The Highest Rents In The United States Are In Williston, North Dakota
You think rents are high in San Francisco? Try Williston, North Dakota. No wait, don’t – there’s nowhere to live. According to a new study by Apartment Guide, the most expensive rents in the country can be found in this relatively tiny North Dakota town.
The study looks at the price for “entry level apartments,” defined as one-bedroom, one-bath units around 700 square feet. Here’s what that kind of space will set you back per month in the five priciest cities:
Williston, North Dakota: $2,394
San Jose/Sunnyvale/Santa Clara, California: $1,881
San Francisco/Oakland/Fremont, California: $1,776
Dickinson, North Dakota: $1,773
Key West, Florida: $1,640
The area widely considered to be the most expensive place to rent in the country, the New York/Northern New Jersey/Long Island region, didn’t even crack the top five, at $1,504.
Two North Dakota cities are in the top five thanks to a burgeoning oil industry that’s building instant cities in the Great Plains. The explosive increase in oil production has transformed Williston and other cities into boom towns with dramatic population spikes. In Williston, a city on the edge of the Bakken Oil Fields, the population has doubled in the last five years, from 14,700 in the 2010 census to over 30,000 people today. The growth is akin to the way the Gold Rush quickly urbanized parts of California in mid-1800s.
In fact, so many people are moving to the area to work for oil companies that so-called “man camps” made from temporary structures were built over the last few years to keep up with demand. That means your $2,394/month apartment might look something like this:
The housing shortage is so dire that people are living in their cars and the homeless population has swelled 200 percent over the last year. Since there are no official homeless shelters, churches apply for temporary permits to help house the thousands of workers who come seeking employment. A $35 million housing incentive fund was introduced in 2011 with the hope of subsidizing the cost of new, affordable housing. Unfortunately, the fund was depleted late last year.
We hear so much about the way the tech boom is shaping the Bay Area, but if you look at where the most astounding growth is happening in the country, it’s not startups that are making the most dramatic changes to U.S. cities. It’s oil.
Chaos as company accidentally invites 61,000 people to job interview
Police dispersed an angry crowd of jobseekers outside an employment office in Stockholm on Wednesday after it called 61,000 people for a recruitment meeting by mistake.
“Something has gone wrong with the mailing list … it has set off a very messy situation at the city office,” said Clas Olsson, acting director of the employment office.
An email call for a recruitment meeting that should have gone out to about 1,000 jobseekers went out to considerably more people, about 61,000 – apparently all the registered job seekers in Stockholm, police said.
Hundreds of people expecting to attend crowded into the alley where the labour office is located and spilled into the adjacent street, a main thoroughfare running through downtown Stockholm.
Emotions were running high and office staff sounded the alarm, bringing police to the scene.
“When we got there it was very crowded and there were some upset feelings,” Police Inspector Ulf Lindgren told Reuters.
Olsson told the Aftonbladet newspaper he did not know if the cause was a human or technical error.
Sweden’s total unemployment stood at 8.6 per cent in January.
Parrot helps India police catch murder suspect
Ashutosh Goswami thought he would get away with robbery when he killed his aunt who caught him red-handed. But according to local police, he hadn’t realised her pet parrot would turn stool pigeon.
In highly embellished accounts of one of the most unlikely Indian murder mysteries in living memory, Goswami was just one of a number of suspects until the victim’s widower local Hindi newspaper editor, Vijay Sharma, read out their names in front of their parrot Heera. When Ashutosh Goswami’s name was read out, the parrot squawked”Usne maara, usne maara’- ‘he’s the killer, he’s the killer.’
Ashutosh was arrested by police in Balkeshwar Colony in Agra for the murder of his aunt Neelam and confessed to her killing, the Press Trust of India reported. According to the well-respected agency, the role of the parrot Heera was hailed by the local Senior Superintendent of Police Shalabh Mathur:”We got a lot of help from the parrot to zero in on the murderer,” he said.
The suspect told detectives he had decided to rob the home of his aunt and uncle with his accomplice Ronny Massey and held his aunt at knife point to force her to hand over their valuables. He stabbed her pet dog and then killed his aunt to make sure she did not inform the police.
He had thought the parrot would be a silent witness, but the victim’s husband, Vijay Sharma, today told the Telegraph Heera had identified his nephew as the killer with a squawk.
“The police told us that the murderer is someone close and known to the family as there was a friendly entry into the house. They gave us names of few suspects including my nephew.
“The parrot always used to be with my wife and I was sure he had witnessed the murder. It was unbelievable and to satisfy ourselves whether the police were going in the right direction we called out the names of all the suspects to our parrot. Surprisingly he screamed and made unusual noises whenever my nephew’s name came up. He confessed to police,” he said.
The investigating officer Superintendent Satyarth Anirudh said he was skeptical of the claims and said normal police work had identified the killer. “It was a blind murder, no clues, but were were sure someone close to the family was involved. We questioned many people and found who had visited the house in the absence of the victim’s husband.
“We interrogated all the suspects and the nephew of the victim confessed to the crime. We don’t know where the parrot came into it,” he said.
From gizmodo and London’s Daily Telegraph
