The New West Magazine
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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Essay: In The New West magazine
The Family Farm, Version 2.0
I spread my sleeping bag on the floor and crumpled my coat for a pillow. I put the bag where my bed used to be.
The room still smelled the same. Aside from the echo, there was something homey, something warm, the smell of a vanilla candle still lingering in the empty walls. My brother and I were at the now vacant house for the night. It was Thanksgiving, and we wanted to stay somewhere familiar. The land had sold, but the house hadn’t yet, so we would stay the night on the floor in my old bedroom.
Facing me, in the wall, was a small hole about the size of a heel. My brother and I had been fighting about something teenagers fight about and, in a tantrum, my foot connected with the wall. My brother had laughed. I was 16 at the time.
I had forgotten about the hole, hidden by a dresser long ago. As I ran my fingers over it one more time, my brother walked in, shaking his head. He always told me I was too sentimental about this place. It’s just a house, just a farm. They’re just walls. It’s just dirt.
He didn’t believe it either.
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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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Another Harbinger of The Crunch
Idaho’s Village Green Development Files for Bankruptcy
The Village Green at the Valley Club, a new high-end subdivision and golf course development in Ketchum, Idaho, filed last week for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, owing more than $24 million to its creditors.
The development plan includes 43 custom homes -- valued at about $3 million each -- and a nine-hole Tom Fazio golf course, but so far only 13 homes have been completed and only seven of those have been sold, according to developer Henry Dean.
"We expected to do a lot better," Dean said. "We just fell off of our pro forma."
It's the latest in a string of bankruptcies among developments in the West, from Tamarack Resort in Idaho to Promontory Club in Utah, further evidence that the high-end real estate market in the West has been deeply affected by the credit crunch.
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In The New West magazine: Project Watch
The High-End Real Estate Market: They Went Bankrupt?!?
The national real estate pullback and the credit crunch, combined with several years of sky-high construction costs, have some luxury developments in the New West on the ropes.
While bankruptcy is an imperfect prism through which to view the effects of the market slowdown, these five cases offer rich glimpses into the operations and financing problems.
More bankruptcies are undoubtedly on the way. The B-word has even been thrown around as a possibility at the vaunted Yellowstone Club, where the divorce of owners Tim and Edra Blixseth has compounded its woes.
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In The New West magazine: Spotlight North Idaho
Coeur d’Alene Tribe Rides the Idaho Boom
There's a certain optimism and sense of limitlessness to Chairman Chief Allan's air that explains, even better than statistics or testaments to his business acumen, just how the once-destitute Coeur d'Alene Tribe has become an economic power and political player in Idaho.
In his office the 35-year-old smiles boyishly. He's speaking about the tribe's immutable bond to the rolling Palouse region of North Idaho and his sense of mission as chairman: "We look at this tribe as a Fortune 500 company, but it's not ours. We're not doing it for us. We're doing it for our kids."
In the past 10 to 15 years the 2,000-member tribe has undergone an impressive turnaround. Tribal enterprises' total revenue surpassed $300 million in its most recent fiscal year, with about $100 million in earnings. With 1,400 people on its payroll, the tribe is the second-largest employer in Idaho's five northern counties. In 1989, unemployment among tribal members was close to 70 percent. This year, it's in the single digits.
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In The New West magazine: Spotlight North Idaho
Players of the Panhandle
North Idaho has no shortage of real estate developers, but Marshall Chesrown is in a league by himself. Barely in his 50s (retired from the car dealership business since age 39), the self-made millionaire with a high school education lays claim to six high-end developments from Coeur d'Alene to Spokane, his hometown.
Foremost is the Club at Black Rock, which sits on about 600 acres of Coeur d'Alene lakefront property with a golf course and vacation homes. The Ridge at Sunup Bay, on 250 acres nearby, is a private development (residents also get memberships at the club).
Known as a charismatic straight-talker, Chesrown gets high marks from economic planners in Coeur d'Alene. Jonathan Coe, president and general manager of the Coeur d'Alene Chamber of Commerce, calls Chesrown a generous corporate citizen -- giving to the arts and donating land for community use -- and says his developments have helped buffer the area from economic slowdowns in the housing and construction markets.
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In The New West magazine: Spotlight North Idaho
On the Agenda In the Panhandle: Youth, Growth & Silver
The decline and near demise in the 1980s and '90s of logging and mining in North Idaho left a landscape of company towns -- Sandpoint, Priest River and Clark Fork among them -- almost bereft of companies.
The towns searched for new industries and leveraged the area's newfound resort profile with hopes of establishing a diverse and more stable economic base.
"If you go back to 2000, and you compare Bonner County to the rest of the state, we've grown manufacturing jobs faster and added more manufacturing jobs than anywhere else," says Karl Dye, the president of the Bonner County Economic Development Corp.
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From The New West magazine
Boise in Its Own Little Bubble
The Treasure Valley Repo Bus Tour embarked on its maiden voyage in March, driving about 25 pre-qualified and hopeful homebuyers on a tour of Boise and nearby Eagle and Meridian, hunting for deals on foreclosed homes.
"In this market it's ‘Think outside the box.' What can we do to generate some business?" says Nate Wilson, who helped organize the monthly bus tour.
In 2005, Wilson's agency, the Boise branch of Keller Williams Realty, had 600 agents. In mid-April, the count was down to about 380.
Boise has been hammered by the national housing slump and the sub-prime loan debacle. In April, there were 200 homes in Ada County scheduled for a trustee sale, the last step in the foreclosure process, compared to 42 last April. March saw 245 defaults filed, up from 99 in March 2007. In the fourth quarter of 2006, single-family home permits plunged 39.6 percent.
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From The New West magazine
Revenge of the Resource Economy
For years now, talk in the Mountain West has been about the "amenity" economy displacing natural resources as the key to prosperity. But as the housing downturn marches across the region and commodity prices soar, the old standbys have returned as key economic pillars.
Clearly, the industry powering much of the growth in the Mountain West over the past decade -- growth itself -- is limping. Residential real estate, while healthier than much of the country, continues to weaken, especially in larger cities like Boise and Salt Lake and in resort markets like Big Sky. The luxury second-home sector is also taking a hit, with high-profile projects like Tamarack Resort in Idaho and Promontory in Utah seeking refuge in bankruptcy.
Yet still-tight labor markets, continued job growth and commercial construction -- all of which are at least partly related to the natural resource boom -- have kept the overall economy in positive territory.
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