SHACKS ON RACKS

OLD HOMES HELP WITH JACKSON HOLE’S HOUSING CRISIS?

// BY SUE MUNCASTER

avid Newby, the owner of Great Divide Earthworks, his wife, Anne, and daughters Kayla (13) and Victoria (10) lived in Afton, Wyoming, when Newby got a phone call they were all happy about. An old workmate wanted to know if Newby, who had been commuting the almost 70 miles (one-way) between Afton and Jackson for 18 years, wanted a new house. And, if he did, could he move the 1,250-square-foot home from West Gros Ventre Butte, between Jackson and Wilson, to wherever he and his family wanted to live in it?

The Newby family’s Afton home was cramped, and the girls shared a bedroom. Luckily, the family owned two five-acre empty lots in Etna (35 minutes closer to Jackson). Newby submitted a route plan to the Wyoming Department of Transportation less than a day after he got his former colleague’s phone call. Shortly after, Anne and the girls were walking through the house, which had been built in the 1980s, on West Gros Ventre Butte, picking out their bedrooms and figuring out where to put furniture.

Three weeks later, the 29-foot-wide home was moved, albeit not easily. Shacks on Racks, which facilitated the home’s relocation, says it was their “most technical move to date” because of the steep, tight switchbacks on the butte. The home, placed on a foundation with a basement, now sits in Etna surrounded by enough land to store Newby’s business equipment and to raise livestock.

Not willing to wait for slow-moving businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies to address Jackson’s housing crisis, 39-year-old Esther Judge-Lennox started Shacks on Racks in 2018. Her mission is to help working families find affordable homes, counter wasteful habits by promoting the reuse of suit- able materials, and stand up to the wrecking ball of progress by preserving historic homes and the legacies of the people who built and lived in them.

Along with one full-time employee, Ryan Dorgan, Judge-Lennox scours Teton County for pending demolitions and works to connect homeowners planning to redevelop their property with families in need of housing. Most structures leave Teton County, Wyoming, for Teton County, Idaho and Lincoln and Sublette Counties in Wyoming; Land-development regulations are less strict in these areas than in Teton County, Wyoming. With help from partners in the architectural, engineering, and structural buildingmoving worlds, Shacks on Racks decides whether moving a soon-to-bedemolished building is possible. The receiver pays the cost of relocation, and Shacks works to convince developers to donate part of their dump budget to relocate the structure.

As of January 2023, Shacks on Racks has saved 21 structures from demolition and diverted 1,205,150 pounds of garbage from the landfill. Developers have contributed a combined $193,050 of their dump budgets to help relocate homes.

Shacks on Racks came about organically, inspired by Judge-Lennox’s own housing crisis. After she and her husband, Philip, built a small house, they found they could no longer afford the mortgage. “Then we found out our neighbor’s house was being demolished and going to the trash. It blew my mind,” says Judge-Lennox. “I desperately wanted to be here. I was skimping and was frustrated enough to do something about it.” She and Philip found a 1940s craftsman-style cabin in Jackson that was about to be demolished. They paid $12,000 to move it onto their lot in Hoback, which was zoned for two homes. Thanks to the rental income this relocated home generates for them, the couple can now afford their own mortgage.

Judge-Lennox didn’t dream up moving homes and Shacks on Racks out of the blue. In 1998, as a young girl, she stood on a bridge over I-15 near Dillion, Montana, and watched the rundown “Roe Mansion” ride down the interstate. A gift from media mogul Ted Turner’s Red Rock Ranch, the restored historic Roe Mansion is now the administration building on the University of Western Montana campus.

In the words of Jackson Town Council member Jonathan Schecter, Teton County, Wyoming, is the “richest county in the richest country in the history of the world.” As a tax-friendly haven with spectacular scenery and world-class amenities,

Jackson Hole continues to attract new homeowners with high salaries and investment income who can work remotely. In December of 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that Teton County once again led the nation in per capita income, and that this figure had experienced an astounding one-year jump of 44 percent (which equaled $97,404). In 2021, the per capita income of Teton County was $220,893. In 2022, it was $318,297. With this amount of wealth and only 3 percent of the land in Teton County held in private hands, housing prices have skyrocketed.

“The pace of Jackson Hole’s growth and change is accelerating faster than our ability—as businesses, nonprofits, or government—to understand what’s going on, much less effectively address and direct it,” argued Schecter last fall during the 22 in 21 Conference, an event sponsored by his think-tank organization, the Charture Institute. Teton County’s housing crisis is perhaps the most visible example of this. “We are trying to do things that no community in the world has figured out how to do,” he said.