There are many people who do not believe what I write about Dickinson, North Dakota.  So I wanted to write some blog posts that show what other people write about Dickinson.

In mid January 2017 I wrote a blog post titled, “How Excessive Land Greed Has Hurt Dickinson For Ever”.  In that blog post I explained that during the Oil Boom the price of housing in Dickinson quadrupled.  There was not a scarcity of land around Dickinson, there was more vacant unoccupied land around Dickinson than just about anywhere else in the United States.  Though the local land owners, local property owners, property managers, and real estate agents may have been able to gouge the out of state workers from 2007 through 2014, this made the out of state workers make up their minds that they would never be able to make Dickinson their home.  They all planned on leaving when the Oil Boom was over.

If you do a Google search for “relocating to Dickinson, North Dakota”, you will find an article from the Inforum.com website titled “Survey: Most out-of-state oil workers not interested in moving to ND”.  This article was written by Mike Nowatzki of Forum News Service in February of 2016.

Two North Dakota State University researchers named Nancy Hodur and Dean Bangsund surveyed 15 firms representing 8,100 employees in 2014 and 2015.  These two researchers presented their results at the North Dakota Housing Finance Agency annual conference in Bismarck in February 2016.

Here are a few quotes from this Inforum.com website article:

“More than 80 percent of nonresidents working in North Dakota’s oil and gas industry don’t want to put down roots in the state, while those who want to relocate see housing costs as a major barrier, researchers found in a survey released Tuesday.”

“When asked if they would like to move to North Dakota, only 19 percent of nonresident workers said yes.

“I thought that was one of the more startling statistics out of this,” said Hodur, an assistant professor in NDSU’s Department of Agribusiness and Applied Economics.

Those workers most frequently cited the high cost of housing and the fear that home values would someday fall below current prices as factors affecting their ability to relocate.

“It’s not because the weather’s too cold. It’s not because they think North Dakota’s a lousy place to raise a family” or that the state’s schools are lacking, Hodur said in an interview. “It’s because it’s too expensive.””

I encourage readers to go read this Inforum.com website article.  You can see, that I am not making this up, the high cost of housing in Dickinson made out of state workers decide that they could never live here permanently.  What the land owners, property owners, property managers, and real estate agents did during the Oil Boom is going to hurt Dickinson for ever.