WILLISTON, N.D. — When Joey Scott arrived here from Montana, he had no trouble finding work — he signed almost immediately with a company working to drill in the oil fields. But finding housing was another matter.

Every motel was booked. Every apartment complex, every mobile home park, had a waiting list. Scott found himself sleeping in his pickup in the Wal-Mart parking lot, shaving and washing his hair in melted snow.

“I’ve got a pocketful of money, but I just can’t find a room,” said Scott, 25.

North Dakota has a novel problem: plenty of jobs, but nowhere to put the people who hold them.

The same forces that have resulted in more homelessness elsewhere — unemployment, foreclosure, economic misery — have pushed laid off workers from California, Florida, Minnesota, Michigan and Wyoming to abundant jobs here, especially in the booming oil fields.

But in this city rising from the long empty stretches of North Dakota, hundreds are sleeping in their cars or living in motel rooms, pup tents and tiny campers meant for weekend getaways in warmer climes. They are staying on cots in offices and in sleeping bags in the concrete basements of people they barely know.

North Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, 4 percent, but advocates for the homeless say the number of people they see with nowhere to live — a relatively rare occurrence here until now — grew to 987 in 2009 from 832 in 2008, an increase of about 19 percent.

And the problem is certain to worsen this summer as oil companies call for more rigs and thousands more workers.

A growing crisis

“It’s hard to know where this might end,” said E. Ward Koeser, the mayor of Williston, who met this month with the governor of North Dakota to plead for state help with the housing crisis. “It’s the one thing that sometimes wakes me up in the morning and doesn’t let me go to sleep,” he said, acknowledging that most mayors can only dream of such a problem.

Still, where will all these happily employed newcomers live?

“I don’t know,” said Koeser, whose city had about 12,000 people at last count, but may now be closer to 15,000. “We literally have no place.”

Cranes dot the city, proof that a building boom is under way, but not fast enough.

While the rest of the country was sinking into recession, North Dakota never did. Other states nursed budget deficits, but North Dakota, even now, has a surplus. The state has a wealth of other jobs. A rise in oil production here, especially, served as an antidote to any whiff of what the rest of the nation was witnessing.

Beneath an enormous expanse of land here, workers have pumped an ever-growing amount of crude oil from a formation called the Bakken, thanks in part to new horizontal drilling technology. Government estimates put the potential recoverable oil from the Bakken, which stretches into Montana, at 4.3 billion barrels.

Now, 109 oil rigs — with scores of workers for each — are drilling in North Dakota, and some officials say that figure could reach 150 this year.

In one of the least populated states in the nation, this sudden overcrowding has upended some axioms of ordinary life.

‘It’s a horrible way to live’

In motels here, some people have stayed so long that they know their neighbors down the hall. Dinner comes from a microwave. “It’s a horrible way to live,” said Chris Rosmus, a Minnesotan who moved into the Vegas Motel for a month and stayed a year and a half.

If the problems are bad for oil workers, who are well paid, they are worse for locals in less lucrative jobs, who have seen their rents soar.

There are still some houses for sale here, but many of the newcomers arrive from grim chapters — foreclosures, bankruptcies. They have little hope of qualifying for mortgages. In desperation a few months ago, the city began allowing trailers, campers and skid shacks (nearly windowless portable homes) to park in one of the empty trailer parks that had been abandoned after the last oil boom ended in the 1980s.

The more than 180 companies involved in the oil operations, including Hess, ConocoPhillips and Marathon Oil, are also concerned about housing. Some have rented out entire motels, and others are bringing in large, portable housing units — known as man camps — for workers to live on site, as Scott, the man sleeping in his truck, ultimately did.

For all of these struggles, few here say they wish to go back to where they came from.

Jana and Robert Stout stayed in motel after motel for four months, not finding one that could keep them for long. When Robert left for his oil job in the mornings, Jana climbed into her Buick and began the hunt for the next place.

A few weeks ago, the Stouts got off a waiting list at a motel that had been booked for two years. The room is tiny, big enough for a bed, a television and a hot plate.

Still, the Stouts said they would never consider returning to Wyoming, where they used to live. “For what?” Jana said. “If I was home right now, I would be way worse. There is potential here.”