North Dakota has plenty of jobs…but not enough places to live……

That state has a 4% unemployment rate….

The Economic downturn never stopped in the state….

But the state has hundreds of people living in make shift quarters….. their vehicles, motels and even at work…..

The state has oil fields…..and alot of oil and the need for people to help get that oil out of the ground….

With a lot of workers following the money and work from other states……and….

Nowhere to live……

“It’s hard to know where this might end,” said E. Ward Koeser, the mayor of Williston, who met this month with the governor of North Dakota to plead for state help with the housing crisis. “It’s the one thing that sometimes wakes me up in the morning and doesn’t let me go to sleep,” he said, acknowledging that most mayors can only dream of having such a riddle.

Still, where will all these happily employed newcomers live?

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Koeser, whose city had about 12,000 people at last count, but may now be closer to 15,000. “We literally have no place.”

Cranes dot the city, proof that a building boom is under way, but not fast enough.

While the rest of the country was sinking into recession, North Dakota never did. Other states nursed budget deficits, but North Dakota, even now, has a surplus. The state has a wealth of other jobs. A rise in oil production here, especially, served as an antidote to any whiff of what the rest of the nation was witnessing.

Beneath an enormous expanse of land here, workers have pumped an ever-growing amount of crude oil from a formation called the Bakken, thanks in part to new horizontal drilling technology. Government estimates put the potential recoverable oil from the Bakken, which stretches into Montana, at 4.3 billion barrels.

Now, 109 oil rigs — with scores of workers for each — are drilling in North Dakota, and some officials say that figure could reach 150 this year.

In one of the least populated states in the nation, this sudden overcrowding has upended some axioms of ordinary life.

More……..

More on the movement of people to the state to fill jobs……