing in Jackson's way is state politics.
Jackson is a liberal town
in a very conservative state.
And because of the way the government is structured,
the town council is limited in what it can do to tackle the affordable housing crisis.
We are very limited by state statute
as to how we can generate revenue.
We have access to the most regressive form of tax, which is sales tax.
We can do up to 7%.
And of that, 4% goes to the state.
And that's what they collect and keep.
And any increase that we put forward
has to be approved by voters.
- There's so much wealth here in Jackson,
but it's frustrating to see that
the wealth can't be used to build more affordable housing.
In the meantime, Jessica knows that she has to do her part
to create more housing for Jackson.
So she and her family are using the extra space
they have in their basement to house residents.
- There was a woman with her two sons
and they had nowhere to go.
And this was kind of unfinished
when we got it.
I was like, well, if we can put this together somehow.
And we got in here and we painted walls
and we put the floor in,
and the kitchen and the bathroom weren't here yet
because we didn't have the—
we didn't have the money to do that yet.
So we kind of shared a home, in some ways.
Yeah, they were here for nine months, 10 months,
and then they were able to find another place.
- But some residents in Jackson haven't been lucky enough to find a home.
Back at the shelter, we met up with Blaze McDonald.
Blaze grew up in Jackson.
He had hopes of being a professional skier,
but now works blue-collar jobs.
- Well, I was camping outside for the summer,
and that's, you know, one thing you have to do
when you're in Jackson is camp in your truck,
but sold my truck and now I have nowhere to live.
- Blaze works as a garbage collector in Jackson
and collects the trash for all the wealthy households in town.
But he still doesn't make enough to pay rent anywhere.
Twenty bucks an hour at eight hours a week,
$800 a paycheck? No.
- Now Blaze is without a car.
He says that most people don't realize he can't just get up and leave
and move to a cheaper area.
- Oh gosh,
it's takes money to leave.
It takes money to go places.
Sure, gosh, I’d love to go to Montana or something.
- But even if he wanted to leave,
Blaze says his family would still be in Jackson.
My mom and two sisters live here.
They're homeless too.
They're, they're moving around.
They're, they're homeless just like me.
- It was hard seeing such disparity
in a place known for beauty,
Jackson sure did have an ugly underside.
It's here in Grand Teton National Park, where American photographer Ansel Adams
captured iconic landmarks of the American West.
And it's here that the idea of American conservation
and environmentalism is championed.
But that's come at the expense of people
like Blaze and Patrick.
And families like Ligia’s, who are trying to build a new life here.
This land is supposed to be preserved for all Americans to enjoy.
But what does it mean for the U.S. when only the wealthy have access to nature?