This last week of February 2017, I saw a decline in people, employment, business, and real estate in Dickinson, North Dakota.

In the business that I work for, there has been a very sharp decrease in work over the past year.  Early this week, I had to telephone the manager of a company here in Dickinson that I have been dealing with for a year and a half.  The owner of this business answered this manager’s cell phone and said that this manager was no longer with the company.  This was upsetting to me because this manager was very hard working, he put in many hours of overtime though he was on salary, and he had a wife and three children.  Knowing the manager, the company that he worked for, and what was going on at this company, I believe that he was let go due to a decline in business and an attempt to cut costs.  This manager and his family were not from North Dakota.  This manager was positive, upbeat, intelligent, and fun to work with.  I am sorry that he is gone.

There is a young woman in Dickinson that I like, that I had included in my blog post titled “List Of Attractive Women In Dickinson, North Dakota”.  I had not seen her for several months, and I was becoming concerned that something had happened to her too.  I have seen her father twice at the West River Community Center in the past several months, and once at an event in Dickinson, but not her.  In the past several months when I saw her father, he did not appear to be his normal self, he seemed unhappy and angry. She should have been at this event recently, because she is a human resources person at a company that was involved in the event.  This week I looked at her Linkedin.com page, and she is no longer working for this company in Dickinson, and she has moved to Montana.

This young woman who was a human resources person with a company here in Dickinson, I can’t believe that she isn’t working there any more.  I thought that she was very happy there and was well liked.  She was very pleasant, positive, intelligent, and funny.  I thought that she made that company better for being there, and made people want to work there.  She graduated from Dickinson State University a couple of years ago, and she has many friends in Dickinson.  Her family is not from North Dakota, her father came to Dickinson to work when the oil boom started.  Her mother, father, and younger sister are still living here, I can’t believe that she left.  I don’t think that she would have left Dickinson unless she lost her job, and I could only see that happening due to the company she worked for downsizing due to reduced work.

This morning I saw another young woman that I liked, that I hadn’t seen for several months.  I met her in 2014 where she worked.  She was a sophomore at Dickinson State University then.  She wasn’t from Dickinson, but she came to Dickinson because there was an oil boom, and she could work and go to school.  She recently completed her degree at Dickinson State University.  I asked her what she had been doing, and she told me that she was moving to Colorado next week.  I talked to her for a while, one of the things that I said was that I couldn’t believe that human resources young woman that we both knew, moved to Montana a couple of months ago.  This young woman that was moving to Colorado told me that she was so looking forward to getting out of Dickinson.  A woman that we know, asked her if her boyfriend was moving to Colorado with her, and she said no, he moved back to the state where he came from several months ago.

I was sad that she was leaving, I like her.  I felt bad for her that she had been living, working, and going to school in Dickinson for the past four or five years and now she is leaving her friends and everyone she knows, to go someplace where she doesn’t know anyone.  It is normal for people to leave and go someplace else when they graduate from college, but for the past eight years, Dickinson was a place that people from all over the United States tried to get to because of the many job openings and higher rate of pay.

Several times this week, I looked at job posting websites like Indeed.com, Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, and North Dakota Job Service for job listings in Dickinson.  There were not very many job listings in Dickinson, and the jobs that were listed were not very good jobs as far as desirability, pay, job security, or job longevity.

On Sunday I read the Dickinson Press Newspaper.  In the classified section under housing, there was a 2 bedroom/1 bathroom house for rent for $600 per month, and one bedroom apartments for rent for $425 per month.  Three years ago, this house rental listing would have been $2,500 per month, and this apartment rental listing would have been $1,500 per month.

This Sunday edition of the Dickinson Press Newspaper came with a Home And Land Company Real Estate Guide.  This real estate guide from the Home And Land Company, had as many homes listed for sale now, as the whole entire Real Estate Guide for all the realtors in Dickinson used to have a couple of years ago.  There were many very nice homes for sale, some of the nicest homes in Dickinson, that must have belonged to the highest paid people in Dickinson.  It appears that many of the highest paid people in Dickinson must have lost their jobs, or had their business income greatly reduced in order to have to sell such nice homes.  There are plenty of working class people homes for sale too.

These people that I know losing their jobs or leaving Dickinson, the lack of very many good jobs posted in Dickinson, the greatly reduced rent of rental housing, and the greatly increased number of homes for sale, show that work and business has slowed down in Dickinson.