The last thing anyone could have expected in those early months was that Gianforte would evolve into an agent of New Urbanist planning reform. No doubt he would still reject that description. But the facts bear it out.
In 2022, he created a task force to deal with the soaring cost of housing in his state. By the fall of that year the task force had issued a report endorsing large swaths of the New Urbanist and YIMBY playbook (for Yes In My Backyard). It challenged minimum lot size requirements for single-family homes. It endorsed provisions for missing-middle housing. Perhaps most striking of all, it questioned minimum parking requirements for new development.
Gianforte went along with all of it. “Faced with a shortage of housing supply,” he conceded, “hardworking Montanans struggle to own or rent a home.” Between 2020 and 2023, the state’s population had grown by about 50,000 while only 19,000 new units were being built. Home prices rose accordingly. Something, Gianforte decided, had to be done about it.
And the Legislature, dominated by Republicans, agreed with him. In 2023 it passed a bill, among others, providing that every town in the state with more than 5,000 residents must allow the construction of duplex housing. Places larger than 50,000 must permit triplex or fourplex housing.
To be sure, it wasn’t all Gianforte. The votes in the Legislature on urban issues were made possible by the decision of nine GOP members to join with the minority Democrats in a bipartisan coalition. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t sit well with the most conservative members of the Republican majority, including the leadership. The defectors were denounced by the state Republican organization. But the governor was on their side.
And the apostasy has continued. A 2024 report by the task force recommended “some much-needed reforms,” Laura Collins of the Montana Environmental Information Center wrote. “Prioritizing urban density and limiting suburban sprawl preserves open spaces and rural communities that are essential to Montana’s identity and economy.”
This year, the bipartisan legislative group passed bills allowing accessory dwelling units (ADUs) by right, permitted single stairways in new apartment buildings (a pet new-urbanist cause) and enacted a new rule limiting parking in new developments to one space per unit of residence. Once again, the governor sided with the bipartisan urbanists, not the Republican die-hards.
Montana is not the only conservative state where unusual things are happening on the urban planning front. In a recent article in Slate, Henry Grabar cited the striking example of Forsyth County, Ga., an exurb 45 miles from Atlanta that has grown tenfold in the past four decades. In Grabar’s recounting, Forsyth has “soured on growth,” with the county commission voting to freeze rezoning for new developments. As one county commissioner told him, “Our roads are gridlocked and our schools are full.”
THE ACTIONS IN FORSYTH AND MONTANA are emblematic of the events transpiring in some areas of the country where one might not expect them — most notably, the Sun Belt. Montana’s newfound urbanism and the move toward growth slowdowns in the Sun Belt might not seem to be directly related. But there’s a connection.
In a recent paper, urban scholars Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko document the leveling-off of new home construction in a whole cluster of southern and western metro areas, among them Atlanta, Phoenix, Orlando, Dallas and Las Vegas. Housing stock in these places is growing by less than 1 percent a year.
In all those regions, hyper-development is making housing unaffordable to middle-class residents. “Real, constant-quality house prices for the nation are 15 percent above their pre-Global Financial Crisis peak,” Glaeser and Gyourko report. “A downward shift in the supply of housing has led housing in the U.S. to become increasingly unaffordable.”
It’s a pretty convincing explanation for Atlanta and Phoenix. Does it help to explain Montana and Gianforte? Perhaps.
Long a remote hinterland with little appeal for affluent elites, Montana has morphed over the last two decades into a combination hideaway and leisure center for wealthy newcomers, many of them from California. The modestly sized city of Bozeman, home to Montana State University, has become heavily gentrified and has sprawled outward since the start of the new century. In response, it has enacted New Urbanist ordinances approving infill projects, rolling back parking mandates and legalizing small-scale housing such as accessory dwelling units in backyards.
Not everyone is on board with the idea that just loosening restrictions on ADUs and triplexes will solve our housing problems. In a much-discussed recent article in the New York Times Magazine, Conor Dougherty preached the value of sprawl, arguing that it represents the simplest route to new affordable housing. Dougherty cited and applauded Princeton, Texas, which has doubled its population since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. But in 2024, Grabar reports, Princeton’s local government approved a moratorium on new residential development.
THERE ARE A COUPLE OF DIFFERENT OPTIONS for a place that has experienced breakneck development and accompanying high prices, making housing unaffordable to most of its residents. One is to open the political gates to large-scale new sprawl projects aimed at its less-affluent citizens. But another choice is to regulate the construction of sprawl housing and focus on urban infill in order to prevent hyper-development from going much further. This can mean a halt to minimum parking requirements for new developments and a rollback in minimum single-family lot sizes that are serving to prop up prices. It’s the option that several Sun Belt cities have chosen. But it isn’t likely to prevent higher prices in the long run.
In a conversation with Grabar, Gyourko put it provocatively. “Sun Belt residents,” he said, “are starting to behave and stop development the way Bostonians did in the ’80s and ’90s. It’s similar behavior but just starting much later. They’re not [exactly like] coastal cities yet, but if this keeps going for another 20 years they will be, and housing will be very expensive.”
Maybe the most intriguing long-term question is what effect these changes might have beyond the realm of housing and development, and in the broader arena of American politics above the local level.
Metropolitan areas such as Phoenix, Atlanta and Orlando not only have welcomed hyper-development over the past few decades, they have depended on it as the core element of their economies. They have not been friendly to any candidate for state office who ran on a platform of development controls. But if the big Sun Belt cities turn toward a new approach to urban planning, the contours of state politics could change as well.
Georgia and Arizona both voted narrowly Democratic for president in 2020; in 2024 they voted narrowly the other way. If stricter planning regulation achieves acceptance in their metro areas, would that be a challenge to the no-holds-barred approach to development that many statewide Republicans have been consistently preaching? I might not bet on it. But I wouldn’t bet a subdivision against it, either.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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