North Dakota Town Wants To Ban "Man Camps"

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

April 20, 2012 | 10:52 AM

The housing crunch caused by Pennsylvania’s natural gas drilling has been well-documented: hotels are popping up across northern Pennsylvania to house drillers; rent is increasing, too.
Many drillers stay in places called “man camps.” These camps take many forms: they can be a collection of RVs, mobile homes, or dormitory-style housing.
North Dakota is going through its own shale drilling boom, and one city is getting fed up with the camps, and the rowdy behavior associated with them. From Fox News:

One town smack in the middle of North Dakota’s historic oil boom has a plan for getting rid of the “man camps” that have sprung up as laborers pour in: Ban their campers.
Williston, the state’s ninth-largest city, is fed up with an estimated 400 RVs that are scattered throughout the city limits and house out-of-state workers who have flocked in to help oil companies tap the massive Bakken formation. The City Commission has introduced an ordinance that would make it illegal to live in a camper within city boundaries. If passed, the law would make living in a home on wheels a misdemeanor punishable by a $500 fine.
“The people who live here and the ones who pay taxes are developing a lot of frustration with it,” Williston Mayor Ward.