Update on Activity in the State's Oil Capital -- Tioga, North Dakota -- Bakken, North Dakota, USA

Link here (regional links break early and break often).

Today, what could become the 16th largest community in North Dakota will shoot up practically over night on crop land west of Tioga.

Capital Lodge, a Texas entity incorporated in North Dakota to build worker housing, is setting up units for 2,500 people as fast as the units can be shipped from the assembly plant in Indiana.

Wham-bam, just like that, a community is rising from the dust storm of bulldozed clay soil. It'll have its own general store, lagoon and waste treatment facility, water wells, a football field-sized dome with swimming pool, hot tubs, exercise facility, basketball court and dining, and parking for 200 semi trucks.

Long-Term Vision

Its management representative, Richard Brown, says the long-term plan is that when the boom is off the oil and mostly male truckers and workers are replaced by production-phase families, a "Capitalville" could become its own self-sustaining community.

Brown said the units, which have seven bedrooms and a large living area, were designed to become four-bedroom homes with relatively little interior remodeling. Every other unit would be removed, or moved, to provide some yard around the remaining units.

That's an unusual bit of futuristic thinking in the oil zone, where between 15,000 and 20,000 temporary housing units (no one knows the exact number) are most often Lego-style modules that bolt together and are intended to be trucked off to the next boom, small modulars, or rows of RVs parked in raw camps and farmyards.

Capital Lodge will bring the number of temporary housing units to 9,400 in Williams County alone.

This is impressive, but one subdivision alone in Williston will be adding about 2,200 permanent units for families.