The 2026 Chugwater Chili Cookoff and Rodeo celebrated its 40th anniversary last weekend, and the number of people who attended broke all previous records by a long shot. Honestly, we have never seen lines like that.

Great bands, great food, and vendors. But also the pie and hot jalapeno eating contest.

First the kids go, then the adults. An audience gathers to watch and see who will drop out first. These people are sadistic.

Here is how it goes.

The contest begins, and the contestants start eating those jalapeños like it’s nothing. They have to eat them all the way down to the stem.

After a few minutes, you’ll see their ears start to go red. Then their cheeks. Watch their next go red next. Eyes go bloodshot. They look a little tipsy at this point. When snot starts running from their nose, they are nearly done.

One at a time, they start dropping out. The audience applauds those who failed because at least they tried.

It’s gross, I know. But it’s worth watching. Because we are all sadistic like that.

There are a few who can eat all of those jalapeños without it affecting them a bit. It’s strange to watch. They don’t feel a thing. Maybe that’s a mutant power. I’m not sure.

Started in 1986, the Chugwater Chili Cook-off was created by the Chugwater Chili Corporation to celebrate the town’s legendary chili and boost the local community. Over the past four decades, it has grown from a simple local contest into Wyoming’s largest single-day event, drawing thousands of visitors.

See the gallery below including the pie eating contest.

CHEYENNE — Wyoming knows it has a huge housing problem. 

Builders, city and county administrators, state officials, business and community leaders — it doesn’t matter which of them you ask, most will agree the state is short tens of thousands of homes.

Scott Hoversland, who heads up the Wyoming Community Development Authority, puts the number of homes the state needs somewhere between 28,000 to 38,000 by 2030 — roughly 2,070 to 3,680 homes annually to keep up with population growth and aging infrastructure.

On paper, Southeast Wyoming Builders Association’s Joe Killpack acknowledges that sounds like it should be a developer’s dream. 

But the reality is a lot more complicated, Killpack told Cowboy State Daily. It’s a tangled knot of economics and investment risk, criss-crossed with infrastructure costs and policy decisions that make houses more costly and time-consuming to build.

“This is a macro problem, not a micro problem,” Killpack added. “It’s not like we’re going to be able to pinpoint one issue. There are several issues. We’re talking about labor costs. We’re talking about commodity costs. We’re talking about development costs.”

Those make homes too expensive for Wyoming’s middle class to afford.

The Middle Class Squeeze

If Wyoming’s housing crisis has a face, it’s the middle-class worker earning median wages. 

Once, that would have signaled a solid, respectable income. Today, it increasingly falls short as wages continue to lose ground against persistent inflation. 

In Wyoming, median household income was $75,500 in 2024, 7.4% below the U.S. median. 

Year over year, incomes rose just 1.3% while inflation climbed 2.9% — a clear decline in real purchasing power for the typical Wyoming family. 

Over the long term, the trend remains problematic. 

Wages have stayed relatively flat since at least 2010, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. For much of that time, inflation was modest, hovering between 1% and 2%. But that changed in 2021, when it surged 4.2%, before peaking at 9.1% in June 2022 — the highest level since 1981.

The result has been a widening gap between what workers earn and what it costs to live. 

Regardless of the causes, the stark reality is wages have not kept pace with living expenses for most Wyomingites. 

That marks a fundamental shift for the state’s middle class. 

Median incomes that once reliably supported homeownership — a cornerstone of financial stability for many families — no longer stretch as far. Increasingly, the workers who power local economies are priced out of the communities they serve. 

The strain shows up in everyday decisions. Longer commutes. Delayed home purchases. And, in some cases, leaving the state altogether.

Wyoming loses roughly 70% of its residents by the time they reach age 30, state officials have said. Housing costs are frequently cited as a key factor in that outmigration, which has led to a statewide hiring crunch. 

The Math Problem

The problem, as Killpack sees it, isn’t that developers can’t see the demand. It’s that the basic math of putting up homes, especially ones that regular families can afford, no longer works. 

On the cost side, labor, commodities, tariffs and fuel have all climbed, pushing construction budgets higher even before projects hit city hall for approval.

After that, fees and regulations are adding as much as $10,000 to the cost of homes, along with code changes like thicker exterior walls or new sprinkler requirements.

“Every time a new code is adopted the costs go up,” he said. “We’re doing these new codes to protect the health and the safety of our people who are living in these homes, which, hey, I can’t disagree with. But that doesn’t mean that costs go down. They only go up.”

Codes requiring particular types of insulation, for example, have meant using two-by-six-inch lumber in exterior walls, which adds to the cost versus a two-by-four.

“In Laramie, we have to do a draft stop in the basement,” he said. “So most are doing sprinkler systems and everybody thinks that’s wonderful, right? Because it truly is. If there’s a fire, it’s great. It’ll stop a fire. But the costs still go up, every single time.”

Meanwhile, waiting times for permit approvals stretch to as long as 18 months or more. In some cases, during which time interest rates, prices, and demand are all shifting.

“I’m involved in a project right now where we were going to build some apartments,” he said. “And this project originally started three years ago. They have had to stop, because the market changed.”

What The Median Buys V. What Developers Can Build

The gap comes into sharp focus when median income is translated into buying power. 

A median salary of $75,500 supports up to $2,097 for a monthly mortgage, assuming a borrower with minimal debt and strong credit. On a 30-year fixed mortgage rate of 6.47%, that maximum mortgage payment tracks back to a maximum loan amount of $332,842. 

Homes in the low $300,000 range no longer pencil out for developers, Killpack said.

“A single-family home under $400,000 is almost impossible,” he said. 

Builder margins, he added, are much lower than people think.

“Most people think it’s like 15, 20%,” he said. “It’s actually very minimal. I mean, you’re anywhere between 3-6% and that’s it.”

Which means developers themselves don’t have much wiggle room when it comes to their budgets. 

Given that kind of margin, when you look at a city like Cheyenne where 5,000 homes are needed, the kind of investment it takes doesn’t feel like it’s worth the risk, Killpack said.

“(Let’s) talk about building 1,250 homes in a year in Cheyenne just to meet the minimum of what we’re projecting,” he said. “And let’s just say $400,000 homes … you’d need a $500 million investment annually.”

For that kind of money, Killpack said developers look at what’s known as the absorption rate, which measures how fast homes sell in a given market. They’re asking themselves where they can get the fastest return on investment. 

Wyoming’s absorption rate needs to be higher to attract investment, Killpack said. 

Now, developers can find many markets with both less risk and faster absorption rates, like those in Texas, Utah, and the Denver metro area, all of which have larger populations to spread risk around. 

Wyoming’s lack of population, Killpack added, has many investors turning up their noses at Wyoming projects, deeming them too risky. 

That doesn’t mean no one wants to invest in Wyoming, Killpack added. 

“But it takes more than just people in Wyoming to make Wyoming grow,” he said. “Capital that’s being infused into our economy doesn’t only come from our local regional banks. It comes from other people, too, and they have to be willing to invest in Wyoming.”

Boom-Towns With Nowhere To Live

On paper, the city of Douglas seems like the classic Wyoming success story. 

Oil and gas jobs form the bedrock of its economy, but more than 300 businesses in health care, education and retail round things out. Hotels are packed with energy workers — the kind of activity that ought to be pumping money into every cash register in town. 

But there’s a catch.

“Our population is 6,512 based on our community snapshot, and 50% of our workers live in the city,” Interim City Administrator Michele Carter told Cowboy State Daily. “About 42% live in Casper. So, we have about half our workforce living in Douglas, just under half.”

The rest are headed to Casper or other areas around Douglas, like Glenrock. 

The reason, Carter said, is directly related to a lack of affordable housing.

“A lot of our housing that has been built over the last few years is in that $400,000 to $500,000 range,” she said. “Which doesn’t fit your local businesses, your teachers, your nurses who are coming in to fill those spots in our school district and our hospital here.”

Many of the oil and gas workers who do live in Douglas, meanwhile, are staying in campers and at the fairgrounds because of a lack of rental properties. 

Fixing that has proven difficult, Carter said. 

Development costs, which include building out new sewer and water services, exceed what most people can afford to pay.

It’s taken a $5.7 million grant for water and sewer lines to help get things moving on a 30-acre site on the edge of town that will include a 94-apartment complex, plus several acres of single-family housing and new commercial space. 

“The grant is really to put the infrastructure in,” Carter said. “Developers couldn’t make the numbers work if they have to eat all of those water, sewer and utility costs on top of everything else.”

Even with a grant, no one is pretending this is a silver bullet that will fix everything. 

The apartments and homes the development unlocks will also take years to build, and the demand from mid-level workers is already far ahead of what’s on the drawing board.

Douglas isn’t Alone

Infrastructure is a significant barrier for communities across the Cowboy State, Hoversland told Cowboy State Daily, but it’s particularly acute for communities with fewer than 5,000 people. 

Water lines, sewer, roads and power are required before even a single house can be built in a new area. For small towns with a thin tax base, fronting the money for that is typically next to impossible.

“Some of the bigger cities, Casper and Cheyenne especially, have more items they can do and have infrastructure built out,” he said. “But our cities under 5,000 population in Wyoming, that doesn’t give the numbers to draw developers in. 

“So, infrastructure funding is another one of those things that I think is a big holdup. It really restricts a lot of developers coming in, because they have to pay for the infrastructure to say 25-to-50-home development, and that’s a lot of upfront cost and a lot of risk on the developer.”

Experiments Underway In Wyoming

Wyoming isn’t alone in facing such problems. 

Nationally, the Harvard University State of the Nation’s Housing report released Thursday shows that construction is down across the nation amid rising costs and an ever-widening gap between what median households can afford and what median homes cost. 

There’s a growing wave of state and local experiments on the ground — ranging from tax abatements, zoning changes, and new financing tools — all aimed at getting more units on the ground across the nation.

Wyoming is part of the melting pot of state ideas. 

Hoversland points to a statewide housing strategic action plan that has 27 items that may help, including fast-track permitting, infrastructure funding tools, and support for manufactured and prefabricated homes, as well as tweaks to how federal housing dollars are used to stretch them further.

Jason Mincer, executive director of Wyoming Neighbors for Housing, is pushing public-private partnerships, community land trusts, and even a state-level investment fund to help shoulder upfront risk for workforce housing, along with streamlined approvals to cut months off project timelines. 

Communities like Cheyenne, meanwhile, are rewriting their own rule books, streamlining zoning codes and getting rid of standards that may have been nice to have once upon a time, but don’t really impact safety and add significantly to costs. 

Cheyenne has even created a “cottage lot” development option that lets builders cluster very small homes closer together with shared open space, which has already attracted some developers.

All of those ideas help at the margins. But Wyoming has to find ways to make it routine, rather than remarkable, to build homes in the price ranges that teachers, nurses, and sheriff’s deputies can afford.

Otherwise, nothing changes with the overriding trend where a large number of Wyoming households are maxed out in the low $300,000 range, and builders can’t drop below $400,000. 

Until that gap can be routinely bridged, builders will remain cautious, and the state will continue to lose many of its young people to areas where the wages are a better match to prevailing home prices.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.