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Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Business & Tourism

Economy

CHEYENNE — Wyoming knows it has a huge housing problem. 

Builders, city and county administrators, state officials, business and community leaders — it doesn’t matter which of them you ask, most will agree the state is short tens of thousands of homes.

Scott Hoversland, who heads up the Wyoming Community Development Authority, puts the number of homes the state needs somewhere between 28,000 to 38,000 by 2030 — roughly 2,070 to 3,680 homes annually to keep up with population growth and aging infrastructure.

On paper, Southeast Wyoming Builders Association’s Joe Killpack acknowledges that sounds like it should be a developer’s dream. 

But the reality is a lot more complicated, Killpack told Cowboy State Daily. It’s a tangled knot of economics and investment risk, criss-crossed with infrastructure costs and policy decisions that make houses more costly and time-consuming to build.

“This is a macro problem, not a micro problem,” Killpack added. “It’s not like we’re going to be able to pinpoint one issue. There are several issues. We’re talking about labor costs. We’re talking about commodity costs. We’re talking about development costs.”

Those make homes too expensive for Wyoming’s middle class to afford.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Middle Class Squeeze"}]

If Wyoming’s housing crisis has a face, it’s the middle-class worker earning median wages. 

Once, that would have signaled a solid, respectable income. Today, it increasingly falls short as wages continue to lose ground against persistent inflation. 

 was $75,500 in 2024, 7.4% below the U.S. median. 

Year over year, incomes rose just 1.3% while inflation climbed 2.9% — a clear decline in real purchasing power for the typical Wyoming family. 

Over the long term, the trend remains problematic. 

Wages have stayed relatively flat since at least 2010, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. For much of that time, inflation was modest, hovering between 1% and 2%. But that changed in 2021, when it surged 4.2%, before peaking at 9.1% in June 2022 — the highest level since 1981.

The result has been a widening gap between what workers earn and what it costs to live. 

Regardless of the causes, the stark reality is wages have not kept pace with living expenses for most Wyomingites. 

That marks a fundamental shift for the state’s middle class. 

Median incomes that once reliably supported homeownership — a cornerstone of financial stability for many families — no longer stretch as far. Increasingly, the workers who power local economies are priced out of the communities they serve. 

The strain shows up in everyday decisions. Longer commutes. Delayed home purchases. And, in some cases, leaving the state altogether.

Wyoming loses roughly 70% of its residents by the time they reach age 30, state officials have said. Housing costs are frequently cited as a key factor in that outmigration, which has led to 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Math Problem"}]

The problem, as Killpack sees it, isn’t that developers can’t see the demand. It’s that the basic math of putting up homes, especially ones that regular families can afford, no longer works. 

On the cost side, labor, commodities, tariffs and fuel have all climbed, pushing construction budgets higher even before projects hit city hall for approval.

After that, fees and regulations are adding as much as $10,000 to the cost of homes, along with code changes like thicker exterior walls or new sprinkler requirements.

“Every time a new code is adopted the costs go up,” he said. “We’re doing these new codes to protect the health and the safety of our people who are living in these homes, which, hey, I can’t disagree with. But that doesn’t mean that costs go down. They only go up.”

Codes requiring particular types of insulation, for example, have meant using two-by-six-inch lumber in exterior walls, which adds to the cost versus a two-by-four.

“In Laramie, we have to do a draft stop in the basement,” he said. “So most are doing sprinkler systems and everybody thinks that’s wonderful, right? Because it truly is. If there’s a fire, it’s great. It’ll stop a fire. But the costs still go up, every single time.”

Meanwhile, waiting times for permit approvals stretch to as long as 18 months or more. In some cases, during which time interest rates, prices, and demand are all shifting.

“I’m involved in a project right now where we were going to build some apartments,” he said. “And this project originally started three years ago. They have had to stop, because the market changed.”

What The Median Buys V. What Developers Can Build

The gap comes into sharp focus when median income is translated into buying power. 

A median salary of $75,500 supports up to $2,097 for a monthly mortgage, assuming a borrower with minimal debt and strong credit. On a 30-year fixed mortgage rate of 6.47%, that maximum mortgage payment tracks back to a maximum loan amount of $332,842. 

Homes in the low $300,000 range no longer pencil out for developers, Killpack said.

“A single-family home under $400,000 is almost impossible,” he said. 

Builder margins, he added, are much lower than people think.

“Most people think it’s like 15, 20%,” he said. “It’s actually very minimal. I mean, you’re anywhere between 3-6% and that’s it.”

Which means developers themselves don’t have much wiggle room when it comes to their budgets. 

Given that kind of margin, when you look at a city like Cheyenne where 5,000 homes are needed, the kind of investment it takes doesn’t feel like it’s worth the risk, Killpack said.

“(Let’s) talk about building 1,250 homes in a year in Cheyenne just to meet the minimum of what we’re projecting,” he said. “And let’s just say $400,000 homes … you’d need a $500 million investment annually.”

For that kind of money, Killpack said developers look at what’s known as the absorption rate, which measures how fast homes sell in a given market. They’re asking themselves where they can get the fastest return on investment. 

Wyoming’s absorption rate needs to be higher to attract investment, Killpack said. 

Now, developers can find many markets with both less risk and faster absorption rates, like those in Texas, Utah, and the Denver metro area, all of which have larger populations to spread risk around. 

Wyoming’s lack of population, Killpack added, has many investors turning up their noses at Wyoming projects, deeming them too risky. 

That doesn’t mean no one wants to invest in Wyoming, Killpack added. 

“But it takes more than just people in Wyoming to make Wyoming grow,” he said. “Capital that’s being infused into our economy doesn’t only come from our local regional banks. It comes from other people, too, and they have to be willing to invest in Wyoming.”

On paper, the city of Douglas seems like the classic Wyoming success story. 

Oil and gas jobs form the bedrock of its economy, but more than 300 businesses in health care, education and retail round things out. Hotels are packed with energy workers — the kind of activity that ought to be pumping money into every cash register in town. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"But there’s a catch."}]

“Our population is 6,512 based on our community snapshot, and 50% of our workers live in the city,” Interim City Administrator Michele Carter told Cowboy State Daily. “About 42% live in Casper. So, we have about half our workforce living in Douglas, just under half.”

The rest are headed to Casper or other areas around Douglas, like Glenrock. 

The reason, Carter said, is directly related to a lack of affordable housing.

“A lot of our housing that has been built over the last few years is in that $400,000 to $500,000 range,” she said. “Which doesn’t fit your local businesses, your teachers, your nurses who are coming in to fill those spots in our school district and our hospital here.”

Many of the oil and gas workers who do live in Douglas, meanwhile, are staying in campers and at the fairgrounds because of a lack of rental properties. 

Fixing that has proven difficult, Carter said. 

Development costs, which include building out new sewer and water services, exceed what most people can afford to pay.

It’s taken a $5.7 million grant for water and sewer lines to help get things moving on a 30-acre site on the edge of town that will include a 94-apartment complex, plus several acres of single-family housing and new commercial space. 

“The grant is really to put the infrastructure in,” Carter said. “Developers couldn’t make the numbers work if they have to eat all of those water, sewer and utility costs on top of everything else.”

Even with a grant, no one is pretending this is a silver bullet that will fix everything. 

The apartments and homes the development unlocks will also take years to build, and the demand from mid-level workers is already far ahead of what’s on the drawing board.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Douglas isn’t Alone"}]

Infrastructure is a significant barrier for communities across the Cowboy State, Hoversland told Cowboy State Daily, but it’s particularly acute for communities with fewer than 5,000 people. 

Water lines, sewer, roads and power are required before even a single house can be built in a new area. For small towns with a thin tax base, fronting the money for that is typically next to impossible.

“Some of the bigger cities, Casper and Cheyenne especially, have more items they can do and have infrastructure built out,” he said. “But our cities under 5,000 population in Wyoming, that doesn’t give the numbers to draw developers in. 

“So, infrastructure funding is another one of those things that I think is a big holdup. It really restricts a lot of developers coming in, because they have to pay for the infrastructure to say 25-to-50-home development, and that’s a lot of upfront cost and a lot of risk on the developer.”

Wyoming isn’t alone in facing such problems. 

Nationally, the Harvard University State of the Nation's Housing 

 released Thursday shows that construction is down across the nation amid rising costs and an ever-widening gap between what median households can afford and what median homes cost. 

There’s a growing wave of state and local experiments on the ground — ranging from tax abatements, zoning changes, and new financing tools — all aimed at getting more units on the ground across the nation.

Wyoming is part of the melting pot of state ideas. 

Hoversland points to a statewide housing strategic action plan that has 27 items that may help, including fast-track permitting, infrastructure funding tools, and support for manufactured and prefabricated homes, as well as tweaks to how federal housing dollars are used to stretch them further.

Jason Mincer, executive director of Wyoming Neighbors for Housing, is pushing public-private partnerships, community land trusts, and even a state-level investment fund to help shoulder upfront risk for workforce housing, along with streamlined approvals to cut months off project timelines. 

Communities like Cheyenne, meanwhile, are rewriting their own rule books, streamlining zoning codes and getting rid of standards that may have been nice to have once upon a time, but don’t really impact safety and add significantly to costs. 

Cheyenne has even created a “cottage lot” development option that lets builders cluster very small homes closer together with shared open space, which has already attracted some developers.

All of those ideas help at the margins. But Wyoming has to find ways to make it routine, rather than remarkable, to build homes in the price ranges that teachers, nurses, and sheriff’s deputies can afford.

Otherwise, nothing changes with the overriding trend where a large number of Wyoming households are maxed out in the low $300,000 range, and builders can’t drop below $400,000. 

Until that gap can be routinely bridged, builders will remain cautious, and the state will continue to lose many of its young people to areas where the wages are a better match to prevailing home prices.

Cheyenne Housing Main IMG 6742 6 21 26

Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Why A Shortfall Of More Than 20,000 Homes Isn’t Enough To Get Wyoming Building | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Wyoming needs tens of thousands of new homes, but only a fraction of the need is under construction because builders say the math doesn’t work. Middle-class wages aren’t high enough to afford to buy houses while home-building costs just continue to rise.

Why A Shortfall Of More Than 20,000 Homes Isn’t Enough To Get Wyoming Building

Kolby fedore

Kolby Fedore

Crime & Courts

Public Safety

The Wyoming Department of Corrections (WDOC) has been chronically understaffed for years, and despite multiple recruiting efforts still has 109 vacant positions across the state, including 66 uniformed corrections officers.

That's only three fewer vacancies than the agency had a year ago, yet prison officials say they're making progress.

Employee retention has climbed from 79% in fiscal year 2022 to 88% in fiscal year 2025. The number of Wyoming inmates housed in a private Mississippi prison has been cut in half. 

And now the department is trying something new: recruiting military service veterans before they even leave the armed forces to take advantage of training that meshes well with transitioning to being corrections officers.

Through a new partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense's SkillBridge program, transitioning service members can train with the Wyoming Department of Corrections before separating from active duty, creating what officials hope will become a new pipeline into correctional careers.

Whether that pipeline can help solve one of Wyoming government's most stubborn workforce challenges remains to be seen.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Problem Years In The Making"}]

The staffing shortage facing Wyoming's prison system didn't appear overnight.

Current WDOC officials and former leaders have spent years warning lawmakers about recruitment and retention struggles inside Wyoming prisons.

Among them was former WDOC Director Bob Lampert, who led Wyoming's prison system for nearly 17 years before retiring in 2023. At the time, he was the longest-serving state corrections director in the nation.

Looking at the current vacancy numbers, Lampert sees a familiar challenge.

"The total number of vacancies I don't think has changed a whole lot," he told Cowboy State Daily. "Corrections has been working hard on recruitment and retention, but at the same time there's either not been any ground gained, or there's been some loss."

Current WDOC Director Dan Shannon was unavailable for an interview for this story because of travel commitments. Questions were answered through department spokeswoman Stephanie Dack.

"Staff retention has always been, and remains, a top priority for the Wyoming Department of Corrections," Dack said.

The department reports overall employee retention reached 88% during fiscal year 2025, up from 79% in fiscal year 2022. Despite that, it’s gained almost no ground in making up the vacancy gap.

Dack said retention efforts have focused on leadership development, workplace culture, employee wellness programs, and compensation improvements.

The work appears to be helping, but filling prison jobs remains difficult.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Why Nobody Has Solved It"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Correctional staffing shortages aren't unique to Wyoming."}]

Eric Wodahl, associate dean and professor of criminal justice at the University of Wyoming, said corrections agencies across the country have struggled to recruit workers for years.

[{"type":"text","text":"Part of the challenge is simple economics."}]

Historically, correctional jobs have often paid less than other criminal justice professions, particularly law enforcement.

[{"type":"text","text":"Money isn't the only issue, however."}]

The work frequently involves nights, weekends, and holidays. Employees face stress, potential danger and the challenges of working with incarcerated populations that often include people with significant mental health, behavioral and substance abuse issues.

"You're kind of incarcerated yourself," Wodahl said, describing the reality of spending long shifts inside secure facilities.

[{"type":"text","text":"Location can make things harder."}]

Many prisons are located in rural communities where labor pools are smaller and where spouses or partners may struggle to find employment.

[{"type":"text","text":"Lampert said Wyoming has long faced that challenge."}]

Rawlins, for example, has historically been both a prison town and a railroad town. Not everyone who grows up there wants to work in corrections, and prisons must compete for workers against energy companies, transportation jobs, retailers and other employers.

"History has shown that pay alone isn't necessarily going to fill the gaps," Lampert said.

Retaining staff also requires quality training, strong supervision, opportunities for advancement and support for employees dealing with the stresses of the job, he said.

Allison Escobedo, a criminal justice professor joining the University of Wyoming this fall, said corrections work can also be uniquely isolating.

Not only are many facilities geographically remote, she said, the profession itself can be difficult for outsiders to understand.

"It's such a unique job," Escobedo said. "Others in what would be considered criminal justice positions — social workers, police officers, etc. — still can't even really relate to corrections work because it's so different."

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"More Than Just Guards"}]

One of the biggest misconceptions about corrections is that the public often sees correctional officers as little more than guards, Lampert said.

[{"type":"text","text":"The reality is much more complicated."}]

"There's not too many people in prison that are there for singing too loud in church," Lampert said.

The work involves managing difficult populations, maintaining safety, and responding to crises.

Beyond security duties, corrections officers help reinforce positive behaviors, model productive habits and encourage inmates to address the problems that landed them in prison.

"It's a lot more than guarding," he said. "It's basically helping individuals in a way that's not visible to the public."

That mission, academics say, may be part of what attracts certain people to the profession despite its challenges.

Wodahl said correctional work offers an opportunity to contribute to public safety while also helping people improve their lives before returning to their communities.

"There is a strong community that develops among people who work in the profession together," he said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Mississippi And Back Again"}]

The staffing crisis became impossible to ignore when Wyoming began sending inmates out of state.

At one point, the department housed 240 Wyoming inmates in a private Mississippi prison because staffing shortages limited its ability to safely operate facilities at home.

[{"type":"text","text":"That number has been reduced to 120."}]

Dack said staffing improvements at the Wyoming State Penitentiary have allowed the department to bring back 125 male inmates while also returning female inmates to the Wyoming Women's Center after temporary operational adjustments.

The remaining inmates, however, cannot return until staffing improves further.

[{"type":"text","text":"Lampert is familiar with that situation."}]

When he first arrived in Wyoming, inmates were also housed out of state. During his tenure, the department expanded facilities and eventually brought them all back.

While private prisons can sometimes provide short-term relief, Lampert said Wyoming's own facilities generally offer stronger training, continuity and services.

[{"type":"text","text":"\"I was always very proud of the staff that we did have,\" he said."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Looking To Veterans"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Now the WDOC is turning to military veterans."}]

Through SkillBridge, service members in the final months of military service can work with civilian employers while still receiving military pay and benefits.

Participants approved by their commanders can train with the WDOC, gaining experience in facility operations, security procedures, de-escalation techniques and correctional law before potentially moving into full-time employment.

[{"type":"text","text":"The appeal is obvious."}]

"Military service and correctional work align in several important ways, including discipline, physical readiness, mental resilience, adaptability and teamwork," Dack said.

Lampert agrees. During his years leading Wyoming corrections, veterans consistently performed well.

"All of the veterans that we recruited, without exception, in my opinion, were excellent correctional officers," he said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Familiar Mission"}]

Sgt. 1st Class Clive Rieke, the Wyoming Army National Guard's AGR branch NCOIC, helps service members navigate the transition from military life to civilian careers.

[{"type":"text","text":"One of the biggest challenges is culture shock, he said."}]

Military members spend years immersed in a world with its own language, structure and expectations.

"In the military, your unit is kind of like your family and you have a clear-cut mission," Rieke said.

[{"type":"text","text":"That sense of purpose doesn't always exist in civilian workplaces."}]

Many veterans also struggle to translate military experience into terms civilian employers understand. Programs like SkillBridge are designed to close that gap by allowing service members to explore careers before fully leaving the military.

Research suggests veterans may bring skills that naturally fit correctional work.

Escobedo said a recent study found veterans entering corrections careers reported greater confidence in their leadership abilities, teamwork skills and interpersonal effectiveness than their non-veteran counterparts.

Wyoming’s prisons have 109 vacant positions, despite years of recruiting. Now they're turning to military veterans because of their training. "The veterans we recruited were excellent correctional officers," said former corrections chief Bob Lampert.