In Bozeman, Montana, the visual contrast has become the story: 80 to 100 private jets sit on the airport tarmac any given day, primarily serving guests of the exclusive Yellowstone Club, while residents of two mobile home parks staged the state’s first rent strike in 50 years. The frame makes the displacement feel like a clash between wealth and poverty. But the underlying dynamic is structural.

The city’s population has grown roughly 20 percent since 2019, when it had fewer than 50,000 people. One-bedroom apartments now rent for $2,000 a month or more. Home values jumped 40 percent in two years. Mark Corner, president of Southwest Montana Realtors, described out-of-state buyers paying cash and purchasing homes sight-unseen — conservatives, he said, “fleeing the Covid mess on the East Coast and West Coast.” At Mountain Meadows mobile home park, Sara Folger, 73, a former city grants administrator who now works part-time at the Whole Foods that opened in 2023, has seen her lot rent nearly double since she moved in 17 years ago. Ben Moore, 35, who moved to the park with his father in high school, said his trailer “will disintegrate” if moved. “The only equity I have is in this trailer,” he said. “It’s the same for a lot of people.”

In May, residents unionized and struck in response to an almost $100 increase in monthly lot rent. The park was later sold to a California-based management company, leaving residents uncertain about their future. Mayor Joey Morrison, elected at age 28 on an affordable housing platform and now 30, described “a lot of hopelessness out there for the ability to stay in this state.” He lives with his fiancée and two roommates.

The policy architecture behind the trap

A 4P analysis — Policy, Process, People, Place — reveals two distinct causal chains converging on the same symptom.

The first is demand-side. Montana has no sales, luxury, or inheritance taxes, a configuration that Corner identified as a primary draw for out-of-state buyers. The tax advantage makes Montana a cheaper place to hold wealth. The behaviour of the incoming cohort — cash purchases, sight-unseen buying, a home-value surge, and rents exceeding $2,000 a month — is consistent with that pull. Jeff Michael, director of the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Montana, cited the “Yellowstone Effect” — the hit television drama — as a likely amplifier of destination demand, though the link is correlational rather than causal.

The second chain is regulatory. In 2023, Governor Greg Gianforte signed House Bill 259, which prohibits inclusionary zoning — the practice of requiring developers to set aside a percentage of units as affordable. The Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research identifies Montana as one of only two states to have passed such a preemption law since 2019, the other being Indiana. The policy root is not that Bozeman lacks a housing strategy. It is that the state framework structurally advantages the inflow of capital while removing the city’s tools to manage its effects. The tax incentive is a direct financial mechanism: it reduces the cost of wealth preservation for high-net-worth households, but the in-migration it generates comes without paired mechanisms — transfer taxes, affordable-housing exactions, estate-tax credits for local inheritance — that would capture some of the influx’s value for housing supply.

The gap is a maintained policy choice, not an oversight. Montana has no mobile home park rent stabilization, no just-cause eviction protections for park residents, and no resident right-of-first-refusal on park sales. Comparable regulatory models exist elsewhere — Vermont’s 10 V.S.A. Chapter 153 — but Montana has not adopted them. The Mountain Meadows sale occurred within this regulatory void. Katie Fire Thunder, a 25-year-old state representative appointed in December, described the governance pattern: state leaders are “making reactionary, short-term decisions that are benefiting the wealthiest in this state.”

The supply-side alternative framing — insufficient housing stock from geographic and zoning constraints — was considered and set aside as a primary driver. The magnitude and speed of the price shock exceeds what a supply-constraint model predicts for a city of Bozeman’s size, and Montana’s 2023 legislative package restored middle-density housing rights in existing urban areas while the crisis deepened. Supply constraints remain a contributing amplifier, not the root.

The cultural amplifier from the “Yellowstone Effect” and the national remote-work shift created baseline pressure. But two distinct causal chains — tax policy concentrating demand, and the regulatory gap enabling extraction from a captive population — converge on the same symptom. The convergence is itself a finding: the displacement is overdetermined.

Power without exposure, exposure without power

A stakeholder mapping reveals a stark asymmetry: the people with the most legitimate claims and the most urgent needs hold the least structural power, while the people with the most power over outcomes face no urgency and no exposure.

Mobile home park residents — Folger and Moore — sit in a dependent position under the Mitchell-Agle-Wood framework. They hold high legitimacy as long-term residents and legal tenants with a moral claim against displacement from their only homes. Their urgency is critical: the park has already been sold, lot rent has nearly doubled, and no alternative housing exists at their price point. Their power is low: no capital, immobile assets, no political office, no legal barrier to lot-rent increases. Folger described the park as “their last stop” with “no place to go.” The tenant union that organized the May rent strike demonstrated organizing capacity — Montana’s first strike in 50 years — but holds only moral and political leverage, not legal or economic.

The California company that acquired Mountain Meadows is classified as Dangerous. It holds high structural power: it owns the lots, controls rent, and has the capital to acquire parks in multiple states. Its legitimacy is low: no community ties, opacity that undermines standing, and the company is unnamed and unaccountable to residents. Its urgency is moderate, driven by an active revenue interest in maximizing rent from acquired property. Legal ownership without community standing produces a pattern in which the party with the most direct control over residents’ daily costs faces the least exposure to the consequences of that control.

At the other end of the power spectrum, out-of-state buyers are Dominant: high direct power from cash, sight-unseen buying, and capital mobility; moderate legitimacy as legal market participants whose activity generates displacement they do not bear; and low urgency because they are choosing to relocate, not facing a crisis. Yellowstone Club guests — celebrities including Justin Timberlake and Tom Brady at the Club in Big Sky, about an hour south of Bozeman — are also Dominant: high indirect power through system-wide price influence, moderate legitimacy, and very low urgency as a discretionary destination with multiple alternatives. The Montana state legislature, which controls the tax code and the land-use preemptions, is Dominant as well: high power, low urgency because the crisis is geographically concentrated in one fast-growing city and the growing transplant-voter bloc benefits from the low-tax posture. The real estate industry, represented by Corner, is also Dominant: Corner functions as both the article’s primary expert source and a structural beneficiary of the tax-magnet dynamic he describes.

Mayor Joey Morrison sits in a Demanding position: high legitimacy and urgency, moderate power that cannot reach the upstream variable — the state tax code. He describes a sharp divide between locals and newcomers and notes renters working two to three jobs, living with roommates, and putting off having children. Fire Thunder and Sam Forstag, 31, a former smokejumper and union leader who won the Democratic nomination for Montana’s 1st congressional district in June, carry fresh mandates but junior positions; their political leverage depends on future election outcomes.

The relationship map shows a structural alignment — each benefiting from the others’ presence without requiring active coordination. The real estate industry profits from transaction volume generated by out-of-state buyers attracted by the tax regime; the Yellowstone Club ecosystem benefits from the same buyer pool; the legislature benefits politically from in-migration. The alignment holds without anyone coordinating it.

Absent from the source reporting: the Montana state legislature, which sets the tax structure Corner identifies as the primary magnet. The Bozeman city council and planning commission, which hold zoning and development authority. Indigenous communities, whose presence in Montana’s history is invisible in the reporting despite Fire Thunder’s name signalling that presence. Agricultural and ranching communities facing parallel displacement from the same growth pattern. Future residents, whose household formation is being deferred and who have no standing in the stakeholder map.

The strategic trap: sequential timing, missing information, no escape

A game-theory reading shows why the structural trap is hard to break. The game is sequential: transplants arrive and re-price the market first, then landlords reset rent schedules, then residents respond. By the time the residents organize, the market has already shifted.

Working backward: transplants choose “arrive” because Montana’s lifestyle and tax advantages exceed their origin markets. Landlords choose “raise rent” because the demand-curve shift makes market-clearing rent exceed current rent, and no committed tenant threat exists at the moment of pricing. Tenants choose “pay” because leaving destroys the only equity they hold. The rent strike in May was a deviation from this equilibrium, driven by desperation rather than strategic calculation, because the landlord’s concession is dominated given the option to sell the park. The subgame-perfect equilibrium is: transplants arrive, landlords raise rents, tenants pay until they cannot, then tenants are displaced.

The game is repeated, not one-shot. Monthly rent payments, annual elections, ongoing migration, and the California company’s management create an indefinite future interaction. Under a grim-trigger reading, cooperative restraint would hold if both sides valued future cooperation enough. But the cooperative equilibrium broke down. The park was sold. The California company’s short time horizon — purchased after the strike, no community ties, opacity that prevents reputation-building — makes the shadow of the future thin. For the grim trigger to hold, both sides must value future cooperation; when one side discounts the future steeply, the residents’ strike threat becomes a signal of resolve rather than a bargaining chip. The company can sell the park or replace tenants with higher-paying users, so the residents’ immobility does not translate into leverage against an owner whose discount rate favours short-term extraction.

The rent strike is credible because residents’ physical immobility makes the commitment binding. Morrison’s affordable-housing rhetoric is credible within his jurisdiction but cheap talk on the upstream variable — the state tax structure. Fire Thunder and Forstag’s political rule-change promise is cheap talk currently, with credibility depending on future institutional power.

The structural insight is that the sequential timing is itself the source of the one-sided outcome. If locals had preemptive zoning or rent-stabilization ordinances in place before the demand wave, the game would be simultaneous rather than sequential, and the equilibrium would shift toward constrained compromise. The displacement is not a market failure but a move-order disadvantage. The structural fix is to compress the timing and information gap through preemptive zoning within Morrison’s city-level jurisdiction.

The game also produces a negative-sum outcome. Each transplant purchase that clears the market is a local’s failure to rent at an affordable price. The hollowing-out scenario — mass displacement plus wealthy exit — costs both sides: residents lose shelter, landlords lose paying tenants and the local service labour force. Stable cooperative accommodation would be positive-sum, but the current game does not produce it.

What comes next

The strategic moves point in several directions. Maintain the rent strike as a commitment device — the union framework and sunk-cost residency provide an anchor for future collective bargaining with the California company, but only if the repeated game continues; every month the strike holds, the landlord’s discount of future cooperation increases. Push for preemptive zoning and rent-stabilization ordinances within Morrison’s city-level jurisdiction before the next wave of transplant demand re-prices the market. Build a political constituency to reverse the tax advantages and restore municipal land-use authority — the campaigns of Fire Thunder and Forstag represent this strategy, but they operate on a longer time horizon than the current crisis.

But these are downstream levers. The upstream variable — the one party that can reshape the incentive structure overnight by amending the tax code or restoring local land-use authority — is the Montana state legislature, the most consequential absent actor. Until the state legislature acts, the residents of Bozeman’s mobile home parks remain trapped. They are not caught in a natural market correction. They are caught in a policy trap, and only the people who built the trap can open it.

Questions to carry

Will the Montana state legislature amend its tax structure, or will the low-tax configuration remain the upstream driver of Bozeman’s displacement? Can the rent strike survive the California company’s ownership, or will the cooperative equilibrium that residents have organized around break down entirely? Is the sequential timing of the demand shock — transplants arriving before policy could respond — reversible through preemptive zoning at the city level, or does the state legislature’s preemption of municipal authority close that option? Will the emerging progressive politicians — Fire Thunder, Forstag, Morrison — build a coalition strong enough to challenge the state-level power that currently favours the incoming cohort?

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Root-Cause Analysis
Traces a symptom back along its causal chain to the conditions that actually generated it.
Stakeholder Mapping
Charts the parties to a situation — their interests, power, and alignments.
Strategic Interaction (Game Theory)
Models a situation as a game — players, moves, payoffs, and likely equilibria.