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Housing prices ready to soar |
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Written by T.J. Gilles
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Thursday, 28 June 2007 |
 By T.J. GILLES For The Outpost Affordable housing, already scarce and tight in Billings, is due for huge price hikes, housing advocates were told last week at the regional conference of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. “We’ve got sort of a perfect storm going right now,” Billings real-estate developer Howard Sumner told a seminar at the Crowne Plaza. He suggested that this is no “bubble” market such as has been seen tanking in some parts of the nation. “There is no national market. It’s all local, based on local conditions.”
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Homeless population getting younger |
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Written by T.J. Gilles
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Thursday, 28 June 2007 |
By T.J. GILLES For The Outpost In the 1930s, dust clouds from the Great Plains descended on big cities and gave notice to urbanites of economic and social crises that were driving farm folk from their homes. Today, winds of a new set of economic and social forces are creating a class of homeless people, and in Montana those winds may blow toward Billings. “Homelessness becomes a problem to a community when you can actually see the homeless,” says Brenda Brockett of the Mayor’s Committee on Homelessness. Although the homeless often must “live their private lives in public,” she said, there is a large invisible population of homeless camping by the river or other out-of-the-way spots where they may not be so noticeable, or living in cars or “couch-surfing” in various friends’ homes.
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