Wyoming Public Radio's award-winning podcast The Modern West is back with its eleventh season. The nine episodes are called Cheap Dirt, and they're all about the quirky and sometimes extreme workarounds Westerners are finding for affordable housing.
Host Melodie Edwards traveled around the American West visiting folks living in yurts, cars, tiny houses, old mobile homes, like Kevin Cox, who lives in his RV.
“It might sound fun to live off the grid, but until you see that snow whipping by and the storm's coming on you and the wind and the thunder. I mean, I rode some stuff out in my trailer that probably wasn't too smart, but I'm like, ‘Whoa, here we go!’”
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Nicky Ouellet: What made you interested in telling the stories of people finding out-of-the-box solutions to affordable housing?
Melodie Edwards: I knew from experience that it was a thing. I lived for three and a half years in a canvas-sided geodesic dome outside Flagstaff, Arizona. It was in this area called Alpine Ranches, and it was kind of a no man's land at the time. My husband, Ken Koschnitzki, and I bought 10 acres for $10,000, and it allowed us to live rent free.
NO: I mean, it does sound like a sweetheart deal.
ME: Yeah, but it was a hard life. In one episode we reminisced about it. We had no idea what we were getting into.
Ken Koschnitzki: Alpine Ranches, when we first started looking at it, was the Wild West. Literally, people would get in gunfights out there. And like, somebody got shot in the gut and so, it had its own kind of set of rules.
ME: That was back in the late ’90s. Since then, I've seen more and more Westerners going this route, and it seems to have everything to do with the fact that eight of the top 10 states with the worst housing shortages are right here in the American West. That means that in those states, there's less than 30 affordable homes for every 100 people.
NO: Oh, wow. I really didn't realize our region was that strapped. And just to say – affordable housing is generally defined as rent or mortgage that costs less than 30% of your income. So what did you learn as you started digging into the data about this type of lifestyle?
ME: I learned that the U.S. census only just started trying to count folks living this way. They actually had to create a whole new category for people who aren't homeless, but who also aren't living under a traditional roof. They're now called “transitory situations” officially. Arizona has 12,000 people living this way. Here in little old Wyoming, we have around a thousand. But the census folks admitted to me that transitory situations are notoriously hard to count. It's kind of hard to go out and knock on a tent door, for instance.
NO: Yeah, that makes sense. So tell me about some of these people that you ended up talking to.
ME: One guy I met was a musician in Frisco, Colorado, and he was living out of his RAV4, even in their bitter winters.
Paul Minjares: I have my actual diesel heater right here. I have a gas can for extra gas, and this is the duct that will go from here into my window. And then that's where it blows the dry heat in there. And I keep warm all winter. This has the exhaust, so there's no fumes coming in. So it's nice and safe. No CO2. And I sleep in shorts every night, even during the sub-zero temperatures.
ME: Wow! How cold did it get this winter?
Paul Minjares: I think the coldest it got was like negative nine.
ME: I also went and visited a trona mine worker who's living off grid in a ’70s mobile home outside of Rock Springs. He's raising his two small children by himself, one who has Down syndrome and requires a lot of electricity for her medical equipment.
Casey Bruder: I get up at 5:30. My daughter has a G-tube, a gastro tube. So she has to have a pump. She takes all her liquids via this tube in her belly. She can't drink without aspirating.
ME: He had to buy extra solar panels for her care. He's now building a log home for them and making great progress, I might add.
NO: That makes me think of tiny houses. They seem to be all the rage these days.
ME: They are. You've probably seen lots of cute miniature houses on Pinterest and Instagram, but they're actually per square foot about 40% more expensive than a regular house. But I met a couple in Fort Collins, Colorado who got one much cheaper by winning it in an auction.
Erica Geisenhagen: We thought we had lost because we couldn't go past the $45,000. $31,000 was already us being like, ‘Eeeeeh!' But then the $36,000 was like just a last minute thing. We were buying scratch lottery tickets the night before it closed.
Eric Forbes: Hoping we could win an extra couple grand to do something.
NO: Who else did you meet?
ME: I also went down to Taos, New Mexico to visit my brother's ex-wife who's been struggling to live there lately. So many people moved there during the pandemic. That rental prices skyrocketed.
Janelle Cassidy: Yeah. I don't have money. I don't have savings, I don't have family that's giving me money, you know what I mean? Like, it's all me. So I was like, ‘What can I do?’ So I started looking at land and I thought, ‘Well, if I want land, I want water rights.’ So I found this property, I think on Craigslist.
ME: She bought it, put up a canvas-sided yurt, some solar panels and moved in. She's in her early fifties. And it's not the first time that she's lived in a yurt. She raised both of my nephews in one back in the ’90s.
NO: That sounds like my dream. Maybe naively.
ME: I mean, maybe? My brother and my nephew don't have many fond memories of the Mesa, which is another no man's land outside Taos, especially of their roads.
Joseph Edwards: Nobody's grading anything. You can't even get an ambulance out there or a fire truck out there.
Jojo Edwards: The cops won't go out there because it's full of gun wielding Mesa hippies.
Joseph: No, they literally will not drive over the cattle guard off the highway.
Jojo: They will, but it has to be a pretty extreme circumstance. A few years ago there was a cult. I guess the FBI got involved with that.
Joseph: Yeah, and then I'm sure they used helicopters.
Jojo: Yeah, yeah they did. They did use helicopters.
ME: Such no man's lands sell dirt cheap land, but they don't have many social safety nets. I also discussed that issue with author Ted Conover, who wrote a book on the subject called “Cheap Land, Colorado,” and it's about a similar area outside of Alamosa, Colorado.
NO: It sounds like Westerners are turning to this off-grid living when push comes to shove, but there are some serious drawbacks to it.
ME: I heard this message loud and clear from the director of the Laramie Interfaith, a nonprofit that works to address homelessness and food insecurity right here in Laramie.
Josh Watanabe: People who are gonna go out and homestead and build their own cabins – and there are a lot of people that are able to do that – that's great. Where I draw an issue with this is the idea that this is a solution to our housing crisis. Because it's absolutely not.
ME: Over and over, I heard it's not really fair to let more and more people face the hardships of this lifestyle as an answer to a larger social problem.
NO: Just from hearing these snippets just now, I can't wait to listen to the full season. When does it come out?
ME: Episode one, where I lay out the problem and share my own story of living off grid, comes out on October 29. So you'll wanna make sure that you're following us on your favorite podcast app so that all the episodes just automatically download.
