January 10, 2023
State spotlight: Building More Homes in Big Sky Country
Your home defines so much of your life. And with more people able to work remotely than ever before, many Americans are re-evaluating where they want their home to be. In recent years (especially during the pandemic), millions of Americans moved from major cities to more rural or suburban neighborhoods, or moved to areas that better suited their lifestyles and preferences.
This nationwide migration has meant that certain states, like Montana, have seen massive influxes of new residents. But more people require more homes—and as the Frontier Institute has shown in their research report and campaign around rising housing costs—Montana has fallen behind on their housing supply.
Anyone who lives in (or has visited) Montana can tell you about the incredible beauty of Big Sky Country. It’s no wonder that over the past 10+ years, Montana’s population has grown by 10%. But because Montana’s housing supply has only increased by 7%, housing prices in Montana have been steadily and increasingly going up. This makes it harder for young families, low- and middle-income families, or anyone without significant resources to make Montana their home.
So why hasn’t Montana’s housing supply matched the demand? The answers (and solutions) can be found in the Frontier Institute’s Montana Zoning Atlas.
The Montana Zoning Atlas provides desperately needed insight into the causes of Montana’s housing price spike. The Atlas shows how overly restrictive zoning and development laws and policies have either made it much more expensive to build sufficient new housing or prevented the production of desperately needed new housing altogether.
According to the Atlas, 70% of primary residential areas in Montana’s most in-demand communities have overly restrictive zoning and development laws that penalize or prevent the production of affordable housing options like multi-family homes. Among all the cities assessed in the Montana Zoning Atlas report, two-family housing is welcomed without Minimum Lot Area penalties on just 29% of primary residential land, while 3+ family housing is welcomed on only 8%.
These types of exclusionary zoning laws make it so that many people are locked out of certain neighborhoods, or as the authors of the Atlas put it, “Exclusionary Single-Family Zoning tells residents who can’t afford traditional single-family homes they aren’t welcome in certain neighborhoods, often the most desirable and opportunity-rich areas of town.”
Fighting overly restrictive zoning laws is one of the rare truly bipartisan issues. In 2016, President Barack Obama developed a housing development toolkit which stated “local policies acting as barriers to housing supply include land use restrictions that make developable land much more costly than it is inherently.” In 2019, President Donald Trump issued an executive order eliminating regulatory barriers to affordable housing where he called zoning regulations “the leading factor in the growth of housing prices.” In 2021, President Joe Biden issued a fact sheet which stated “for decades, exclusionary zoning laws – like minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing – have inflated housing and construction costs and locked families out of areas with more opportunities.” And in 2021, in a veto letter, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte said, “the most effective way to address housing affordability challenges is to reduce the panoply of regulations faced by housing development.”
In today’s heated political climate, when such a diverse group of politicians from different parties and political backgrounds agree on the solution to an issue—it’s usually a sign that reforms are desperately needed.
The Frontier Institute’s research and insight into Montana’s growing housing affordability problem began desperately needed conversations about the ways forward towards more affordable housing options for all Montanans.
Within a few months of the Montana Zoning Atlas being published, its research was featured in at least 9 original news stories by Montana media, mentioned in at least 3 major nationwide newspapers, received support from at least 2 editorial boards of major state newspapers, and prompted at least 7 additional op-eds responding to the report.
The Frontier Institute’s Montana Zoning Atlas has provided much-needed data and perspective around Montana’s affordable housing problems, but more importantly, it has provided the solutions that local governments and the state can take to solve these problems for good. In July 2022, Governor Greg Gianforte appointed Frontier Institute President Kendall Cotton to the state’s bipartisan Housing Task Force. The task force has adopted several of the reforms proposed by Frontier’s report.
More people than ever before are making Montana their home. But living in Big Sky Country shouldn’t be a luxury reserved only for the rich. And thanks to the impressive work done by the Frontier institute, Montana is moving closer to being an affordable option.
