Many Hands Make Light Work

When a U.S. Forest Service worker gets fired by DOGE, she’s left scrambling to find a place to live while she finishes building her straw bale house. Luckily, she has lots of friends who not only let her couchsurf, but help with the house raising. It’s an old fashioned approach to affordable housing that’s catching on.

Howdy Cheap Dirt fans! We will be taking a pause this holiday and resuming on January 7th with a new episode.

People in the American West love tiny houses. But, come to find out, per square foot they cost almost 40% more than a regular house. Eric and Erica found a way to get one on the cheap – by winning one in an auction! But are tiny houses really an affordable housing solution, when you try to scale up?

We usually think of full time RVers as retirees. But these days, over half are Millennials and Gen Zers. And way more people are adopting the RV life. Including a house builder who doesn’t have a house of his own. Instead he lives in his RV on the edge of Wyoming’s Big Hollow. He says, off gridding isn’t for the faint of heart.

We journey into the Red Desert of southwest Wyoming to visit a trona mine worker building his dream cabin off grid for the two small children he’s raising alone. He had to buy extra solar panels for his daughter’s medical equipment and the cabin includes an apartment where she can live with him when she grows up. He says it’s all part of his American dream.

You’ve probably seen viral videos on social media about how quaint it is to live an off-grid life. But these videos belie something more problematic going on beneath the surface. An affordable housing crisis that’s affecting the working and middle class more all the time. Eight of the ten states with the least affordable housing are in the American West. And that’s causing lots of resilient westerners to get creative about their living situations. Including Host Melodie Edwards who shares her own story of living off grid in a canvas dome in a no man’s land in northern Arizona.

Cheap Dirt: The Trailer

Two conversations about Wyoming's news ecosystem: one with Cali O'Hare, the editor of the Pinedale Roundup and a roundtable discussion with Solution Journalism's Melissa Cassutt and WyoFile's Rod Miller.

In early August, a media company that owned dozens of newspapers across the region suddenly collapsed. It forced eight Wyoming papers to shut down their presses. The outcry statewide was immediate. But a week later the owners of the Buffalo Bulletin stepped forward with one other investor and offered to buy all eight and keep them publishing. We talk to the husband/wife news team.

Reviving Rural America -- A Modern West Bonus