From the Executive Director, July 2026

In the late 1980s, I can still remember standing outside my family's home in Washburn, ND with a paintbrush in hand alongside my father, working our way around the exterior of the house. Like many home projects, it involved plenty of effort and probably just as much paint on us as on the siding.

My father and I have a well-established habit of starting projects with optimism and finishing them on a much less efficient timeline than planned, and this one was no exception. What likely began as a straightforward weekend project stretched on longer than expected. But it left behind a memory that has lasted far longer than the paint job itself.

At the time, it was simply a home improvement project. Looking back, it is something more: a reminder that housing is not just something we study or discuss in policy. Housing is something we live, maintain, and build our lives within.

Following this year's Independence Day celebrations, our nation is now fully engaged in commemorating the 250th anniversary of the United States. This milestone invites reflection not only on our founding, but also on how life in America has evolved over two and a half centuries. Few things tell that story more clearly than housing, where families are formed, communities take shape, and opportunity begins.

In the nation's early years, homes were built out of necessity from log, timber, and stone, often by the families who would live in them. As the country expanded westward, housing followed settlement - homesteading, railroads, the promise of land ownership - and new towns rose along the frontier. The 20th century brought a different kind of transformation: industrialized construction, suburban development, federal housing programs, and modern financing that turned homeownership into a defining feature of middle-class life. In recent decades, the pressures have shifted again to rising construction costs, smaller households, greater mobility, growing demand for affordability, and resilient communities. The form keeps changing. Housing's role as the foundation of opportunity has not.

North Dakota's housing story carries this same arc, but with its own roots that run far deeper than statehood. Long before European settlement, the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and other Indigenous peoples built earth lodges, tipis, and other structures closely tied to climate, mobility, and community. Their homes were shaped by a deep understanding of this land and how to live on it. As settlement expanded, new housing patterns followed agriculture, railroads, and town development: homesteads, small-town neighborhoods, and eventually the housing developments of our growing cities. The materials and methods changed; housing's place at the center of how North Dakotans build community did not.

To help preserve and share this story, the North Dakota Housing Finance Agency has launched a History of Housing in North Dakota collection as part of the America 250 commemoration, an online archive of homes and communities across our state's history. I've added my own contribution: two photos from that very painting weekend back in the late 1980s.

Explore the collection here: https://www.ndhousing.nd.gov/housinghistory

We also invite you to contribute. If you have historical photographs of homes, neighborhoods, or housing developments in North Dakota, we welcome your submissions to help expand this growing archive. Photos can be sent to [email protected].

As we mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, housing remains one of the clearest reflections of our shared story - not just where Americans have lived, but how housing has shaped the way we live and how the meaning of "home" keeps evolving across generations.