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The rise in popularity over the last six years of Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone series, which debuted in 2018 and began airing its final episodes this week, is not a fluke.
The Paramount Network series tackles issues that are not unfamiliar to residents of Western mountain towns that have seen their communities explode in popularity in recent years, while also glamorizing the lifestyle of the “Wild West.”
Alongside the economic boost that millionaires’ dollars bring to these towns in the way of tourism and second-home purchases are anxieties about stress on the local infrastructure and workforce, the buying up of large swaths of undeveloped land and a rise in prices that threatens to make living unaffordable for the locals.
During the first season of Yellowstone, the fictional Dutton family, who own the largest cattle ranch in the U.S., battle developers from California, a pair of menacing casino owners and a hoard of Chinese tourists — all of whom have designs to encroach on their Montana territory in some form or another.
The Duttons’ concerns largely echo those in places like Jackson, Wyoming; Bozeman, Montana; Park City, Utah; and other mountain resort towns like them, except that a large portion of the population in these areas, whose families may have lived there for generations, are not necessarily well-to-do ranch owners. Many are service or hospitality workers who often end up living outside of town in order to get by.
Latham Jenkins | Live Water Properties
“What’s happening in the turnover in these resort communities is we’re losing many of the core workers who make it function, as the property [is sold] out to either virtual workers or second-homeowners who are not participating in helping us run the village, and it’s creating a lot of challenges in just being able to function as a community,” Latham Jenkins of Live Water Properties told Inman.
As the popular series sunsets this year, Inman took a look at some of the factors that have contributed to the “luxurification” of Western resort towns — including Yellowstone’s influence — and asked agents what they see as solutions for finding a balance between living options for both working-class and wealthy residents in these areas. The answer is not simple.
A deepening economic divide
Jackson Hole has one of the most unequal incomes in the country, with the top 1 percent of residents earning 132 times the income of the bottom 99 percent of residents, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Meanwhile, the average annual income of those 1 percenters is above $16 million.
Wealthy remote workers and second-homeowners started flocking to such mountain towns after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, home prices and stress on local services have largely been on an upward trajectory.
As of September 2024, the median sale price of all homes in Jackson was $2.77 million, up 80.6 percent year over year, according to Redfin. But Andrew Ellett of Engel & Völkers Jackson Hole told Inman that the average home price in Teton County, as of the third quarter of 2024, was $5.3 million, according to MLS data.
Pre-pandemic, in September 2019, the median home price was under $1 million. The median sale price has also spiked above $3 million at times, hitting a peak of around $3.5 million in November 2022.
The area’s unique geography and the fact that so much of Teton County is protected land also contribute to housing challenges, leaving only so many places available where new homes can be built. Out of the county’s roughly 2.7 million acres, less than 3 percent are private, according to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.
In mountain towns, these challenges are common — there is seemingly a vast amount of land, but it may be restricted by state or federal protections or is not suitable for building because of the geography.
The land grabs
Despite the seemingly ever-growing challenge of having enough affordable housing for local service workers, many locals, who tend to be nature lovers and conservationists, are opposed to building on undeveloped land.
Just in the last year, local outcry halted the would-be auctioning off of the 640-acre Kelly Parcel, a vast wildlife migration corridor adjacent to Grand Teton National Park. Instead of a potential sale to private developers who could build more homes on the land (albeit, likely luxury properties) and bid up the sale price, state officials changed course and developed a plan to sell it to the National Park Service so that the land instead could become part of the national park.
The Grand Teton National Park Foundation will have to raise $38 million, while the federal government will contribute $62 million, in order for the deal to close.
Last week, Wyoming’s State Board of Land Commissioners approved the sale of the Kelly Parcel in a 3-2 vote. Investment income made through the sale will allow the state to earn millions of dollars annually. There is currently no hard closing date on the sale, and Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon must also approve the deal.
Housing affordability struggles
After these Western towns began to skyrocket in popularity during the pandemic, home prices rose as outsiders brought their external buying power to the local market.
Agents who operate in Jackson, Wyoming; Aspen, Colorado; Sun Valley, Idaho; Missoula, Montana; and Lake Tahoe, on the border between California and Nevada, say that prices have doubled or tripled in their markets since before the pandemic.
Ryon Brewer | PureWest Christie’s International Real Estate
In Montana in particular, where Ryon Brewer of PureWest Christie’s International Real Estate operates, the mania of outsiders moving to the state began even earlier, around 2018-19, as the appeal of Yellowstone spurred fans to explore the state’s beauty and lifestyle.
After the show gained momentum, Western parts of Montana experienced a tourism boom, particularly Missoula and the Bitterroot Valley where Yellowstone had been filmed, Brewer said, becoming a “significant economic driver.”
“You could not get a hold of a Vrbo or an Airbnb to save your life for a couple of years, just because of all the cast they had there filming,” Brewer said.
Once COVID hit, people were drawn to the area even more, enticed by its wide-open spaces. “There was this huge sales surge of people looking to have a second home, or maybe a third or fourth home in Montana that was sort of a COVID refuge,” Brewer said, “and it tied in perfectly with the lifestyle that Yellowstone was showing.”
The University of Montana conducted a study, which was funded by Paramount Studios, which found that more than two-thirds of tourists surveyed who visited the state in 2021 were inspired to do so at least in part by the series. The study also found that in 2021 alone, the show created more than 10,000 jobs across a variety of industries, brought 2.1 million visitors to the state and put more than $730 million into the state.
The spending certainly gave Montana an economic boost, but it also created affordability issues in the housing market, Brewer said.
“[Montana has] always struggled with wage creation,” Brewer explained. “Historically, it’s been primarily an extractive state, a great big state, very few people mining coal, timber, cattle. We’ve always really struggled with salaries. And what’s happened is, of course, folks have come in from the coast [and driven up prices].”
Another related challenge is that wages for most local service workers, aside from maybe those in construction, have not risen proportionately with the cost of housing and property taxes, Jenkins noted. As a result, many are either struggling to find affordable housing in town or having to move to neighboring towns 30-40 minutes away, which means particularly challenging commutes in the winter or if there’s a landslide on the road into town (a problem that blocked traffic last summer).
“The dynamic pricing of hospitality in a competitive situation does not really afford an environment for the employees to have jobs that truly pay for them to live in the community,” Jenkins said. “We’re losing the ability to house the very people that make the community function. And I really wonder, at some point, do we get a tipping point to where you can afford to live in the community, but the community doesn’t offer the services that you’re accustomed to because we don’t have the worker base?”
Finding balance
The increased attention that Western resort towns have garnered as a result of factors surrounding Yellowstone, the pandemic and the rise in remote work has not been all bad, of course. Increased spending from tourists and second-homeowners alike is good for the local economy, and demand from luxury consumers has given rise to world-class amenities, like high-end ski resorts and award-winning restaurants.
Paul Benson | Engel & Völkers Gestalt Group
“There’s the extra traffic and the non-stop [construction] work that you see everywhere, and the trucks on the road everywhere,” said Paul Benson, CEO of Engel & Völkers Gestalt Group, which operates about 40 offices across the West.
“It’s been very good for the economy in general, by creating these new jobs for the construction workers, the restaurant employees, the hospitals, the schools. And so overall, it creates this need for additional infrastructure, but it’s very good for the economy.”
The problem is that the demand has also created an imbalance in affordable living options for the wealthy versus the everyday working-class person, agents say.
“Pretty much the No. 1 topic for the local governments is employee housing,” Benson added. “The value of homes has basically tripled in some of these communities, particularly starter homes. So that has meant longer commutes, and with the addition of traffic, it is harder on the local worker.”
Jenkins said that one possible solution would be to deed-restrict some housing in Jackson for locals so that housing stock is preserved for that community group. The challenge is simply getting the government to move on such measures in a timely fashion.
“As a Realtor, what’s missing has been the ability of local government to keep up with the pace of this change and the land development regulations,” Jenkins said. “It takes years and years and years to update them, and they don’t move as fast as the trends do.”
“Every time a deeded parcel moves from someone who’s living and working in the community to someone who’s either virtually working in the community and/or with us seasonally, we’re losing our capacity to help run our village,” Jenkins continued.
“What’s needed — and the planning tools don’t truly exist in Jackson Hole — is a mechanism to deed-restrict properties to those that are working in the community,” he said. “What’s missing is the incentive of local landowners to sell to an entity that would deed-restrict it and then sell it back to a local resident. We don’t have a mechanism to do that, so there’s no incentive for property owners to not want to sell to the highest and best use.”
Ellett noted that there are a couple of affordable housing projects in the works, both in Jackson and South Park, at the very southern end of town, but he said that those developments won’t cover the outsized demand.
Andrew Ellett | Engel & Völkers Jackson hole
“What we realized is that, no matter how much of that happens, we will never be able to keep pace with demand,” Ellett said.
About two years ago, the Teton Board of Realtors also created the Community Housing Fund, which allows every agent and seller in Teton County to designate proceeds from their home sale or a portion of their commission to help fund affordable housing in the county. The association partners with the Jackson Hole Community Housing Trust, Teton Habitat and Teton County Idaho Joint Housing Authority to fund projects in the region. Ellett was one of the fund’s founding members.
Those residents who are able to get a foothold in the market and stick it out for at least a few years also hope to reap the rewards, Ellett added, which doesn’t help the inequalities in the market — but that’s also simply the nature of buying and selling in a high-demand area.
“The same people I know who have complained about affordability issues for 20 years in Jackson, when it comes time to sell their house and move to Arizona, they sell their house for the absolute tippity-top of the market, right?” Ellett said. “They don’t sell it for 50 percent of the market … I think it’s their right to do that. And you know, my job as a real estate professional is helping them buy and also sell their property for the most amount of money because it is their most important investment.”
As some long-time locals have decided to downsize as they age, a new phrase that Ellett has started to hear is, “We’ve decided to move back to Wyoming,” meaning that with the new waves of tourism, luxury services, rising prices and traffic in recent years, Jackson Hole has started to feel like it’s in a different state than the one they grew up in.
“They have decided that Jackson Hole has gotten a little bit too crazy for them,” Ellett said. “They feel like they’ve peaked in their investment and haven’t completely left Wyoming, but they’ve sold, purchased something rural and then pocketed the rest for retirement.”
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