Montana’s Housing Push Continues: ‘We Made It a Republican Issue’

Montana has the least affordable housing market in the country, with the biggest gap between average incomes and average home prices, according to a National Association of Realtors study that was released last year. But if the flurry of housing policies coming out of the state Legislature in recent years work as they’re intended to, it won’t stay that way for long.

In 2022, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican, appointed a Housing Task Force made up of state and local officials, developers and advocates to develop responses to the state’s housing challenges. The task force was appointed at a time when the traditional geographic and political fault lines of housing policy had started to rapidly break down. No longer was housing unaffordability just a problem for big cities run by Democrats; it was increasingly tough for people to afford homes in the city, the suburbs, the exurbs and rural areas, and in communities of every political stripe.

The Montana Legislature passed a series of bills in 2023 that approached the affordability challenge from a range of angles, but all united by the theme of limiting the power of local governments to impose costly restrictions on development. Backed by Republicans and Democrats, the housing push was dubbed the “Montana miracle” by a Bloomberg CityLab reporter — a label that state officials quickly adopted as a badge of honor. This year, the Legislature passed another set of housing policies aimed at accelerating the pace of construction around the state.

The bills include a major piece of parking reform, preventing cities from requiring parking spaces for most new multifamily housing and limiting the number of parking spaces they can require for all new development. Other bills would allow taller apartment buildings in many areas, prevent cities from regulating manufactured housing differently than traditional construction, expand the area where accessory dwelling units can be built by right, and allow some small apartment buildings to be built with a single stairway — a major goal of YIMBY (or Yes In My Backyard) advocates in recent years.

“There’s not one answer that’s going to fix anything, but hopefully many of these policies will help us,” says Greg Hertz, a Republican state senator who served on the Housing Task Force and sponsored a bill to limit local impact fees on new development. “We just need more housing supply.”

The bills were sponsored by members of both parties, and all received some bipartisan support. But Republicans are firmly in control of the Montana state government and drive the legislative agenda. With housing costs at the top of residents’ list of concerns, it’s been a relatively easy issue for the party to organize around. “In Montana, we kind of made it a Republican issue,” says Katie Zolnikov, a Republican state representative who sponsored the parking bill.

A Property Rights Tradition

Montana is in some ways uniquely suited for a policy agenda built on limiting local government control. The agenda dovetails with the state’s strong property rights tradition. And, in its promotion of urban density, it also discourages sprawl into the open rural land that gives Montana its identity.

The reforms have been championed by a coalition of advocates with a range of political aims, incorporating free-market principles and social justice goals. “What we’ve been able to do is communicate this pro-housing message,” says Kendall Cotton, president and CEO of the Frontier Institute, a conservative think tank. “Any way you slice it, whether you’re approaching it from a left or right perspective, you arrive at the same conclusion that we need to build more homes.”

State legislators say the most resistance they’ve gotten on certain zoning reforms has come from local groups and officials. One Bozeman-based group sued to block some of the density-promoting bills the Legislature passed in 2023. The policies were built on “utopian dreams” that don’t align with the Montana way of life, Jim Goetz, a lawyer who filed the suit, told Governing last year. A judge recently ordered a mixed ruling in that case, allowing most of the laws to move forward.

Cities have opposed some of the policies adopted this year as well. One Bozeman city commissioner recently testified in a legislative hearing that the parking reform bill would interfere with local incentives that encourage builders to add affordable units in exchange for parking relief. But state lawmakers argue that overregulation by cities is exacerbating the housing crisis. Arguments for municipal control of land use hold less and less sway at the Statehouse.

“We’ve really just turned it into a property rights thing,” says Zolnikov. “If I own a piece of land, I should be able to do what I want with it. Control can’t get any more local than the property owner.”

Housing isn’t a clean political issue in Montana. YIMBY reforms have Democratic and Republican support, while some local progressive groups are focused instead on stronger tenant protections. The state pre-empted rent control in 2023, alongside its broader package of housing policies. At the state level, Democrats know which direction to push if they want to successfully pass housing policies.

“I’m really pretty thankful for my friends on the right for keeping the momentum going," says Ellie Boldman, a Democratic state senator who helped lead the governor’s task force and who sponsored the bill raising building height limits this year.

"Not everything is so hyper-partisan," she says. "There’s always room to try to find the common thread of what our values are and bring everybody together. And you certainly need to learn to work together when you serve in the minority party and you have a Republican governor."