Lessons from a conversation with Eran Fowler Pehan, Director, City of Missoula Housing and Community Development

My key takeaways from Missoula:

  • Conversations about affordable housing are actually conversations about values. Engaging with the public about their values is an important and authentic way to explore support for and resistance to affordable for housing.
  • Economic booms in small towns increase demand for affordable housing and, with it, the need for a swath of new housing policies, programs, and financing priorities. Small teams of committed and creative city employees play a critical role in imagining, researching, and implementing innovative initiatives.
  • Single-family zoning has a long and racism-fueled history in the US. Single-family zoning can also be detrimental to long-time locals with average incomes when economies change and supply cannot meet demand due to zoning restrictions.

What makes Missoula’s story about affordable housing unique?

The following two issues have created long-standing challenges for developing affordable housing in Missoula.

1. Developing housing of any kind in mountain towns like Missoula is often complicated and expensive due to environmental factors. Missoula’s topography calls for costly environmental mitigation measures, such retaining walls to manage stormwater on hillside slopes. As a result, many homes are sold at high price points to cover the costs of the development, making them unaffordable for the average Missoulian. Also, Missoula has more brownfield sites than average due to the past prevalence of timber mills, tanning operations, and coal mines. Those sites require costly “clean up” to be environmentally safe for construction.

2. Single-family zoning reigns supreme throughout Missoula and covers approximately 70-80% of the city. This limits the city’s ability to develop affordable housing to meet current supply needs. While changing the zoning code in the current political climate will be an uphill battle, momentum is building as demand for affordable housing increases.

What is the state of affordable housing in Missoula today?

Missoula’s strong sense of community has been challenged by population growth in recent years. Now, Missoula is consistently on lists of “top 10 places to live” and the tech industry has discovered Missoula’s merits. (Have you heard about their microbrew scene?!) There has even been an uptick in migration to Missoula during COVID. As Missoula’s economy and population grows, its citizens have confronted new questions about how to keep the mountain town affordable for locals.

Missoulians pride themselves in living in a town where everybody can thrive, but this value has been challenged in the last several years. High-income out-of-state professionals are buying homes in Missoula and increasing the market value. The average family of four in Missoula has a $50,000 income. They would have to earn twice that to afford the $300,000 homes that are on the market. Relatedly, approximately 8,000 people in Missoula could afford to buy a median-priced home if there was one available. As mentioned, single-family zoning has inevitably limited supply. Another reason that housing supply is low is that development halted during the great recession and, when there was an oil boom in East Montana, 90% of the construction industry relocated to that job market. The construction industry in Missoula did not fully recover until 2017.

Local families are being priced out and displaced, calling attention to the need for more affordable housing options in Missoula. In response to the increasing demand for affordable housing, Missoula’s current city government has committed time, energy, and resources to affordable housing development like never before. They’re backed by 90% of residents that are interested in local government taking a more active role in investing in affordable housing. This incredible public support even surprised Missoula’s policymakers! However, people want fast, easy answers, but all aspects of affordable housing creation – between financing, politics, and construction – are slow.

Missoulians are learning that generating affordable housing involves compromise. Missoula is having big city problems, but locals still want Missoula to feel like the small town they know and love. As with many mountain towns, in Missoula, there are countless tradeoffs between maintaining natural beauty and developing an urban interface. Missoulians want to know all their neighbors and have beautiful views of nature through their windows. They are realizing that values around maintaining their standard of living and making changes to allow for more affordable housing development do not realistically align. People are thoughtfully reflecting about the conflict in these values and the NIMBYism that is inherent with maintaining the status quo. Missoulians’ strong values around community and equity are adapting with the recognition that affordable housing will require the look and feel of their community to change.

If you could wave a magic wand and change any one policy at any level of government, what would it be and why?

The most impactful way to create affordable neighborhoods will be to revise Missoula’s zoning code to allow for multiple housing types throughout the city . While waving a magic want to make zoning code changes would be an efficient shortcut for this controversial policy change, building collective support to decrease the prominence of single family zoning is an important part of this values-driven work. Maybe seven years down the line, sentiments will have shifted so that necessary zoning code changes will be politically feasible. In the meantime, Missoula’s city government has made clear that every neighborhood should be part of the affordable housing solution and by including affordable housing in one form or another, even though it is not possible to implement all housing typologies throughout Missoula due to the restrictive zoning code — yet.

What makes you hopeful about housing in Missoula?

Missoulians have engaged in wonderful, vulnerable conversations about their values related to affordable housing development. It’s inspiring to realize how important it is to Missoulians to provide equal opportunities throughout the town. Through rich dialogue, people are also slowly accepting that there are tradeoffs between things that they care about like affordable housing, pedestrian space, and open space. The genuine engagement in these difficult conversations is hopeful. Further, Missoula’s executive and legislative leadership are invested in affordable housing and believe that housing is a human right. Knowing that there are challenging choices ahead with a City Council that is already supportive of affordable housing in Missoula contributes to a spirit of optimism for the cause.  

What are effective ways to include the people most impacted by affordable housing issues in government-level decision making?

Standard civic engagement is welcoming to white middle class Americans. Missoula has been intentional about removing barriers to civic engagement and creating ways to for people to engage on their own time. City government makes better choices when they hear from their full constituency.

A Citizens Advisory Committee was created that reflects the city’s demographics for ethnic and gender diversity, and has an equal number of renters and homeowners. This model of citizen oversight was part of the recent recommendation for Missoula to establish an affordable housing trust fund. The Advisory Committee provides insight even more valuable than data could provide, helping to answer questions about a variety of housing types or the importance of aging in place measures, for example.