I moved to Bozeman from Denver in 2024 for the quality of life, the mountain access, the tight-knit community, and the sense that this place was still real in a way that bigger cities had stopped being. Two years later, I can confidently say: we need to stop letting people move here.

I understand the hypocrisy. I do. But hear me out.

When I arrived, Bozeman still had a certain rawness. You could get a table at a restaurant without a reservation. You could find parking downtown on a Saturday. The trails weren’t crowded until late June. It felt like a secret, and I was fortunate enough to discover it at exactly the right time.

Since then, I’ve watched the town change. New condos on every block. Traffic on 19th that rivals anything I left behind in Denver. A line at the Co-op that wraps past the bulk bins. Prices that make Denver look reasonable, which is saying something, because Denver is also unreasonable.

I know what the old-timers are thinking: “Welcome to 2018, buddy.” And they’re right. They watched this happen years before I did. They tried to sound the alarm and nobody listened, probably because the people not listening were people like me who were busy packing a U-Haul.

But I’m here now, and I’ve adopted the full range of local concerns. I complain about the traffic. I shake my head at new construction. I tell people from out of state that winters are brutal and they probably wouldn’t like it. I have become, in every way that matters, a local who doesn’t want more people to have what I have.

Is that selfish? Probably. But so is moving to a small town and expecting it to stay small. We’re all guilty. I just got here more recently.

Ashton Waverly works remotely for a tech company and describes himself as “basically from here at this point.”