Actually I think they have been very slow at spending any oil revenue. I think it might have been better to move faster then they did. Lots of people in ND remember the last oil boom - and bust - and don’t want to repeat the same mistake made then. This boom looks pretty long term even though some very local areas are having mini-busts when the drilling stops.
I saw a map of the western ND oil wells a couple weeks ago. It classified the wells into different colors based on the year they were drilled. The oldest wells were random on the map, the newer wells were lined up in what looked like deliberately planned lines. The map showed a pad with something like 6 wells total, some in the Bakken layer and the rest in the Three Forks layer. The point of this is the drilling locations seem to be methodically planned, and like once an area is covered there will be no need to go back and drill again. That is why there are localized “busts” - the activity has switched from drilling to production. Production requires way less people, and less local infrastructure. That is why man camps during the drilling phase makes sense.
Many a town in west Texas was created due to the oil booms and field housing built by the oil companies them selves. there allot of old geezers who were raised in oil camps.
There will be infill wells in the future, and in many places, there will be another round of Three Forks drilling in a deeper part of the formation. The planning you see revolves around access road construction and infrastructure for getting the oil and gas to processing facilities. Your parallel lines of well pads should be roughly two or four miles apart, from north to south, as the normal lease size is two sections (1280 acres), or two square miles.
I do agree, however, that temporary housing for temporary workers makes sense. Overbuilding will cause property values to drop significantly in the future, and that becomes a disincentive toward buying a home versus renting.