Fracking Evictions: Housing Instability in a Fossil Fuel Boomtown

Abstract In 2019, North Dakota accounted for 11% of American oil production. Rural counties like Williams County, ND experienced rapid in-migration of oilfield workers and, consequently, acute housing shortages. Williams County provides an excellent opportunity to study the relationship between commodity booms and housing instability because its housing market is tied so tightly to the production of a single commodity. While fracking is often presented as an economic boon to these communities, we show that Williams County has experienced “rural gentrification,” in which long-term residents are displaced by higher-income workers linked to the oilfields. To explore housing instability in an oil boomtown, this project links oil production statistics with evictions data and individual-level address histories. By showing how housing instability increased during the oil boom, this study contributes to our understanding of how rural communities are affected by extractive industry and how housing markets respond to rapid economic changes.

policymakers would attempt to weigh the environmental and social harms of fracking against the economic benefits they believed would flow into their community.In practice, however, aggressive tactics by oil and gas companies can fracture communities attempting to reach consensus on these issues (Willow and Wylie 2014).Attitudes toward the oil and gas industry often determines how residents feel about allowing fracking into their communities rather than vice versa (Mayer 2016).Due to the number of factors in play, even geographically proximate communities can reach different decisions (Dokshin 2016(Dokshin , 2020)).
While fracking debates often revolve around an "economic growth versus the environment" framing, how specific harms and gains will be distributed among community members is equally important.In this article, we consider how fossil fuel production contributes to housing instability among residents of boomtowns through a process of "rural gentrification" (Sherman 2021).In particular, we examine the prevalence of court-issued evictions, a leading cause of housing insecurity.Aggregate statistics showing rapid increases of wealth and income in boomtowns may obscure the loss of housing stability among lower-and fixed-income renters.
Before the oil boom took off, North Dakota had an eviction filing rate of 0.002% in 2010, dramatically lower than the national rate of 9.4% (Gromis et al. 2022).While North Dakota's eviction rates were kept low by affordable rents, the state's weak landlord-tenant laws meant that its residents were vulnerable should the affordability of local rental markets decrease suddenly (Schmidt 2016).For example, in North Dakota a landlord can file an eviction against a tenant as soon as three days after a missed rent payment.The law also allows a court summons to be served only three days before an eviction hearing, which makes it difficult for a tenant to obtain legal advice or to rearrange their schedule so as to be present at court (Legal Services Corporation 2021).While seemingly minor, these technical aspects of the law are associated with higher eviction rates (Gromis et al. 2022).These legal conditions left the residents of Williams County vulnerable to eviction after rents began to increase along with oil production.
The consequences of evictions for these communities' long-term health are significant.Housing security is increasingly being recognized as a fundamental determinant of rural community vitality (Cook et al. 2009) and individual health outcomes (Cutts et al. 2022;Desmond and Kimbro 2015;Hatch and Yun 2020).Evictions may amplify harms linked to fracking (Beleche and Cintina 2018;Jayasundara et al. 2018;Opsal, Luzbetak, and O'Connor Shelley 2021), such as adverse birth outcomes (Himmelstein and Desmond 2021), crime (Gomory and Desmond 2023;Semenza et al. 2021), sexually transmitted infections (Niccolai, Blankenship, and Keene 2019), and poor general health (Desmond and Kimbro 2015).In other cases, evictions may negate the positive effects of fracking by leading to job loss (Desmond and Gershenson 2016) or by draining local fiscal capacity (National Low Income Housing Coalition 2020).
In short, if the arrival of oil and gas workers disrupts local housing markets, lowerincome renters in these communities will become more vulnerable to eviction.In order to assess the effects of a commodity boom on renters, this study focuses on evictions in Williams County, North Dakota.Williams County, located in the northwest corner of the state, was primarily an agricultural community until major oil discoveries in the 1950s began to shift the county's economic base.The county's population grew during North Dakota's first oil boom, which ended in the mid-1980s (State Historical Society of North Dakota 2013).The arrival of unconventional oil extraction technologies opened up the Bakken Shale Formation to even more intensive oil production, kicking off a second extraction boom.The largest town in Williams County is Williston, which saw its population double during this boom.Served by Amtrak and an international airport, this otherwise isolated town grew from 14,700 in 2010 to over 29,000 in 2020.Even so, this figure likely undercounts the town's true population due to the difficulty of counting the many workers drawn to the oil fields who may stay for only a season or find shelter in informal "man camps" (Caraher et al. 2017).
Williams County and Williston are ideal sites for a study of the link between commodity booms and housing instability not only because we possess quality administrative data on evictions, but also because of its relative isolation.Unlike other boomtowns in the Marcellus, Barnett, and Permian Basin shale formations, nearly the entirety of observed demographic and economic trends in Williams County can be attributed to the oil boom.We find that William's eviction filing rates rose from nearly non-existent to greater than 7% over the course of the fracking boom.The majority of those affected by housing instability had residential histories in Williston, suggesting that long-term residents of the area were displaced by the arrival of oilfield workers.

The Political Economy of Natural Resource Production
Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", is a technology that fractures shale formations containing oil and gas deposits, enabling extraction by fossil fuel companies (Evensen et al. 2014).Along with improvements in horizontal drilling techniques, fracking allowed domestic petroleum production in the United States to increase rapidly starting in 2008.Petroleum imports peaked in 2007 while petroleum exports began to grow rapidly, actually exceeding imports in 2020 (U.S. Energy Information Administration 2023).Increased petroleum production has had dramatic effects on the American economy as a whole, but it has had an even larger effect on the communities that host fracking sites.While oil and gas production certainly generates short-term growth for local economies, long-term economic and social consequences are more complicated.
Thinking on the long-term economic consequences of fossil fuel extraction has long centered on theories of the "Resource Curse," which posits that high returns on resource extraction will crowd out investments in more sustainable forms of economic growth.While much evidence for the Resource Curse is derived from cross-national comparisons of the diversified economies of industrialized nations to the stagnant economies of underdeveloped petrostates (van der Ploeg 2011; Sachs and Warner 2001), American fossil fuel booms have provided economists the opportunity to assess this thesis in the American context.While these studies often find that resource production results in higher wages and more jobs without destroying productivity in other tradeable sectors (Allcott and Keniston 2018;cf. Mayer, Olson-Hazboun, et al. 2018), they also find that when the boom gives way to bust, employment and wages drop at a faster rate than they rose during the boom (Black, McKinnish, and Sanders 2005).As a result, employment rates and per capita incomes may be lower than they would have been had the boom not occurred (Jacobsen and Parker 2016).Fossil fuel extraction may provide short-term boosts to the local economy, but it is not a formula for long-term prosperity.
Struggling communities may be willing accept slow long-term growth tomorrow in exchange for an economic boom today.However, it is worth noting that many economic studies on this topic focus on topline economic figures while largely ignoring the distribution of costs and benefits across socioeconomic identities due to fossil fuel extraction (Schafft, Brasier, and Hesse 2019).This stands in sharp contrast to accounts produced by sociologists and others, which show that commodity booms often exacerbate existing social inequalities (Fernando and Cooley 2016;Griswold 2018;Jerolmack 2021;Malin, Ryder, and Lyra 2019), even driving low-income residents into homelessness (Schafft et al. 2018).
While states and regions that participate in oil and gas production may benefit from increased employment and revenue, the benefits to the most impacted communities are less clear (Schafft, Brasier, and Hesse 2019).Oil and gas production does little to reverse "human capital flight" from rural counties, suggesting that the fracking boom has not improved these counties' long-term prospects (Mayer, Malin, et al. 2018).Oil and gas production may also undermine the agricultural sector in these communities (Malin and DeMaster 2016), weakening their resilience after the boom turns to bust.
Historical treatments of fossil fuel production in the United States also emphasize that the majority of the value created by fossil fuel production flows to non-local owners and investors, often leaving producer communities poor relative to the rest of the country (Gaventa 1982;Stoll 2017).Stoll (2017) describes how the coal industry followed a logic of enclosure, essentially proletarianizing Appalachia's peasant class by making it impossible for Appalachians to remain as independent smallholders who could live off hunting, foraging, and farming in the region's food rich hollows.Coal mining may have been a high wage occupation for decades, but the influx of external capital into Central Appalachia is nonetheless why so many of its residents became wage laborers in the first place.Now, as mechanization and the energy transition cause coal production in Appalachia to plummet, the region lags the rest of the United States in the majority of indicators of health and human development (Housing Assistance Council 2020).

The Distributional Consequences of Commodity Booms
For all of the disagreement in the literature, most research does conclude that unconventional oil and gas production tends to create high-wage jobs in the communities that host expanded production (Munasib and Rickman 2015;Weber 2012).But demand for field workers notoriously outstrips the ability of local communities to supply labor, meaning that boom communities experience rapid population growth.Which existing residents gain and which residents lose from this influx of highly paid workers?
The harms and benefits created by oil booms are distributed unequally across regions, localities, and socioeconomic identities (Schafft, Brasier, and Hesse 2019).Regionally, residents of communities on the periphery of oil booms see themselves as living in a "Goldilocks Zone": They are close enough to benefit from economic spillover, but far off enough to avoid social and environmental harms (Junod et al. 2018).Within a locality, there is an important spatial element to whether landowners benefit on net from oil production.Unlike renters, landowners stand to reap large monetary rewards if geological chance is in their favor: Oil companies may purchase mineral rights or offer large leasing fees to those whose land they need.One study of property values in fracking communities found that homes closest to well pads tend to lose value if the fracking rig is visible from the home or if the home relies on groundwater (and thus its drinking water may become polluted).However, homes a little further from wells see a small positive effect on home values due to leasing fees, especially after the initial drilling has been completed.The sweet spot here is to be close enough to benefit from lease payments but far enough to be unbothered by light, noise, and water pollution (Muehlenbachs, Spiller, and Timmins 2015).
In sharp contrast to landowners, almost all renters are positioned to lose from the arrival of the oil and gas industry.So many non-local workers are drawn to boomtowns that even the proliferation of temporary workforce housing establishments (informally known as "man camps") cannot meet demand for housing.(Caraher et al. 2017).One econometric working paper finds a small but significant increase in mean rents in Pennsylvania's fracking-friendly Marcellus counties as opposed to those of New York, where fracking was banned (Muehlenbachs et al. 2015; see also Williamson and Kolb 2011).While the median effect size is small, they estimate fracking to have caused a $250/month rent increase in around ten percent of in-sample census tracts.
Qualitative accounts of housing markets in boomtowns, however, document much more severe increases in rent.As early into the boom as 2010, locals reported that motels had no vacancies and some two-bedroom apartments had seen monthly rents triple to $1,000 (Lindholm 2010).A field hand in Williston reported being fortunate to pay "$450 a month for a mattress on the floor of a living room, which I shared with four other migrant men in a small townhouse packed with as many as 12 people" (Smith 2021).The North Dakota Man Camp Project documents over fifty man camps in the Bakken oil patch (Caraher et al. 2017).These man camps range in quality and formality, from prefabricated barracks in company towns to illegal encampments of RVs.However, demand for RVs and mobile homes in formalized man camps is so high that rents can hit $2,000 a month (Caraher et al. 2017, 270).
Rising rents are documented in other fossil fuel production communities.A journalist documented rents rising by 12 percent a month in Southwestern Pennsylvania due to the arrival of migrant workers coming to work the Marcellus shale (Griswold 2018, 154).Meanwhile in northern Pennsylvania, a resident reported being unable to find housing because landlords "only rent to the gas company because they can charge per head … [They] shove five or six guys into [an apartment] and charge $300 a head … They don't like to rent to families" (Schafft et al. 2018, 521).Across the country in South Texas, a city council member and his family were evicted from their long-time home, where they had paid $550 a month.The landlord then put the home back on the market at the rate of $125 per man per week, with a sign out front reading "Oil Field Guys-Welder-Pipe Liners (Guys Only)."The landlord said the home could hold up to 12 men (MacCormack 2011).
Inflation in these areas is not limited to rents.Any increase in the cost of living can put stress on people on fixed income such as retirees, people on disability or those receiving other kinds of government benefits (Ryser and Halseth 2011;Schafft et al. 2018).If local wages cannot keep up with rising costs of living, then very few existing residents stand to benefit from a commodity boom.Economists argue that "backward linkages" from the fossil fuel sector to other sectors of the local economy are the largest source of positive welfare for existing residents of fossil fuel communities, but they also note that this effect is generally small and "is conditioned on the policies of resource projects as well as the availability of local markets for goods and services" (Cust and Poelhekke 2015, emphasis mine).For example, fast food workers in Williston command considerably higher wages than they do elsewhere, but the price of fast food is similarly inflated (Little 2014).Indeed, even oilfield workers report that the high cost of living can prevent them from accumulating significant savings despite high oilfield wages (Smith 2021).
Goods in rural boom areas are prone to inflation because their relative isolation makes it difficult to increase the supply.Housing costs are especially vulnerable to boom-induced inflation.First, the housing supply is notably inelastic, especially in smaller, isolated communities that are unable to support a dedicated construction industry.Construction costs in these communities start high, and they only increase as the price of labor and land go up in response to the local boom economy.On top of these costs, developers may be hesitant to invest in new construction when it is unclear what the real estate market will look like after the bust, when incomes fall and outmigration begins (Fernando and Cooley 2016, 426).While temporary workforce housing would provide a relief valve for some of this excess demand, man camps are often prohibited by local ordinances due to their unsavory reputations (Caraher et al. 2017).
For all of these reasons, the rental housing supply cannot keep up with demand generated by waves of incoming oilfield workers, whose presence is attested to in part by the volume of oil produced in the county.

H1: Increased Oil Production Will Lead to Increased Eviction Counts in Williams County, N.D
Furthermore, we expect that the rise in market rents is responsible for the linkage between oil production and eviction rates, although some of the rise may be attributable to (for example) an increase in lease violations associated with the influx of young, male oilfield workers. 1 As rents skyrocket in Williams County, where renters enjoy few renter protections, we predict that evictions will rise apace.

H2: The Effect of Increased Oil Production on Eviction Counts is Mediated by Median Rent and the Size of the Local Renter Population
Finally, we expect these evictions to primarily affect longer-term residents.Because migrants to the town generally work in the oil fields and receive the highest salaries, dislocation is expected to be highest among existing residents, who are the most likely to rely on fixed incomes (Ryser and Halseth 2011) or earn wages from non-fracking occupations.While "backward linkages" (Cust and Poelhekke 2015) from the fossil fuel sector to other sectors exist (Little 2014), they will be too weak to counteract the rising cost of living.

H3: Evictions Increased among Residents with Residential Histories in Williston, N.D
We now turn to the data we will use to evaluate the effects of the fracking boom on housing instability in Williams County and Williston, North Dakota.

Data Sources
We create two data sets for our analyses.The first dataset is used to analyze monthly eviction counts in Williams County.Months are our units of observation for these data, to which we also append data on housing market characteristics.The second dataset is used to analyze the residential history of eviction defendants.Eviction records from Williston, ND are the unit of observation for these data.

Monthly Eviction Counts
We collected civil case records directly from North Dakota's state court, allowing us to observe eviction filings in Williams County between 2000 and 2016.These filings contain information on date of filing, defendant name, and defendant address.We also obtained aggregate eviction filing counts from Legal Services Corporation (LSC) from 2016 to October of 2022 (Legal Services Corporation 2023).LSC obtained these records directly from North Dakota's state court.Together, these data sources allow us to create monthly counts of evictions in Williams County from 2000 through to October of 2022. 2

Oil Production and Prices
The Oil and Gas Division of North Dakota's Department of Mineral Resources (North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources 2023) provides monthly time-series on the volume of oil barrels produced by county and the first purchase price of North Dakota crude oil.We use data from Williams County for oil production.As discussed above, oil production is our explanatory variable of interest.We consider North Dakota oil prices as a possible confounding variable, because increased oil prices can lead to lower employment rates in the short term (Keane and Prasad 1996).We also observe unemployment rates for Williams County using data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2023).

Mobility Data
We link Infutor Data Solutions address histories to case-level eviction records using defendant name and address. 3For address histories, we restrict analysis to defendants with addresses in Williston, the largest town in Williams County.Because rural residents are not required to have mailing addresses, we achieve higher match rates by focusing on filings in the most urbanized area of Williams County.First, we selected all filings from our state court data that listed a Williston address.We also selected all individuals from the Infutor database who reported ever having living in Williston, N.D. (n ¼ 57,575).We linked eviction filings and Infutor records using the FastLink package in R (Enamorado, Fifield, and Imai 2019).The FastLink package enables probabilistic record linkages that can account for uncertainty and measurement error.We retained matches for defendants that had a posterior probability greater than 75% that the matched individual was correct.472 out of 762 eviction defendants were successfully linked to a record in the Infutor database.This is a match rate of 61.9%, which is comparable to other research involving linked eviction records (Collinson et al. 2022).From Infutor, we are able to observe defendant age and up to 10 addresses associated with the linked individual.

Methods
Where possible, we use descriptive statistics and visualizations to present our findings.To formally assess the relationship between energy production and eviction activity, however, we use multivariate analyses to investigate the pathways through which increased oil production affects eviction activity.Our model is displayed in Equation ( 1): Where EF t and O t respectively remain the number of eviction filings and barrels of oil produced in Williams County in month t from 2000 to 2022, and X t is an array of control variables.Model 1 models the bivariate relationship between oil production and eviction counts.In Model 2, we control for North Dakota oil price and county unemployment rate.Fluctuations in the oil price affect local labor markets (Keane and Prasad 1996), and job losses are often associated with eviction activity (Desmond and Gershenson 2017).In Model 3, we add controls for the median rent and the number of renter households in Williams County.The effects of oil production on eviction counts are expected to be mediated by increased rental prices and a larger renter population.Accordingly, we expect the inclusion of these variables to result in a smaller estimated coefficient for oil production

Results
In Figure 1, we plot eviction filing counts in Williams County by month.The color of points indicates the number of barrels of oil produced in Williams County.Figure 1 shows a clear association between the rise of oil production and eviction filings in Williams County.Landlords filed evictions at a stable rate of 1-2 a month from 2000 to 2010, before filings began to climb steadily to an average of 21 a month by 2015 and 42 a month by 2019.Over this same period, oil production in Williams County climbed from 300,000 barrels a month in 2000 to over 5.9 million barrels a month in 2015 and 7.5 million barrels a month in 2019.As Figure 1 shows, Williston's eviction rate began to climb at the same time as Williams County's oil production.
Both evictions and oil production peaked in 2019, because the COVID-19 pandemic decreased demand for oil products at the same time as an aggressive federal response prevented millions of evictions nationwide.North Dakota itself had an anemic housing policy response to the pandemic.The five eviction filings recorded in April 2020 can be attributed to the cancelation of civil hearings for most of that month 4 , but afterwards evictions quickly reverted to relatively high levels in Williams County.However, it is likely that federal spending on emergency rental assistance and other programs kept evictions below 2019 levels (Hepburn et al. 2021). 5 If we divide annual filing counts by ACS estimates of renter households, we find that Williams County annual eviction filing rate increased from .002% in 2010 to over 7% by 2019-an increase of around 350,000%. 6This means that at the height of the fracking boom, Williams County experienced an eviction filing rate similar to that of major cities like Philadelphia and New York City (Gromis et al. 2022).In 2019, nearly 17% of all evictions filed in North Dakota were filed in Williams County, despite representing only 5% of the state's total population.In Table 1, we display results from regression models.Model 1 confirms there is a statistically significant positive relationship between oil production and eviction counts in Williams County.As seen in Model 2, this relationship remains remarkably robust to the inclusion of oil price and unemployment rates, suggesting that these variables do not mediate the relationship between oil production and evictions.Model 3 show that oil production remains predictive even after including a full suite of controls.However, the much smaller estimated coefficient for oil production suggests that the housing market plays a substantial role in mediating the effects of increased oil production.
We can also assess the distributional impacts of housing shortages more directly by using Infutor data to look at the residential history of tenants evicted from Williston after the boom began in 2010.Infutor data list up to 10 addresses for each matched defendant.Notably, only 16% of defendants had a majority of prior addresses outside of North Dakota, and only 4% of defendants had prior addresses exclusively outside of North Dakota.Of the 76% of defendants with a known address prior to their eviction, we find that 84% had a known prior address in North Dakota (and 93% of these addresses are in Williston).As shown in Table 2, around 24% of defendants had only one known address prior to eviction, and 94% of these addresses were in North Dakota.Even if we consider defendants with two prior addresses, around 60% have only lived in North Dakota.Table 2 demonstrates that a clear majority of eviction defendants in  Notes: 0 a indicates that Infutor first observed the address from which the tenant was evicted before 1 January 2010l 0 b indicates that Infutor first observed the address from which the tenant was evicted after 1 January 2010.
Williston have substantial in-state residential histories.This reinforces our claim that "backward linkages" (Cust and Poelhekke 2015) from the fossil fuel sector to other sectors were too weak to counteract the rising cost of living for lower-income residents of Williams County.

Discussion
The above findings demonstrate that boomtowns like Williston, N.D. experience severe housing stress.Furthermore, the people most likely to suffer from housing instability are those residents whose incomes did not keep pace with the rising cost of living.How generalizable are these findings?We selected Williston because it is a boomtown for which we were able to find high quality timeseries for evictions data.While qualitative accounts of other rural fracking communities suggest that they also experience elevated eviction rates, the data do not exist us to study this relationship quantitatively.We can also think about the generalizability of these findings outside of the context of fracking booms.Are all exogenous economic growth events productive of housing instability?Not necessarily.The inelasticity of Williston's housing supply is a key factor behind the rise of rents and housing instability in Williams County.Resource extraction sites adjacent to large urban areas generally have more release valves-more neighborhoods or suburbs and satellite cities for spillover growth-than do isolated sites.For example, a study of housing prices in Pennsylvania counties on the Marcellus Shale found that fracking had less of an effect on housing in Westmoreland County, adjacent to Pittsburgh's Allegheny County (Williamson and Kolb 2011).
Nonetheless, isolated towns have policy options that can protect existing renters from displacement.Population growth must be matched by corresponding increases in housing supply, rent support, and tenant protections.Tenant protections can have profound effects on eviction filing rates (Nelson et al. 2021;Sabbeth 2022).North Dakotans could particularly benefit from simply increasing the time that a landlord must wait between first notifying tenants of intent to evict and actually filing that eviction, a reform that has been shown to substantially reduce filing rates (Gromis et al. 2022).Tenant protections are even more potent when reinforced by programs that give tenants formal representation in courts (Engler 2010;Sandefur 2015;Seron et al. 2001) or which give tenants more information about their rights (Golio et al. 2022).However, creating the kind of social service infrastructure necessary for tenants to defend their rights takes concerted effort: Nonprofit expenditures lag in many rural areas (Shapiro 2021) and tenant-oriented groups are especially sparse in towns like Williston that previously experienced little housing insecurity (Kneebone and Underriner 2022).
Tenant protections are necessary but insufficient to keep eviction filings rare.Small towns and rural areas can improve local housing stability not just by making it easier to build housing, but by making it easier to build affordable housing.The negative effects of exclusionary zoning on the housing supply are often thought of as a suburban problem, but even small towns and rural areas make it hard to build manufactured housing, which is the largest private source of affordable housing in much of the country (Sullivan 2018).Many communities on the Bakken have passed ordinances meant to block the establishment of man camps (Caraher et al. 2017), which diverts worker demand for housing into local rental markets instead.
Small towns must also be willing to fund and site subsidized housing, which is among the most effective means of ensuring housing stability (Preston and Reina 2021).For renters who already have a home or are unable to find a spot in subsidized housing, direct financial support is an effective shield from displacement (Aiken et al. 2022;Hepburn et al. 2021).However, housing is so expensive in Williston that the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program is ineffective.The Housing Authority of the City of Williston is authorized to lease only 110 units through HCVs, but the Authority's budget turns out to be the greater constraint.Due to the high cost of housing, the Authority runs up against its budgetary capacity once 50% of those vouchers are in use (U.S.Department of Housing and Urban Development 2023).Subsidized housing and direct housing support are expensive, but governments can fund them by capturing the profits of extractive industry through means like severance taxes.Notably, Pennsylvania (at the heart of the eastern fracking boom) does not collect severance taxes, and so does nothing to make residents whole who experience the harms of fracking.While a lucky few Pennsylvanians become "shaleonaires," many more suffer harms from fracking without any compensatory gains.Communities must negotiate rental support for lowand fixed-income renters in order to ensure the community as a whole benefits from its mineral resources.

Conclusion
The fracking boom may be winding down, but unconventional oil and gas extraction is likely to continue for decades.At the same time, new boomtowns may arise where minerals necessary for the energy transition are located.The Biden administration's use of industrial policy to onshore supply chains will have dramatic effects on the geography of jobs in this country.Tiny communities adjacent to rare earth metals, such as those in the desert on the California-Nevada border, may experience housing dynamics similar to those that have occurred in Williston.Meanwhile, mining companies are preparing to dramatically expand copper and lithium production, sometimes in conjunction with geothermal drilling projects that use hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques similar to those used in unconventional oil and gas extraction.Even towns aiming to transition from coal to nuclear may experience acute housing pressures (Bleizeffer 2022).These industries will be vital to the decarbonization of the economy, and so it is imperative that resource extraction be able to proceed in as just and equitable manner as possible (Malin, Ryder, and Lyra 2019).The lesson from the fracking boom is clear: Rural towns that welcome extractive industries must adopt tenant protections that are more commonly associated with big cities.Rural towns should also seek to redirect some amount of profits from resource extraction to budgeting for rental support and other housing subsidies.
However, as scholars like Malin and DeMaster (2016) and Jerolmack (2021) detail in their studies of oil producing regions in Pennsylvania, communities are at a structural disadvantage vis-� a-vis large corporations when it comes to negotiating the terms of extraction.Individuals deciding whether to allow fracking on their land can easily choose to forego direct benefits by blocking drilling on their property, yet as individuals they have no ability to avoid the negative externalities of extractive activity in their community.Unable to control the decisions of their neighbors, residents of these communities are inclined to grant corporate agents access to their land (Malin 2014).Policymakers and residents of new boomtowns should take care to negotiate community benefits before land agents come and before the exact geographic distribution of harms and benefits is made clear.Communities will only benefit as a whole from resource extraction if they can negotiate as if they were behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance.
These findings also highlight something of a paradox: Where is the best place to situate extractive industries?From a strict fiscal perspective, populated areas are ideal.While most localities that engaged in fracking report that revenues exceed costs, "local governments in highly rural regions experiencing large-scale growth have faced the greatest challenges" (Newell and Raimi 2018).Populated areas have the lowest transportation costs, more elastic housing supplies, better infrastructure, and thus a greater ability overall to use revenues to adjust to changing economic conditions.But of course, extractive activities in populated areas create graver environmental justice concerns: there are simply more people who will be exposed to pollution and who may see their properties permanently scarred.
Resource extraction creates tradeoffs between the higher environmental costs of operating in populated areas and the higher economic costs of operating in isolated areas.This tradeoff cannot be eliminated, but its impacts can be planned for and attenuated by local policymakers.If we have to extract resources in populated areas, extra care should be given to environmental protections.If we have to extract resources in isolated areas, local policymakers need to plan for tenant protections, housing supply, and rental support before the population boom arrives.Given the demand for resources that will accompany the energy transition, the number of both kinds of sites will likely grow in the future.
5. According to the Treasury Department, North Dakota was allocated $200.1 million dollars from the federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program.Because Congress mandated a minimum allocation to small states, North Dakota received a much higher per-renter allotment than most of the country.According to Eviction Lab estimates, North Dakota received three times as much aid per rental household than did renters in typical states (Hepburn 2021).6.While all formal eviction filing rates are undercounts of the true amount of forced displacement in a locality, this undercounting is likely unusually severe in Williams County, where informal housing arrangements swelled to accommodate the booming population.

Funding
The Eviction Lab is funded by the JPB, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Ford Foundations as well as the C3.aiDigital Transformation Institute and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Monthly evictions in Williams County increased dramatically with oil production.

Table 1 .
Number of eviction filings in Williams County and barrels produced (millions).��� p < 0.01.Average rent and oil prices are adjusted for CPI-U inflation.Average rent and renter household data from 2009 through 2021 for Williams County are based on ACS 5-year estimates for the given year; data from 2005 to 2009 are based on 2009 5-year estimates; data from 2000 to 2009 are based on decennial census estimates from 2000; and data are not available in 2022.

Table 2 .
Address histories of evicted tenants in Williston, North Dakota.