标签： North America

For 82-year-old grandmother-of-five Anita Le Brun, a crisp glass of pinot grigio at 5 p.m. with family and friends at the lakehouse is more than a simple drink—it is a cherished lifelong tradition. When she moved into Minnesota’s Amira Choice Champlin assisted living facility, that tradition nearly came to an abrupt end due to a little-noticed state regulation that blocked care facilities from serving alcohol to residents without an official alcohol license.

The discovery of the ban came last year, after local regulators cited Amira Choice for breaking rules when it served champagne to mark a facility renovation in April 2025. While residents were already allowed to keep and consume alcohol in their private rooms, and could bring their own drinks to community events, the facility could not serve alcohol from its own stock without a license. For senior care providers, the cost and bureaucratic requirements of obtaining such a license were prohibitively expensive and burdensome.

A well-loved social butterfly among her fellow residents, Le Brun stepped forward to become the public face of a campaign to rewrite the outdated state rule. Over months of organizing, she prepared her testimony by practicing her remarks in front of a mirror and running through her talking points with her daughters over the phone. She ultimately testified twice before Minnesota’s state legislature, arguing that entering assisted living should not strip seniors of the personal freedoms they enjoyed their entire lives.

“Just because we are older and live in assisted living doesn’t mean that we should have fewer freedoms than anyone else,” Le Brun told the state Senate committee. “My friends and I love happy hour, just like many of you do. Over a shared drink, we get to reminisce about parts of our life, military service, raising a family, the loss of a friend, and celebrating the golden phase of our lives.”

This week, that campaign crossed the finish line: Governor Tim Walz traveled to Le Brun’s assisted living facility for a ceremonial bill signing, where the pair shared a celebratory toast to the new law, widely nicknamed the “Grandparents’ Happy Hour” bill. The legislation, which went into effect this month, eliminates the license requirement for nursing homes and assisted living facilities across Minnesota that want to serve alcohol to residents and their guests at special events and regular social gatherings. Facilities only need to notify the state in advance of their plans, and the facility already limits residents to two drinks per event to mitigate known fall risks for older adults.

“Growing older shouldn’t mean giving up the traditions and freedoms you’ve enjoyed your whole life,” Governor Walz said at the signing ceremony. “This law cuts unnecessary red tape so senior living communities can spend less time worrying about paperwork and more time creating opportunities for residents to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, Happy Hours, and everyday moments together.”

The movement for regulatory change has drawn national attention from senior advocates and care providers. Just last month, 96-year-old TikTok star Lillian Droniak—better known to her 15.1 million followers as “Grandma Droniak”—made headlines after she shared a warning letter from her Connecticut assisted living facility that banned her from hosting room parties where she served alcohol to other residents. According to her grandson Kevin Droniak, Lillian praised the new Minnesota rule, saying simply, “Let them drink!”

Alcohol regulations for senior care facilities are set on a state-by-state basis across the U.S., and many facilities already host regular happy hours to encourage social connection among residents. Erin Huppert of LeadingAge Minnesota, the non-profit advocacy group that supported Le Brun’s campaign, said the change is about more than cutting administrative costs—it is about respecting autonomy for seniors. “This is their home,” Huppert said. “They should be allowed to take part in legal consumption of alcohol, just like they could if they lived in a single-family home in the community of their choice.”

Huppert added that senior care providers across Minnesota are already moving to take advantage of the new rule, and at Amira Choice, residents and staff are already planning a large celebratory party next month to mark the change. Facility spokesperson Sara Luehmann called Le Brun a “resident superstar” for her months of work to make the new law a reality, and Le Brun says she is proud to have delivered a win that all her neighbors can enjoy. “I’m very proud, because everybody’s so excited about it,” Le Brun said, noting that fellow residents long viewed the old restriction as “ridiculous.”

Nestled in the shadow of the snow-capped Rocky Mountains, the rugged, unspoiled beauty of Bozeman, Montana has long drawn dreamers and outsiders seeking a different way of life. For decades, that tight-knit community fit the small-town Western ideal: a mix of back-to-the-land idealists, working cowboys, college students, and seasonal ski workers who called this quiet rural outpost home. Today, that sleepy charm has been replaced by a constant hum of construction, orange traffic cones lining once-quiet streets, and license plates from every corner of the country marking a seismic shift that has split the town along socioeconomic lines.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bozeman’s population has surged by roughly 20% – an explosive increase for a town that counted fewer than 50,000 residents in 2019. This unprecedented wave of migration has been driven by a perfect storm of overlapping factors. For years, Montana has attracted conservative transplants from across the U.S., drawn to the state’s long-held cultural celebration of rugged individualism and self-reliance, as well as its tax policies that eliminate sales, luxury, and inheritance taxes. That trickle of new arrivals turned into a flood during the public health crisis, as thousands fled dense, locked-down coastal cities on the East and West Coests for open space and lower restrictions. “Their numbers increased exponentially as droves began fleeing the Covid mess … on the East Coast and West Coast,” explains Mark Corner, president of Southwest Montana Realtors.

One major cultural catalyst that accelerated outside interest has been dubbed the “Yellowstone Effect.” The hit Paramount drama *Yellowstone*, starring Kevin Costner, depicts sweeping, cinematic shots of Montana’s dramatic landscapes and romanticized ranching life, drawing millions of viewers who fell in love with the state on screen. “Everyone in Montana believes the Yellowstone television show, with its dramatic scenery and montages of Montana life and how beautiful it is here… had an impact on the housing market,” says Jeff Michael, director of the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Montana.

The result has been a skyrocketing of real estate and rental prices that has priced generations of local working-class residents out of the market. Corner notes that home values jumped 40% across the region in just two years, and costs continue to climb. During the pandemic, local buyers were routinely outbid by all-cash offers from out-of-state purchasers, many of whom bought homes sight unseen. The trend became so common that the Montana Association of Realtors was forced to add a new disclosure form to its standard contract library to address the practice.

Downtown Bozeman has been transformed in lockstep with the housing market. Long-standing local small businesses have been displaced by upscale boutiques, custom cowboy hat shops catering to tourists, and bespoke steakhouses that cater to new wealth and out-of-state visitors. The city’s airport, currently undergoing a major expansion, now regularly sees 80 to 100 private jets parked on its tarmac on any given day, most shuttling wealthy guests to the exclusive Yellowstone Club in nearby Big Sky – a gated resort community where A-list celebrities including Justin Timberlake and Tom Brady own multi-million-dollar vacation properties.

For working-class renters and low-income homeowners, the shift has been devastating. One-bedroom apartments now routinely rent for $2,000 or more per month, a rate out of reach for many single-income local households. Many long-term residents have been forced to leave Bozeman entirely, while those who stay often work two or three jobs to make ends meet, share homes with roommates, or commute long distances from more affordable communities outside city limits. Even residents who own their own mobile homes, a historically affordable housing option, have not escaped the crisis. Lot rents, the monthly fee mobile home owners pay to park their homes on community land, have surged across the city.

Seventy-three-year-old Sara Folger, a former city grants administrator who has lived in the Mountain Meadows mobile home park for 17 years and now works part-time at Montana’s first Whole Foods (which opened in 2023), has watched her lot rent nearly double over the course of her tenure. For many of her neighbors, the mobile home park is the last affordable option in the city. “There are so many people here [for whom] this is their last stop,” Folger says. “They have no place to go. They don’t have the money to pay the rent. There’s no housing for them that they can afford. There’s nothing. Where are they going to go?”

In May 2024, residents of two Bozeman mobile home parks organized Montana’s first rent strike in 50 years, pushing back against a planned $100 monthly increase in lot rents. After the strike, the park was sold to a new management company based in California, leaving the long-term future of residents and their homes uncertain. For many owners, moving an aging mobile home is not a viable option: “You can’t move a mobile home that’s been sitting for 25 years. It will disintegrate,” says 35-year-old Mountain Meadows resident Ben Moore, who moved to the park as a high school student with his father. “The only equity I have is in this trailer. It’s the same for a lot of people … even if we could move the trailer, where are you supposed to move it to?”

The growing anger over the housing crisis and the displacement of working-class locals has sparked a grassroots political shift in the city. In November 2023, 28-year-old Joey Morrison, a progressive candidate who ran on a platform of expanding affordable housing, was elected mayor. Morrison, who grew up in eastern Montana to a nurse mother and incarcerated father, was a founding member of Bozeman Tenants United, the local union that helped organize the mobile home park rent strike. He personally understands the impact of skyrocketing rents: a decade ago, he paid $333 per month for a room in a duplex; that same room now rents for $900. Today, he still lives with his fiancée and two roommates to afford housing in the city he leads.

Morrison’s election was part of a broader wave of young progressive candidates winning office on promises to defend working-class Montanans. In December 2023, 25-year-old local activist Katie Fire Thunder was appointed to a seat in the Montana House of Representatives, and 31-year-old union leader and former smokejumper Sam Forstag recently defeated an establishment candidate to win the Democratic nomination for Montana’s 1st congressional district. “Young people have seen, right in front of our very eyes, the way that our leaders currently are not making decisions that are protecting us,” Fire Thunder says. “They are making reactionary, short-term decisions that are benefiting… the wealthiest in this state, while we are all watching and are like: This is not how Montana works or Montana runs.”

Today, the stark divide between old and new Bozeman is visible everywhere, from the crowded downtown coffee shops full of remote workers coding on laptops, to the $170 whiskey pours on offer at swanky new downtown eateries. When a Colorado visitor visiting for his son’s Montana State University orientation noted the whiskey list was priced four times higher than what he pays at home, a nearby out-of-state sales rep summed up the new reality simply: “That’s Bozeman.”