One of life’s great tightrope balances is finding a way to be helpful to others without being foolish or harmful. Fortunately, Montana has a lot of common sense rooted in experience on this subject. The trick is to be honest with yourself if even the plan on the table in front of you doesn’t make sense. 

Anyone who’s read past guest opinions here gets that big money, however well intentioned, can harm as well as help. The tendrils of corporate influence and control can easily reach down to local levels, as we know from the selfish PFL/Goldman Sachs suit against the city, pitting well-funded powerful interests against small communities like ours, as only one example (inserting my customary reference here to the book Billionaire Wilderness about similar conflicts throughout the West.) Investors and grantors alike in turn disproportionately shape communities through entities like PCCF, PFL, Explore Livingston, and HRDC. The recent “Housing Coalition” is a shift from where in years past, less by oligarchy and more by democracy, the community used to shape itself. 

Plutocracy, government by the rich, doesn’t have to be big and obvious. Like an eclipse, just the shadow can hint at its presence. I see the hints in the “housing crisis,” which until recently was a fairly alien idea. 

HRDC has grown especially big for its britches. Technically, only a 501(c)(3), in competition with similar entities, it is not, as many assume, an arm of either Park County or Livingston governments. It is only a 501 (c) (3).  Yet is seems to intimidate our commissions into thinking we have to just accept their “Housing Action Plan” and insert it into the Growth Policies which WE, not they, participated in and created with full public process. 

They are wrong. We should never have included the HRDC “Housing Action Plan” in with the Growth Policy. Period.

That plan, for all their claims otherwise, is still at base the creation of HRDC staff. As if it weren’t obvious from its potentially destructive effects, as it could stand to kill our downtown in the way PFL/Goldman Sachs has been indirectly trying to do. It’s a bad idea, but it gets touted by the plutocracy and their minions as critical to fix the “crisis.” 

What crisis? We had tools in place and functional control of normal social issues. Sure, in Bozeman, they developed a crisis - thanks to the mismanagement of HRDC, whose latest shelter project is straining Walmart and has already killed the beautiful useful rest stop along I-90 at 19th Ave. Not something to be proud of, though I doubt HRDC cares. And they may yet bring the same mess soon to a Livingston, if we are not vigilant. 

Livingston, for all the attempts to quash our Growth Policy and make us just another Bozeman suburb, is I argue a horse of a very different color. We have not yet lost our small-town identity to the big bucks planners of sprawl. We still feel our roots in railroading, pioneers, and Yellowstone Park tourism, and people here, out-of-state stereotypes aside, genuinely care about their neighbors. But we have always addressed things like homelessness in our own way - and critically, on our own scale.

After my grandfather died in the 1918 flu epidemic, my grandmother continued running the Grabow Hotel with the help of her five children, including my father, born here in 1900.

But in a way, there was to be a sixth child. 

In the 1920’s, the Urbach family, who lived on a ranch out on Swingley, became victims of a bombing by a German-hating bigot, an event written up by the beloved late historian Doris Whithorn in a booklet available I believe at Sax & Fryer (140 years old this year and a history fan’s playground). Angry over an injury to his thumb, the murderer it was said put dynamite in the Urbach family cooking stove. When the father rose in the morning to get the fire going, it exploded. The mother died instantly as she slept in the bedroom above it, and the father died the next day. Louie and his three brothers survived, but became orphans. 

My grandmother Grabow went out to the ranch and picked up Louie who was twelve. She told the older boys, the   sixteen years old and older, that they would be all right. They were old enough to scrape by, but Louie was only twelve, so Elizabeth brought him to the hotel to care for him and help shepherd him through this devastation, basically adopting him with maternal care. That did not keep her from setting standards. She said he’d have to keep his bedroom clean, and she would teach him the hotel business and pay him for his work, saving money from his earnings to put him into college when the time came. He had to attend school and get good grades and be an active participant like the rest of her children. And in Montana fashion, she was true to her word.

Louie got a degree in engineering from MSU. She was always kind to him and he loved her back in spades, as she helped fill the hole that had been violently put in his life. I always remember Uncle Louie calling my grandmother “Mom.” It was the natural outcome of how Livingston people realistically helped each other.