Why Billings, Montana, Is the Best Town of 2016 [video] | Hacker News Reader

Why Billings, Montana, Is the Best Town of 2016 [video]

outsideonline.com

31 pointsscapecast62 comments

I can't properly describe the cultural phenomenon but there is a sort of intelligent/privileged/rich get-out-there demographic that has been on a steady incline for some time causing gentrification of many rural areas.

Sort of a cross between totally-stoked-Mountain-Dew-guys + farm-to-table-vegan-tatooed-hipster + do-not-really-have-to-worry-about-money + love-ridiculously-over-hoppy-ipas + own-four-bikes + sustainable-forever + into-outdoor-shaming-others [1].

I'm not that knowledgeable on demographic groupings but I think you know the type. Yes stereotypes are dangerous and I hope I don't offend anyone.

EDIT: btw to be clear I don't have any problem with above mentioned traits (as I'm not far from it myself). IMO I prefer it to the rural stereotypes I grew up with which is toting guns and killing animals for sport (which again sadly I don't actually have strong feeling against either). However I do hate IPA beers. The over hoppy beers have to stop (I'm stout, porter guy).

Also if you are looking for a similar city to Billings I just recently visited Flagstaff Arizona. Flagstaff is pretty darn cool.

[1]: https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/20/9-making-you-fee...

I'm not sure about the not having to worry about money portion, but I agree with the rest. It seems to be the 90's adventure sports crowd "settling" down and enjoying family life.

I'm not sure it's so much the adventure sports crowd who, as you say, probably don't overlap so much with the not worrying about money crowd. Though maybe that's part of it.

Instead, I think it's more the outdoor lifestyle, decent restaurants, at least a modicum of culture, maybe not retired-at-40 but comfortable financially. Especially if they're willing to trade the offerings of larger urban centers for a more laid-back, more outdoor activities oriented existence.

I concur. I guess I mean "adventure sports crowd" in terms of kids of baby boomers who grew up with the opportunity to hike, mountain bike, ski, etc.. often.

Fair enough. I was taking it more as extreme sports, adventure guides, etc.

I'd say I fall in this demographic. It helps that many jobs can now be performed remotely. The thing holding me back from small town mountain living was my career, but now with remote work I can relocate to where I'm happiest.

Rural America is, on the whole, losing population [1], and having the sorts of groups you're lumping move in (for either "hipster farming" or outdoor recreation reasons) provides socioeconomic diversification and robustness to many rural areas that would otherwise be in decline as family farms and natural resource extraction become less profitable.

[1]: http://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2016-june/five-years-of-...

Any area of rural america that I have observed as doing ok/well for themselves seems to have a strong outdoor recreation/beautiful scenery in or right near town. Mountains; bodies of water; national parks.. I think these areas are going to keep growing but plenty of other towns that don't have much of this draw are dead/dying.

I grew up in a ski resort, but I don't want to get a remote dev job, and move back, just to find a bunch of people like me are already crowding the place up.

I'll do my part to make their life better by staying in Raleigh. We have: trees, 100% humidity for over 4 months of the year, this big area people keep claiming is a park, creeks that flow when it rains.

It always seems like I'm one of the few in my age cohort (~24), but I'd rather work in Montana than SV/NYC any day. It feels like everyone just wants to be downtown to some major city, but I just want a respectable house on 1/2 acres with mountain views and snow every winter.

You can easily commute to NYC from Jersey. :)

Yes but Jersey is not going to give you the 1/2 acre property for nearly the same price as Montana, let alone the mountain views :(

Plus my girlfriend has a strict "No New Jersey" rule.

Sunshine every day is the reason by a couple of my friends for moving back home.

I think downtown in a major city would be fun for a few years while building up the start of a career, then switch to somewhere like Chattanooga or Asheville and get a comfy house somewhere in the mountains (small cities but not rural). I think my problem is that I like constant novelty. I'm not sure any location is "best" for me — I seem to want different scenery every few years.

I think for a lot of people, it is hard to find employment in small cities in their field of work. If you want to have a finance career or software career, you need to be in a big city.

How many software engineers does Billings, Montana hire with comfortable compensation?

This is actually a severe problem that I have. I'd really like to work remote, so that I could live anywhere. At the same time, however, what if my company goes under, I get laid off, &c., I'm essentially stuck in a sub-optimal position.

I really wish remote were more frequent a benefit.

Most people agree with you. There are far more young people living outside SV/NYC than inside.

This is definitely true, but I spend too much time on HN and living in Austin and it definitely affects my views on my peers.

How do you like Austin? I've been looking for jobs there and am curious what it is like.

Depending on whatever you like (small, medium, large) in companies, they've got it here. It's too damn hot and humid and I've lived here all my life.

I'm personally not a fan, but if you want a tech-oriented city with a huge music scene, this will be your place. Downtown prices are ridiculous (3300/month for 650ish square feet if you want to be on 6th street), but I have a nice place on the outskirts 2b/2ba for 1100/month).

Thanks! Wow, those prices are pretty ridiculous; that's approaching SF levels.

We have significant trouble hiring developers here in Socorro, NM. Most are of the downtown favoring variety. But here, you can get a modest house for under $100K, have lots of great hiking opportunities, see a lot of open space. I think my lot is 1/4 acre with a 1200 sq ft house on it, and I paid $95K. (You'd have to compromise on the snow.)

I think you're right about your cohort. But in the next 15-20 years, I think there will be a swing in the other direction. These things are cyclical; your cohort hated growing up in suburbs with nothing to do, but their parents hated growing up in crime-addled cities packed with people, and their parents hated growing up bored on a farm, etc.

Every time I drive through Billings I wish they didn't have several oil refineries in town. Given the choice, I'd always pick a town that did not host major industrial sites.

Source: https://www.google.com/maps/search/billings+oil+refineries/@... (this query doesn't pick up the refinery in Laurel, just to the West of Billings).

This was also my first thought as well. A truly beautiful place ruined, visually, by the refineries.

Of course jobs are nice to have as well, and certainly more important than views to the locals.

The refineries also smell pretty bad so they're emitting pollution of some sort into the local atmosphere.

That video didn't have a single person that wasn't white and young adult/middle aged. Maybe the hat guy is older, but still – diversity didn't seem a priority in the list of features. Maybe that's entirely representative of the demographics, just found it striking.

As an non-USAn, I'm always suprised how much emphasis is put on this in the USA ("look, these office visualisations have only white people in them, that's unacceptable!"), while at the same time very little is done to really improve the lives of minorities.

It's because of a painful history, some distant and some not so distant.

So it is in people's minds pretty often. Other places have this as well. In Western Europe it is perhaps ww2 stuff. Someone here just yesterday claimed they don't want to use the 'ss' Linux command to diagnose socket issues because of how it relates to 'ww2'.

In other parts it is all about nationality, if you call someone by a different nationality, they might be terribly offended by it. It looks silly from the outside, but once you live there it makes sense why there is emphasis on certain things like that.

I think you have to grow up in a place to internalize that. When I was in Portland with a co-worker, who was born and raised in US. He leaned over and whispered "Have you noticed, how everyone is white here?. It's freaking me out". But I haven't noticed until he mentioned it. For better or for worse, it is just not something I think about. But he did.

I'm not sure about age. My anecdata is that I know a reasonable number of people who have moved to, more or less, "the mountains" when they've retired--for at least part of the year.

But based on my observations hiking, skiing, etc., the participants in those activities in much of the US are pretty overwhelmingly white, as are the long-time population of cities in the Mountain West.

Indeed -- the demographics of Montana in particular are overwhelmingly white[1]. As of the 2010 census, 89.4% white, 6.3% native (many of whom live in one of the seven reservations Montana has, rather than the "star" towns of Billings, Bozeman, and Missoula), and less than a percent each for any other races. The state also has only just over a million people total, so there are about 4 times as many white people in New York City as there are in the whole state of Montana.

This isn't to excuse the white-washy-ness of the video (e.g. lots of cowboys, no Indians), but just to say that the problem is at least a couple of levels out from just this video.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana#Demographics

This is probably because the state of Montana has a 90.6% white population and a 6.2% American Indian population.

There are only 2,700 [1] black people living in the state, it looks to me like they're exactly showing the racial diversity of the state. Sure, they could have a single black person so the numbers are correct but then someone will just complain about them including a single, token black person.

The Billing specific census information is a little bit older but has the same 0.3% figure for black people [2] - that puts their total black population at 270/95,220.

[1] http://www.infoplease.com/us/census/data/montana/demographic... [2] http://www.infoplease.com/us/census/data/montana/billings/

Huh, that's interesting – thanks for sharing!

As a person of color the first thing I thought when I saw this video was, "Wow I would stick out like a sore thumb."

Billings is actually one of the more diverse towns in Montana (which isn't saying much) due to how close the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservations are. 4.4% Native American according to Wikipedia. But I guess that's not part of the image this marketing team wanted to project...

The impression I got from the video was simply that Billings is yet another American city on the path to homogenization, as captured (if imprecisely) here: http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-g...

Billings? Really? It gets a bad wrap out here in Montana (unfairly, I will add). Missoula and Bozeman are the 'cool' cities. Billings is just a big oil town. They do have some nice bouldering though.

As a New Mexican with family in Libby (near Kalispell), Missoula is the one of the three that interests me. But I'm not a big outdoors buff.

There is no better town in the US than Missoula, Montana. Bozeman's nice too, closer in proximity to Yellowstone. There's just something magical about a summer in Missoula.

I had read about Greg Gianforte's startup RightNow Technologies (IIRC the name). Think he started it somewhere in Montana, maybe Billings or Bozeman. The interesting part of the story was that he did it the lean way - before creating any product, he asked some people whether they would buy what he was going to make. Some did, so he built it. Not sure but I think some time later he sold it for a good sum (maybe to Oracle?). First read about it on Sramana Mitra's blog, www.sramanamitra.com .

What about crime rate and stuff like that. For some reason I feel that the town is almost 100% white.

i had the exact same sentiment looking at this video. i didn't see a hint of diversity in any of the shots.

Would be interesting to know the racial proportions of the town.

86.3% white alone (92,543)

5.5% hispanic (5,860)

4.2% American Indian alone (4,458)

2.1% multiracial (2,223)

1.0% black (1,049)

0.9% Asian alone.

0.06% Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander alone.

0.03% other race alone.

http://www.city-data.com/city/Billings-Montana.html

Brilliant. Thanks bro.

Look pretty nice. Anyone else thought they are trying to be the next Portland ? ;-)

Maybe unpopular here, but I for one, like suburbs next to a big city. I can have access to the city once in a while, there is a potential large job market if I want to jump ship, but also have a garden and quiet streets. This is basically an ex-rural town with a history, but it just grew suburbs and tech offices around it.

I rationally understand that it is unsustainable and I watched all the videos about death of suburbia and all that. Yet, am I going to uproot my family because I watched those videos and read a few article on HN? Probably not.

I grew up in a city, in a small apartment, with noisy neighbors, piss in the elevator, being flooded from upstairs, getting pick-picketed in transport. So there is nothing romantic about that for me.

I have also seen farming life and living in the rural areas, getting up at 5am in the cold and rain to feed the animals, worried about crops being eaten by pests, nope not for me either.

I think if more places accepted remote work, and job market would be more stable, there would be a great opportunity to places like Billings.

After living in Montana for almost 10 years, this video is kind of funny. It's like an ad for all of the things that _other_ Montana towns like Bozeman and Missoula are famous for!

Granted Billings is obviously changing (for better or worse), but it's known for it's industrial plants, not it's bike trails. I will say the "rimrock" above town is lovely and unique (and it's home to one of the most challenging disc golf courses in the country!) but in terms of trails and other recreational development Bozeman and Missoula are years ahead in development.

Billings actually does have some diversity due to it's close proximity to the Crow Reservation (4.4% Native American), but that fact is just as absent as the 3 oil refineries in this cheery white-washing promo video.

As a side note: it's incredible how many breweries and distilleries are springing up across the country - even in Billings! I love beer, but it's kind of overwhelming.

Interesting. I grew up in Kalispell, went to college in Bozeman, and now live in Missoula. I would agree with some other people in the thread that Bozeman and Missoula seem like the 'cooler' cities, but I think the Mission and Flathead valleys take the cake when it comes to views and recreation.

I mean, you cant beat the mountain views of the Missions and Swans with Flathead lake right in the middle. AND Glacier Park just to the north. But I'm biased I guess :).

It's tricky stuff. Other people often appear more two dimensional on the surface. it takes spending time with someone to see their depth.

When I lived out there (10+ years ago), I remember the locals always grumbling about people from California moving in and ruining it. I wonder if that has changed.

I prefer the Glacier/Whitefish area, but Montana is a thing every American should experience. I miss it every day.

How's the tech industry?

The tech industry is in Bozeman (140 miles to the West).

Yup. Though Missoula (another 180 miles west) is getting big pretty quickly (including a Y-Combinator company), as is Helena (about 90 miles north-west of Bozeman).

What's the YCombinator co?

Submittable: https://www.submittable.com/

If you want mountain views, your best bet might be more urban Salt Lake City or Boise.

And you could actually add Tahoe/Reno, Portland and Bend, OR to that list as well. And of course Boulder, CO

Boulder, Co is no longer affordable. Most likely the reason it is no longer on this list. The average house price is $668,000 and the average rent $2,600. I used to pay the same in rent while living on Wall Street in NYC for a one bedroom corner unit apartment.

A mountain view in Seattle or Portland might be a bit pricey. SLC and Boise are right on mountains, and are more rustic inter-mountain west cities (like Denver and Boulder I guess).

There is also Idaho Falls and Los Alamos, which both host major DOE labs, I think, that would attract tech activity.

After leaving Tektronix in Portland, my Dad moved further in tech at Hanford. The mountains are not so big in Richland, however (well, we lived on a small mountain when we were there).

It seems Outside magazine propelled itself from obscurity by driving traffic to its site with population contests through Facebook. People tend to vote familiarity, so the larger metro area of the two tends to win. The exceptions are the tourist towns that have regional pull. I'm impressed this method continues to work.

Outside has been popular for decades. They published the articles that led to Krakauer's books Into Thin Air and Into the Wild.

My mistake and ignorance on the 'from relative obscurity' part, but the strategy works nonetheless. I'm not knocking the method. If it works, it works. It was just an observation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com