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Town of Shoshoni demolishes motel to make way for more local housing

Shoshoni town sign as spring storm rolls in. April 2022.
Taylar Stagner

The town of Shoshoni received a grant from the Wyoming Business Council earlier this year to make the town more suitable for housing expansion. Officials cited the Wyoming Mushroom Farm as one reason to have local housing. The Shoshoni Motel will be demolished to make room for a new housing project.

Christopher Kojima, Shoshoni’s treasurer and Chief of police, said the new housing will be subsidized. But he’s careful not to call it affordable housing, which he said has a bad connotation.

“We're building and constructing housing that's affordable for the local workforce, to support our town and projects and the jobs that we have in our town, while also allowing families to live here,” he said.

Kojima said he hopes the new housing will be constructed in 2023. The demolition of the Shoshone Motel will move forward in the next couple weeks.

Taylar Dawn Stagner is a central Wyoming rural and tribal reporter for Wyoming Public Radio. She has degrees in American Studies, a discipline that interrogates the history and culture of America. She was a Native American Journalist Association Fellow in 2019, and won an Edward R. Murrow Award for her Modern West podcast episode about drag queens in rural spaces in 2021. Stagner is Arapaho and Shoshone.
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