No roads home: How a chronic housing shortage keeps reservation communities in crisis.

Housing insecurity touches almost everyone in tribal communities in Montana. Its causes and consequences are deep-rooted, confoundingly complex, and often overlooked.

This three-part series, The Shelter Gap, explores Indian Country’s housing crisis by examining the barriers residents and developers face in buying, renting and building homes, investigating the root causes of chronic housing shortages on reservation land, and highlighting what’s possible when residents achieve stable housing. 

Part 1 explains how a widespread reservation housing shortage prevents middle-class tribal citizens from living in reservation communities, perpetuating economic stagnation and cycles of poverty. 

When Jacqueline Martin, a citizen of the Aaniiih Tribe, retired after a 32-year career in natural resource and fire management around the Mountain West, she wanted to move back to the reservation where she grew up.

Located in north-central Montana, the Fort Belknap Reservation is home to more than 3,000 members of the Aaniiih and Nakoda tribes. Martin had ambitions of bringing her professional skills and experience back to the community. She hoped to help the tribes find funding for natural resource management projects and mentor young people in her field. 

But when Martin looked for homes on the reservation, she couldn’t find any. She’s not alone. 

Though Martin lives hundreds of miles away in Boise, Idaho, she stays in touch with her former high school classmates who left Fort Belknap to work in real estate, construction and health care — expertise that’s in short supply on the reservation.

“Our conversations always come back to we’d love to move home, but there’s nowhere to live,” she said. 

The long-standing housing shortage on Indian reservations in Montana reinforces cycles of poverty by forcing young residents to seek opportunities far from home and by discouraging financially secure citizens from returning to tribal communities, interviews with tribal leaders and housing experts show. Federal funding for tribal housing agencies is inadequate even to maintain limited existing housing stock. Convoluted land ownership patterns, financing hurdles, and lack of access to electricity, water and roads discourage commercial development on reservation land.

The result is a housing landscape inadequate to the needs and aspirations of its current and would-be residents.

“The brightest and best are the ones you need at home, building the future on that reservation,” former Salish and Kootenai Housing Authority Director Bob Gauthier, now deceased, said last July. “But if there’s nowhere to live, what do you do?”

OUT OF STOCK

Current Salish and Kootenai Housing Authority Director Jody Cahoon Perez told Montana Free Press that housing challenges “look essentially the same on every reservation” — a sheer lack of housing stock to buy or rent combined with a chronic shortage of tribally managed rental units.

According to 2019-2023 census estimates, the Northern Cheyenne, Rocky Boy’s and Fort Belknap reservations in Montana had homeownership vacancy rates of zero, meaning there were no unoccupied homes for sale when the survey was conducted. 

With the supply of purchasable homes severely limited or nonexistent, the rental sector becomes overburdened. Tribal housing authorities, whose primary source of funding is the federal government, are often the dominant — and sometimes the only — landlord in tribal areas. With demand for housing consistently outpacing supply, wait lists for rental units swell. 

The wait for tribally managed housing in Ronan, on the Flathead Reservation, is typically two and a half years, according to Cahoon Perez. A 2021 report found the average wait for housing on the Crow Reservation was 10 years.

Because Native families tend to take in friends and relatives, housing insecurity in Indian Country often translates to overcrowding, rather than homelessness, according to a 2017 federal report. About 16% of Native Americans living in tribal areas experience overcrowding — defined by more than one resident per room, including dining rooms, living rooms and kitchens — compared to just 2% of all U.S. households. 

Overcrowding is even more acute in the state. A 2018 tribal health board survey of more than 300 residents of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation found that 31% of respondents lived in overcrowded homes. A similar survey in 2021 found that more than 1 in 4 homes on the neighboring Crow Reservation were overcrowded. Some respondents reported up to 20 people sleeping in a single house. 

The crisis touches nearly everyone in tribal communities statewide. 

When Tyler Baker left the Blackfeet Reservation to pursue higher education — first at Salish Kootenai College on the Flathead Reservation and then at Gonzaga University in Washington — he imagined he’d eventually return home. But today, employed as the coordinator of the Montana Native Homeownership Coalition, Baker can’t find housing on the Blackfeet Reservation.

“There’s always a push for leaving to get educated, come back, and help your tribe,” he said. “I went and got my education, but can’t go back because there’s nowhere to go.” 

Gaylene DuCharme, who was the financial aid director at Blackfeet Community College for 13 years, has watched the negative impacts of inadequate housing play out at both ends of the education spectrum. She said the average BCC student commutes about 54 miles to campus, and some have tried to solve their housing conundrum by asking if they can camp on campus property. DuCharme had to tell them no. 

The same lack of housing that complicates life for students also deters potential teachers, she said. 

“We’ve had faculty accept a job and then find out they don’t have housing and then resign soon after, because it’s such a hard place to get a home or even rent,” she said. 

NO HOMES, NO GROWTH

The difficulties tribal citizens face in finding adequate housing create economic ramifications well beyond the personal. 

Housing deficiencies in Indian Country also stymie the development of a middle class — a demographic that’s vital for a community’s economic growth — said Robert Crawford, former real estate adviser and homeownership coordinator for the Blackfeet Nation. 

That assessment tracks with Jacqueline Martin’s experience. 

“When you take out professional, independent entrepreneurs, individuals who want to help, it makes the community take a step backwards,” she said. “We’re not able to progress at the rate we should be.”

Lack of housing means that many people who work on the Fort Belknap Reservation live outside the community in places like Chinook or Havre, tribal councilmember Randi Fetter said. As a result, dollars earned in the tribal community are often spent outside the reservation.

“So that’s where all of our economic development goes,” she said. 

With few or no homes for sale, federally funded low-income tribal housing is often the only available option. And because tenants must meet a federally determined low-income threshold to be eligible for that housing, earning more money can disqualify a resident. The catch-22 result is that many reservation residents can’t afford to advance economically without losing access to the only housing available to them.

“I refer to it as a square peg going into a round hole, because only if you are poor are you eligible,” said Maria Cohen, a real estate broker and tribal housing consultant in Arizona. “If you are middle-class and above, you are no longer eligible.”

Crawford has owned several businesses on and around the Blackfeet Reservation. He said his biggest challenge has been hiring employees. 

“There’s all this data about [high] unemployment, so I thought, ‘This is perfect, we’ll get everybody a job,’” he said of a cannabis company he oversaw just outside the reservation. “But we couldn’t. Because if they took the job, they’d lose their house.”

That dynamic only adds pressure to tribally managed low-income rental housing, where maintenance backlogs and wait lists are already months or years long, perpetuating a cycle in which many families live in inadequate low-income housing for multiple generations. 

“We can’t get out of it,” Crawford said. “We can’t [house] the people who are definitely going to boost the economy. A rising tide raises all ships, but we can’t get the tide in.”

CULTURE AND RECONNECTION

Because tribal identity is closely tied to land and place, cultural and language revitalization efforts often occur on reservations, but lack of access to housing in tribal communities creates roadblocks to those avenues of connection. 

Living in Arizona with his partner, La’Trell Hendrickson was eager to return to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation for a summer Cheyenne language internship at Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer. 

Hendrickson’s grandmother spoke Cheyenne, and when she died he felt a sense of duty to pass the language on to younger generations.

“Our language is the heart of our people,” he said. “It makes us Cheyenne. That’s why it matters so much to me. I don’t want that gift to go away.”

Hendrickson’s family owns a home on the reservation, but like many homes in tribal communities, it’s overcrowded. Eight or 10 people share the four-bedroom space on a given day, Hendrickson said.

“There’s not any space for me,” he said. “We’ve already got someone on the couch, all the rooms are full. So to actually come and learn my language, I have to make a sacrifice.”

Hendrickson’s sacrifice was that for two months he camped outside his family home in a tent or camper van, depending on the weather, during the internship. 

The intergenerational transmission of values and culture is an “inherent right” of Indigenous people, according to Caroline LaPorte, an attorney for the Indian Law Resource Center, a national nonprofit. 

“If you’re a tribal community, and your tribal members, your descendants, your kids, your grandkids, want to stay close to that nucleus of culture, that’s what having access to housing does,” she said. “It keeps us together.”

Part 2 of The Shelter Gap, publishing Wednesday, Oct. 1, investigates the historical and contemporary causes of Indian Country’s housing shortage. 

This series was produced with support from the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.