Jackson Hole: The Wealthiest Valley in America

The elk-antler arches at the corners of Jackson's town square were installed in the nineteen sixties, a piece of civic decor that became the most photographed corner in Wyoming. Today, the square is surrounded by galleries selling art at six figures, restaurants with three-month reservation waits, and real estate offices where the listings start above three million dollars. Teton County, Wyoming, has the highest per-capita income of any county in the United States: roughly four hundred seventy-one thousand dollars, driven by a concentration of finance and technology wealth that arrived over the past thirty years and has not stopped coming.

The median home price in Jackson is well above one million dollars, among the highest in the nation. Service workers, the people who staff the hotels and restaurants and ski lifts that the wealthy use, commute from Driggs and Victor and Rexburg in Idaho, over an hour each way, because they cannot afford to live in the valley they work in. The county has a two-tier population that barely occupies the same physical space.

The displacement is not new. The Shoshone and Bannock peoples were removed from this valley to make room for settlers. The settlers who came in the eighteen nineties were small-scale ranchers, hay farmers, people who built barns that are now the most photographed barns in America. They were displaced by a federal preservation campaign that used a billionaire's money and deceptive purchasing practices. The ranchers gave way to a national park. The national park gave way to a resort economy. The resort economy gave way to a billionaire enclave. Each generation of displacement was presented as an improvement.

What Jackson Hole has become is a compressed version of the American West's recurring story: a beautiful place, and the question of who gets to live in it.