Trego's Mountain Ear

The historical accounts pretty much say the Great Depression sucked, and some reading of Montana’s history will suggest that it started sucking out west before the “dirty thirties”. So, things sucked, people were poor- but what was the exact cause of homelessness that drove the spread of “hoovervilles”?

What exactly was it people couldn’t pay? Rent, Mortgages, and Property Taxes (these are in a sense, much the same thing, with a mortgage being a lot like rent paid to the bank, and property taxes being a lot like rent paid to the government).

Rent has been increasing- this graph is for Missoula, but the trend should be similar throughout the state.

Mortgage rates seem to be rising as well, though the data is harder to find (to much noise in the search results from lenders saying ‘pick me’). And then, of course, there are property taxes:

What the property tax timeline shows is that property tax rates haven’t increased especially. It excludes property values, however, which changed significantly in the last reappraisal. The Montana Free Press estimated that on average, property taxes went up 21%. This image (from the Montana Free Press) illustrates the significant increase in property valuations.