I was walking down North Wallace the other morning, headed to get a paper, when I realized I was lost. I have lived in this neighborhood since 2006, back when I bought my house for a perfectly normal amount of money—a figure that, frankly, represents the baseline for what a person should reasonably expect to pay for shelter. I know every curb, every crack in the sidewalk, and every dog that barks at 7:00 AM. But there, where the old yellow bungalow used to be, now stands a structure that appears to be made entirely of windows and ambition.

It is a four-story affair with a glass elevator on the exterior. I stood there for a long time trying to decide if it was a space station or a very expensive way to reach the second floor. It is undeniably elegant, if you like the idea of living inside a giant fishbowl while your neighbors try to find parking for their Subarus. It sits, quite comfortably, right next to a cottage built in 1920 that still has the original paint peeling off the cedar shingles.

Nobody seems to notice that the two buildings are not speaking the same language. The cottage is whispering about how hard it was to clear the fields in the old days, and the glass elevator is shouting about high-speed fiber-optic internet and sustainable HVAC systems. It is quite a conversation to have on a Tuesday morning.

I remember when “development” meant someone finally decided to patch the potholes on Main Street. Now, it means we have to decide whether a neighborhood is a place where people live or a collection of investment vehicles that happen to have bedrooms. My friend Gary, who has been framing houses in this valley since the eighties, looked at that elevator and just sighed. “It’s got a rooftop terrace, Howard,” he told me. “For looking at the mountains we’re busy blocking from view.”

I don’t want to be the person who says things were better in 2006, but it is a verifiable fact that they were quieter. In 2006, if you saw a crane, it usually meant someone was fixing a roof, not putting up a boutique hotel for people who want to pretend they’re rugged because they own a pair of expensive hiking boots. I sometimes worry that if we add one more sleek, modern facade to our downtown, the old brick buildings might just get embarrassed and crumble into the street out of sheer modesty.

There is a sort of math that everyone in Bozeman seems to be doing lately. It involves taking your current salary, multiplying it by the number of people who want to move here from California, and then subtracting the amount of joy you get from your morning commute. The result is always a negative number, yet we keep building these glass towers as if the economy were a game of Monopoly where everyone already has three hotels on Park Place.

I asked a woman emerging from the glass lobby if she liked her new view. She looked at me with genuine confusion and said, “It’s so authentic, isn’t it? I love the grit of the old town right next to us.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the “grit” she was referring to was a pile of construction debris that had been sitting in the alley for three weeks.

We are a town of contradictions. We want to be a world-class destination with the privacy of a ghost town. We want four-star dining on every corner, but we also want to be able to find a parking spot for our lifted trucks at the Co-op. We want to protect the character of the valley, but we also want the property value of our homes to climb high enough to fund our retirement in a place with less snow.

I suppose the glass elevator is just a sign of the times. It’s transparent, which is appropriate for a city that has stopped being able to hide its intentions. We aren’t a small town trying to remember its roots anymore; we’re a luxury catalog that people are physically moving into.

I walked back to my house, which I bought for a very normal amount of money nearly two decades ago. I sat on my porch and watched a delivery truck try to navigate the narrow street, its side mirror narrowly missing a sculpture of a metal elk that someone put in their yard to signal they are “local.” The sun hit the glass elevator down the street, and for a moment, the glare was so bright I had to squint to see the Bridger Mountains.

It’s a lovely morning, provided you don’t look at the reflection.

Howard Benchpress owns a home he bought in 2006 for what he describes as ‘a normal amount of money.’ He brings this up frequently.