The Minneapolis Fed notes that tourism, along with relocating retirees, health care, and Ellsworth Air Force Base have boosted Rapid City’s economy:
It’s not an exaggeration to call tourism the economic lifeblood of the three-county Rapid City metropolitan area, which boasts four National Park Service sites and South Dakota’s most popular state park. The area also attracts a significant number of new residents, Air Force personnel, and those seeking health care.
As a result, business sectors that benefit from the movement of people to Rapid City have an outsized effect on the area economy when compared with other communities in the Great Plains and the adjoining Intermountain West region.
In recent years, these sectors have helped propel the area’s economic expansion, with gross domestic product (GDP) growing by 3 percent a year between 2019 and 2023. In the preceding five years, GDP grew at half that rate [Tu-Uyen Tran, “Rapid City: A Magent for Tourists, Bomber Crews, and Retirees,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 2025.12.18].
But banking on tourism means lower wages:
A significant number of workers, particularly in tourism-affiliated sectors, earn lower-than-average wages. For example, in 2023, employment in accommodation and food services and retail represented 33 percent of total employment but only 16 percent of total personal earnings, according to government statistics [Tran, 2025.12.18].
And those relocating retirees are scooping up houses but not adding to the workforce:
Demand for housing, driven by new residents, has outpaced supply, driving up costs. During the pandemic, rent grew by as much as 7 percent year over year and home prices by as much as 56 percent (per square foot), according to data compiled by Elevate Rapid City and Realtor.com, respectively.
The supply of workers has not kept pace either. The unemployment rate in the Rapid City area has long been low compared with most of the region, but it’s been exceptionally low since 2022, averaging 2 percent or less. Employers have struggled to find enough workers [Tran, 2025.12.18].
Funny how the market doesn’t solve this problem by offering higher wages to get more people to move to the Hills and work in the tourism industry that is so crucial to Rapid City’s economy.
Downed power lines, unrepentant utilities, uprooted trees, wildfires, school closures, collapsed buildings, the gnashing of teeth and red state failure all fall at the feet of South Dakota Republicans. And speaking of poisoning your own water supplies then begging for more federal money for a Missouri River pipeline that would lift water nearly two thousand feet in elevation then pump it a hundred and fifty miles for lawns, Rally campgrounds and Ellsworth with tax dollars spent on carving through Native America for white privilege instead of empowering communities to harvest snowmelt and rainwater rural communities are still dependent on politicians who exploit need.
The wind does blow rapidly in Rapid City. 101 miles an hour. Just saw it in tv so it must be true.
Rapid City is a good place to live, if you have to live in South Dakota. Compared to most of the state, the winter weather is pretty mild, but you can go into the Hills and ski. There was a lot of migration to the Hills areas during the 1970s. Mostly it was younger people then, many from East River who loved the Black Hills. Housing prices were reasonable then. The music scene and arts in general were thriving, It led to a lot of activism through the 70s-90s. Now the people who came to rapid then either left, died or are older. The new people are older. Not sure it’s that great of a place anymore.
Few policymakers dispute the reasons educated people are fleeing my home state of South Dakota. The state’s governor is a reactionary cracker. Infrastructure is crumbling. Industrial agriculture is smothering wildlife habitat. Churches are girding for gun violence. Meth has replaced alcohol as the state’s drug of choice. Pierre’s culture of corruption and attacks on kids have ended open government. Native wildlife are being exterminated to make way for disease-ridden domestic livestock and exotic fowl. Jails far outnumber colleges. Bankers continue to enslave landowners and the state’s medical industry triopoly operates without scrutiny.
Freedom? Sobriety checkpoints are being conducted in Bennett, Brule, Butte, Codington, Custer, Day, Hughes, Jerauld, Lincoln, Meade, Minnehaha, Moody, Pennington, Walworth, and Yankton Counties.
Spearditch is the seat of whiteness in LawCo and in the winter Exit 14 looks like a monument to the clear-span building that has been air-dropped into Antarctica so life-long residents drive to Rapid City and Denver to shop forsaking local merchants. The resultant soaring median age of the retirees seeking deliverance from the cultural diversities thriving in Colorado, California, Minnesota, even Arizona and Oregon drives the exploitation of South Dakota’s regressive tax structure and reinforces the racially insulated Nazist enclave that Spearditch is today. Many, if not most, of these obese Republican slackers take advantage of the dynasty trust industry and flee the frozen tundra in their RVs ahead of consecutive six-month winters and strings of below-zero days.
Mr. Pay, you harken ol’ grudznick back to the days when Trojan became a hippy conclave, The so called free-thinkers were really just looking for freeloading and lazing about doing their art work and toking the Demon Weed. They called it “The Hole.” Now it really is a hole, one that my close personal friend Lar knows much about as do you. They call it “The Wharf.”
Bill Walsh couldn’t have said it better.
Whenever there is a push for something like a new arena, sports complex, etc., the common argument is how this will boost the local economy and create jobs. What people do not understand (or promoters do not want to talk about) is that most of the jobs in the hospitality industry are low paying and many are just part time.
Hopefully more people read this info from the federal reserve and just do not go along with some of these costly projects that have limited return on public investment.
Great info as always!
Excuse me? The SD market raising wages to entice something? Go to Wall and live in your van.
The retirees are fleeing areas with high sales tax and income taxes. They are saving money by living here. Then their property tax bill comes. Now they hate schools, counties, fire department, ambulance services etc. They really hate TIFs. I am OK with turning the retiree spigot down a little bit.
The Republican regime has used the prospect of luring people here for low taxes as an excuse not to get serious about tax reform, saying that bringing people here will increase our tax base and thus alleviate the need to raise any taxes. If all we get are a bunch of tax-dodging retirees who stack the Legislature with enough yahoos to slash taxes and starve public institutions, are we really any better off?