North Dakota Winter in an Evanescent Apartment Built by Californians

Ruin of an old soviet style apartment. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

I live in an apartment that Californians may have built. I don't know who made it. probably some bag of money that lacks a face or a name. The type that under U.S. law is a real person with rights called a corporation. All that I know is that whoever built this building never lived in the icy north-central U.S. I have lived in about eight different apartments over the years, and this is, with some irony, the newest and the most poorly built for a climate that is cold for half the year.

 
I am into symbolic metaphors lately. Our apartment is a symbolic metaphor for the short-term philosophies that ascribe place as an extractive resource. Our building, built just a half a dozen years ago, is already coming apart. It was built, not with the long term view of recouping costs over decades, but the short term one of making a profit before the bottom falls out. If the bottom does fall out, in another decade, it may well be a ruin like the collapsing man camps that litter the countryside.

The apartment is built simply and cheaply to survive in an unstable economy that can go bust at the flick of an economic switch. In fact, following the pandemic downturn, occupancy plummeted, and we live in a half-full building. Our rent went down a little, but we make up the difference in higher electric costs due to having empty apartments beside and above us. To build anything lasting here in the oilfield would be as much folly as those who made all the decaying small town elevators and schools across the plains in the last century.

It may last a while, a few more years, a few more decades, but it will eventually end, and in the end, people will be hurt, and the land will not be cleaned up. It is the way of resource booms. Still, people come. Like myself, like every worker who ever traveled to a boom, to make a little extra, get ahead and get out. Most people, like me don't want to "get in and get out", but would rather build a life in a place. The "get in, get out" mentality is born of the inherent instability of a place that depends on one transitory and economically marginal thing to keep people employed. Like the recent meteoric rise and spectacular fall of Game Stop stock, everyone knows the bubble will burst, the key is to get out before it does. Those of us in boom areas are like players at a casino, putting it all on the table. Unfortunately, what is on the table is our lives and our future. 

In the end, the place and those people, possibly myself included, who made it their home will be left with the ruins. Those who remain will be left with the pollution and the incomplete dreams that locals are always left with when the boom ends. It has always ended the same for those who chose to remain in a place; the long hangover that comes after a boom goes on forever. There is no ending to the end of a boom.

I say Californians because, in 2012, I was wiling away a few hours in a bar on Polk Street in San Francisco in the middle of a weekday afternoon waiting for my sister to get off work. I had backpacked miles across the streets of the city and was tired. I like to hike cities the way many people do the wilderness. The country boy in me sees the urban streets as a different kind of wilderness.

Sitting there, all alone in the bar, enjoying an expensive draft, I listened as the bartender excitedly explained how he and his dad were getting ready to go up to North Dakota to build apartments. "There is a lot of money to be made, and they need housing." He said to me. He had the look of thousands of others who have chased gold, lumber, land, whales, guano, and resource booms of all kinds across the globe throughout history. The idea was to get in, make some money and get out. There's gold in them thar hills.

A few years ago, my wife and I moved to an apartment in the oilfields where we still live. I won't name it since I don't want any defamation suits against me. It doesn't matter, since there are dozens of others just like it, built quickly in the past decade. Ours, built just a few years ago, already shows the signs of wear with drooping vinyl siding, shattered plastic dumpster barriers, chipping concrete, and the slow coming apart of things built quickly and cheaply.

The complex of several buildings is just like a dozen others in the city, and everywhere across North America, three-story, stick-built, balloon structures that are the American equivalent of the Russian Krushchyovka apartments of the Soviet Union, cheaply and quickly constructed to house the proletariat. Buildings like ours can be found in almost every city and town of a certain size and litter the suburbs in rings outside the largest cities. The socialist Soviet system built identical apartments across the Soviet empire to quickly and cheaply house an urbanizing population. The capitalist response is to quickly and cheaply build with toothpicks; three stories with a deck. Each toothpick apartment has a sliding glass door and deck, better suited to warmer climates. Five of the eight apartments I have lived in have had decks like that, and in five of eight, I have never really used them. Interestingly, the three that I lived in that didn't have decks were older and built in the fifties and sixties. Also, interestingly, they still stand and will do so for decades to come. I am not so sure about the one I live in now.
 
 The building is admirable in many ways. It has premium styling and amenities, but the quality of materials, built to last a decade or so and not more, are degrading quickly. It has upscale styling with the extras that we never really use. The windows could be better quality, and the walls feel like they are not well insulated. The underground sprinkler valves sit outside uninsulated. For some reason, we have two air conditioners sticking out of the wall, a feature I have never seen in a northern apartment. We have never even switched on the air conditioners since we live on the east side of the building, away from the hot summer sun. Someone from the region would have known that heat is less of a problem than cold here. Instead, on a cold day like today, they leak cold air. For most of the year, they are just leaky holes in the wall. Even though I insulate and cover them, the cold metal conducts cold air right into the house. Someone from this climate would have known that you don't need two air conditioners in a small apartment and that they are efficient conductors of cold air into the house. 

Thank you, California bartender builder dude. Can I send you our electric bill?