This story is part of our annual look at the state of American design. This year, we’re highlighting work that shines through an acrimonious moment—and makes the case for optimism.

I grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in the 1990s, when there was a lack of activities to entertain a teen, aside from playing sports and drinking Boone’s Farm—one of which I may have enjoyed. Wyoming is the least populated state in the United States, but the 10th largest in landmass; we had a lot of room but not a whole lot to do.

Returning to Cheyenne now is a trip: A town often described (by myself and my cousins) as “Podunk” has seen an influx of new, cool businesses. The Lincoln theater, a 1928 movie house where I used to make out with boys during $3 films, has become a 1,250-capacity concert venue. The gas station that sold me cigarettes underage is gone, but now there’s a rock and roll–themed convenience store opened by new transplant Ivan Moody, of the metal band Five Finger Death Punch. The rowdy Cowboy Bar is toast, but in its absence four microbreweries have popped up.

Cheyenne is the state’s biggest city, at around 65,000 people, but I always sensed static, as if ghosts of old territorial cowboys were refusing to ascend. The tallest building—a poo-brown office boasting 11 floors plopped amid beautiful 19th-century and Art Deco landmarks in the historic downtown—and the Frontier Mall, an exceedingly taupe structure built in 1981 between a housing development and a field of acrid prairie grass, were once its crown jewels. The city’s population swells in July during Cheyenne Frontier Days, the largest outdoor rodeo in the world, during which an arena full of bucking bronco riders and cattle ropers abuts a small carnival with a Ferris wheel and Western expo. Despite annual excitement for the smell of fresh leather, no one wanted to move there, and a lot of young people—myself included—wanted to get out.

Now, though, twenty- and thirty-somethings are flocking to my former home, as the mid-19th-century dream of the American West finds itself colliding with server farms across Cheyenne’s sagebrush plains. The sleepy city of my birth is, shockingly to me, in the crosshairs of the affordable housing crisis and, with that, raises thorny questions about whether the gentrification causing it can also, sometimes, help revitalize a community.

In 2021, Microsoft began building two data centers on the outskirts of the city, beckoning workers from California and elsewhere; earlier this year, Meta announced it would build its own $800 million data center in the city. Meanwhile, urban sprawl from Denver and Fort Collins, Colorado, sees denizens moving an hour or two up the highway to Cheyenne to take advantage of its comparatively low cost of living and wildly low tax rate. (Denver, as it stands, is one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the U.S.) A 2022 report by Cheyenne’s Affordable Housing Task Force (AHTF) found that monthly costs increased 32 percent from 2010 to 2020, rising from $621 to $906 for an apartment and $630 to $928 for a mobile home, with a median individual income of $41,908 a year. The city has become so unaffordable that, for instance, my cousin, her husband, and their infant son currently live in a two-room cottage in her parents’ backyard.

Curtis Holcomb, a 32-year-old artist who’s lived in Cheyenne most of his life, has moved six times in the last two years. “It’s been quite a wild ride,” he says. “Right now, you can’t find a one-bedroom apartment for anything less than $1,000 a month.” Holcomb has wanted to purchase a single-family home for a few years, but an influx of new residents—“based on the license plates, a lot of Texas and California people”—has driven up home prices. Outdated city ordinances, too, make building affordable housing a bureaucratic struggle: Advocates are hoping to relax a regulation, for example, that says a third of the facade for a multifamily dwelling must be built of expensive brick or stone, an insistence on Old West aesthetics that reflect much of the city’s 150-year-old downtown.

Holcomb, disillusioned about his prospects in a town where his $19.50-per-hour art-supply-shop pay—Wyoming’s minimum wage of $5.15 is superseded by the federal $7.25 —and 790 credit score would have been, in the years before the pandemic, sufficient to purchase a starter home, recently moved in with his brother.

The atmosphere is also complicated by the rugged individualism that has defined Cheyenne since its founding. “In Wyoming, we very much have a self-reliance mentality, and I get that,” says Brenda Birkle, the city’s AHTF chair and executive director of My Front Door, a nonprofit helping low-income families find pathways to homeownership. “I also understand that 150 years ago, when we had barn raisings, every neighbor came and helped, right? So when you think about bootstrapping, the policymakers don’t want to compete with the market. But the market isn’t serving the families that we serve.”

The gentrification question, though, is another matter. In big cities, gentrification often means replacing communities of color with more-moneyed, white residents. In Cheyenne, however, which is around 83.9 percent non-Hispanic white, according to 2023 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, some citizens are cautiously enthusiastic about what these new residents mean. “I definitely see the benefit, especially with diversity,” says Holcomb, who is biracial and gay. “Cheyenne is not a very diverse place, so that’s a silver lining.”

“I think a lot of people are moving to Cheyenne because of everything that’s happening in the world. Cheyenne—Wyoming in general—has always been thought of as an ‘untouched oasis.’”
—Curtis Holcomb, artist and longtime Cheyenne resident

But as Cheyenne evolves with its growing populace, the question is whether governing bodies can solve its housing problems quickly enough to preserve its core, conservative, cowboy values—or if they even want to. “I come from a longtime homesteading family, so this issue is close to my heart,” says Birkle, who in our conversation gave me a brief history of the housing crisis dating back to the Louisiana Purchase. “In Cheyenne, we need maybe two houses that are two million dollars? But my guess is, with eighteen hundred or more on the waiting list at the Cheyenne Housing Authority, affordable homes might be a little bit of a broader need. Just sayin’.”

When I return to Cheyenne to visit, it’s still the dusty town I know and complicatedly love, but the glimmer of newness always startles me. My mom, who’s worked for 35 years at what used to be the city’s sole Off-Track Betting establishment, now grouses about the eight competing horse palaces that have emerged. Concert flyers that once advertised local bands playing at the Lions Park Community House now brag about Animal Collective performing at The Lincoln. And some of the fields where my friends and I used to party are now built over with upper-middle-class housing developments named for ranches and meadows. In some ways, I wish my boring hometown would have stayed just a little bit boring, for all the people who stayed.

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The Transformation of Cheyenne, Wyoming