In The New West magazine: Design Showcase
The Big and Little of Western Building
In this" Design Showcase" piece from The New West magazine, two of the West's smaller homes stack up against one of the West's log mansions -- showcasing there are different interpretations of having your own "little" piece of the West.
In this" Design Showcase" piece from The New West magazine, two of the West's smaller homes stack up against one of the West's log mansions -- showcasing there are different interpretations of having your own "little" piece of the West.
First, is two microhomes in Montana's Mission Valley, 126 square feet apiece. Each cost about $10,000. Second, is a 9,700-square-food log house in the Yellowstone Club near Big Sky. With a lookout tower and guest quarters, it costs about $15.5 million.
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Urban Fringe Development Area Project
Where Should Missoula Grow?
To house the growing population, Missoula needs to build about 15,000 new homes in the next 20 years, local planers say. The big question is how the city will accommodate this growth.
Members of the community gathered at the City Club Missoula’s forum on Monday afternoon to address this question and a possible answer: the city's Urban Fringe Development Area Project. The project looks at where growth has occurred and where it might in the future. Its goal is to help the community develop a framework plan of the growth policy it wants.
Roger Millar, the director of the Office of Planning and Grants, discussed the challenges of growth in Missoula and options for accommodating the housing demand.
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From The New West Blog: Housing Trouble News
This American Life: Who Caused the Credit Crunch, and Who Got Crunched
This week's hour-long radio show This American Life will take you in with one of the best business stories, ever. Period.
The housing crisis? The credit crunch? What do they have to do with each other? It's all in The Giant Pool of Money.
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In The New West magazine
Montana’s Cash Cowboy
If you didn't know any better, you might think William Patrick (Bill) Foley II was just another retiring baby boomer looking for golf courses, open spaces and the chance to recapture an idealized childhood of summertimes on the family ranch. A frank man with an almost goofy charm, he speaks of his love for Montana, his concern for the landscape -- and the joy he gets bombing around the backcountry on an ATV or a snowmobile.
But the truth is, Foley isn't very good at leisure. He's got the fancy log home on Whitefish Lake, five West Coast wineries, the huge cattle ranch near Deer Lodge, and the requisite private jets, but he can't seem to help turning everything into a business.
Foley appears to be in a much better spot than most of the Wall Street moguls, Silicon Valley financiers and high-rolling property developers who see the surging "amenity economy" in the Mountain West as the next great capitalist frontier. In some ways, he's representative of the breed: a very rich man who's become enamored with the West, and whose first instinct is to buy it.
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A Bridge Over the Blackfoot
The New/ Old Bridge at Milltown
In 1921, a steel bridge was built across the Blackfoot River at Milltown; the contractor was a company called Security Bridge, and the main man on the job was W.P. Roscoe. Now that bridge is being rebuilt as part of the Milltown Dam removal project - made a little longer, among other things - and will be used as a pedestrian and bicycle crossing. The company doing the work is Roscoe Bridge, a unit of Roscoe Steel & Culvert, a Billings-based company owned by Jim Roscoe - the grandson of the original builder.
The steel truss bridge is not what you would build today - there are cheaper and easier methods - but it holds a powerful place in our industrial history, and in the aesthetic memories of local residents.
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guest opinion: plum creek and mark rey
Backdoor Deals on Public Lands Deeply DisappointingIn Montana, we are proud of our sunshine laws that keep government actions open and responsive to the public. Unfortunately, the laws that apply to the federal government are not as enlightened, which can sometimes lead to nasty surprises from Washington—surprises that impact the clean water and open spaces we treasure on our public lands.
Montanans got just such a surprise two weeks ago, when the Missoula County Commissioners and Senator Jon Tester discovered that Undersecretary of Agriculture Mark Rey, the Bush Administration political appointee who oversees the Forest Service, has been quietly negotiating a backroom deal with real estate developer Plum Creek.
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In The New West magazine
Real Ranch Living: Not Everyone is Selling Out
It's 2:30 a.m., and Bud Boyce, 75, fumbles in the dim light of the pickup cab for the controls of the mounted spotlight.
Outside, the beam cuts the blackness, illuminating clouds of warm breath and glassy eyes as it pans from left to right, then back again across a herd of more than 250 Angus-Hereford cows, all pregnant and ready to give birth.
The cattle huddle in dark masses. Bud plays the light across them, carefully watching for a cow in labor or a newborn calf. With no signs of a delivery-in-progress and no new calves since the last check three hours ago, he wheels his pickup back toward the house and lurches down the frozen drive. In three hours, he'll do it again. Then, ranch hand Mike Horst will take over.
It's a grueling schedule, part of what makes ranching a lifestyle, not a job.
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6degrees Astroblog
What Should be Taught in Science Classes
For nearly a century a battle has raged in our country over the nature of science and how it should be taught to public school students. When Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” in 1859 based on his observations of various animal species during his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, it immediately crystallized a growing disagreement between the proponents of a divinely inspired origin to life on Earth and those who looked for a natural explanation for the multitude of species.
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New West News Brief
Statewide Wyoming Real Estate Steady, Slight Chill in Teton Valley
The Associated Press' Mead Gruver takes a look at the Wyoming real estate market today with two stories: One about a slight cool down in the pricey Jackson Hole area and another about the still slightly tight overall statewide situation.
New Census numbers show Wyoming is ninth in the nation for the lowest vacancy rate in the first quarter (1.7 percent, compared to 3.2 percent West-wide), tied with Hawaii and Oklahoma. New energy workers moving into the state have helped the market, as has the reluctance to go hog-wild with new construction.
In the Teton Valley, Gruver reports there is a little dip in home sales, although the median price continues to climb. (It's at $1.1 milllion.) And, with a proposed moratorium on new building while the county finishes a management plan, those prices might just continue their rise.
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