How 2025 changed Missoula

A “year-in-review” article is something of an end-of-year journalistic tradition, a way to help readers make sense of 12 months of headlines and fill front pages while reporters take breaks for the holidays. And what a long, strange year we’ve had. It was a year that seemed to hurtle past at blistering speed and yet somehow stand still. At risk of ripping off an R.E.M. or Billy Joel song, I’ll resist the temptation to enumerate all the headlines, but you get the idea. Remember that record-long federal government shutdown? That ended just about a month and a half ago.

And this was also a big year for Missoula, for reasons both connected to and separate from the broader political picture. City elections, zoning reform, new floodplain maps, budget cuts and more. Of course, all of these have roots that extend into the past, but it really does seem that Missoula has seen it all this year. And Fresh Press has only covered a fraction of what’s out there. But, out of respect to the great journalistic tradition of year-end wrap-ups and out of a genuine desire to help our readers make sense of the news, we figure it’s worth giving an annual summary a shot. With that said, here are four stories that defined Missoula in 2025.

Photo by John Stember, illustration by The Pulp

All things through planning

The city’s — really, the region’s — affordability crisis continues to be arguably the most significant issue facing Missoulians. While rents and home prices haven’t skyrocketed in the same way they did in the immediate aftermath of COVID-19 and the associated population boom, they’ve still climbed steadily over the last year. And just about any storyline from the last year has a housing connection.

Chief among these, perhaps, is the city’s ongoing effort to rewrite its zoning codes, a process guided by the new 20-year land use plan that the city adopted late in 2024. That plan identifies a current housing shortage of roughly 3,000 units and calls for 27,000 more to be built by 2045 to absorb anticipated growth and maintain a “healthy” vacancy rate. To accomplish this goal, the proposed development code would allow for increased residential development — more housing, more types of housing, and greater density — in almost all neighborhoods of the city, in addition to myriad other changes.

The Missoula City council was initially supposed to vote on the code by the end of this year, but has since postponed the vote until early January. With these changes to code comes changes to the built environment, and while the plan seems to have buy-in among most council members, not all Missoulians want to embrace even more change and development in their city, especially if it means noise, traffic, a loss of viewsheds and increased demand on local services. The code reform effort also isn’t the only change to local infrastructure in the works, either — earlier this month, the city council gave final approval to an overhaul of downtown. The downtown Safety, Access and Mobility plan will restore two-way traffic to Front and Main streets, add protected bikelanes, put Higgins on a “road diet” and more to improve multi-modal connectivity.

It’s hard to imagine council backing down from plans that are funded and years in the making — ones that have already been shaped in response to extensive stakeholder and community input — but there is still time for Missoulians to make their voices heard, at least on the broader code reform effort. While the council has lent its final approval to the design of the SAM project, officials will provide public updates at forthcoming council meetings to address concerns about stormwater management and cost.

But Missoula isn’t solely relying on stimulating the market to address the housing problem. The city has made some direct investments in income-restricted affordable housing, often in partnership with the private sector, community land trusts, and local and state affordable housing funds. The Scott Street Ravara project, where construction began in the spring of 2024, is a prime example. But Mayor Andrea Davis has made clear that the city will work within the market system it inhabits — a system that limits the city’s power and spending ability — and has also presided over an easing of requirements for private-sector development of city-owned property.

Johnson Street shutters; tenant power grows

While neighborhood groups, elected officials and local bureaucrats (to name a few interested parties) have been crafting the future of Missoula housing, many Missoulians are facing affordability challenges that no amount of planning will address in the short term. Late last year, officials and advocates counted more than 640 people experiencing homelessness in Missoula on a single day, more than any other region in the state. That’s actually down from the previous year, but still hundreds more than in the years leading up to the pandemic. City officials cite increased housing costs as a primary contributor to increased homelessness — about 44 percent of Missoulians were rent burdened in 2024, and average rents for a one-bedroom apartment exceeded maximum monthly social security payments by about $170.

And this year, the city’s decision to close the Johnson Street shelter meant fewer beds for homeless Missoulians. In the spring, Mayor Davis announced a phased closure of the shelter, initially opened as a temporary, seasonal COVID-19 measure in 2020 and re-opened year round in 2023. But the shelter had always received temporary funding boosted by pandemic-era federal grants, and this year, with some of that federal funding expiring, Davis said that the city could not afford to keep the shelter open.

That meant the roughly 160 people who stayed at the shelter on a given night needed to find somewhere else to stay in a city with few options. The city and local service providers announced a “housing sprint” to help at least some of these people find stable housing, soliciting donations that could be used to pay deposits, bills, and other expenses that might prevent a person from attaining a place to live. By November, the city announced that it had used about $181,000 of sprint funds to help 133 people, connecting about 60 of them with housing — rentals (subsidized or otherwise), stays with family members, transitional housing and so on.

This year also saw greater tenant activism in Missoula, especially through the Missoula Tenants Union. In October, almost 200 people who live in a Westside trailer park — many of whom live on fixed-income — formed a union under the MTU umbrella, making it one of the largest such tenants’ unions in the state. The residents of the Travois Village protested rent increases and changing lease terms imposed by an out-of-state ownership group, and seemed to find some success from their greater bargaining power.

The Davis era and City Council politics

Mayor Davis, the former executive director of housing non-profit Homeword, took the reins of the city following a 2023 special election. But she was technically elected to carry out the remainder of the term of Mayor John Engen, who had sat in that position for almost two decades before he died that year.

In November 2025, Davis won election to her first full term, and did so with a sizable mandate, defeating challenger Shawn Knopp by almost 40 points. On the campaign trail, she championed the growth plan, the code reform effort and the other technical, measured initiatives the city has taken to add to the housing supply.

“The issues that I ran on in 2023 are the same fundamental issues that I ran on in 2025,” Davis told The Pulp shortly after her re-election. “It’s dealing with cost of living issues. It’s dealing with attainable and affordable housing. It’s responsive government. Thinking about a four-year term … I think we will be basically building off of those. Because those are major things that we aren’t going to be able to flip a switch on quickly.”

Davis’ first term hasn’t been without controversy, especially when it comes to the closure of Johnson Street. She also presided over city budgets that cut spending and raised property taxes — albeit, less dramatically this year than in 2024 — efforts to right the fiscal ship following years of structural deficits. But she’s maintained that the city is doing what it can with the relatively limited legal powers and financial resources that it has. (Knopp, for the sake of comparison, favored even more aggressive cuts in an effort to halt property tax increases, one of the few ways that the city can generate additional revenue).

This year’s election also highlighted factional divides on the council even among progressives, as exemplified by the high-profile Ward 3 contest between two incumbents: Daniel Carlino and Jennifer Savage. Savage had previously represented Ward 1, but after moving to the other side of the river mounted a challenge against Carlino. Carlino was one of several candidates this cycle endorsed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, while Savage was one of several candidates endorsed by the mayor. To paint with a perhaps overly broad brush, it was a contest between two candidates who identified similar problems facing the city, but prescribed different paths forward. Carlino favored comparatively radical action on housing, climate change and other issues — at least as radical as one can get within the boundaries of city council — while Savage called for a more incremental approach with public-private partnerships and council coalition-building.

Savage ultimately defeated Carlino; likewise, all but one of Davis-endorsed candidates cruised to victory in November. Of the DSA group, only incumbent Kristen Jordan won her race, defeating challenger Chris Foster in Ward 6.

It is of course too early to say if Davis will lead an Engen-esque political dynasty, if that’s even something she would want. But in any case, 2025 marked the official beginning of a new political era for Missoula.

Missoula gets DOGE’d

Missoula, like much of the rest of the country, felt the impacts of President Donald Trump’s spending cuts soon after he began his second term. Whether through executive orders freezing federal spending, budget legislation or the slash-and-burn cuts of the Department of Government Efficiency, myriad programs saw budget lines eliminated and grants clawed back. While Republican officials authorized many of these cuts with the stated intention of stamping out supposed wokeness in federal spending, the impact of the cuts extended far beyond diversity and equity programming.

In July, for example, the feds clawed back through budget legislation a $24 million grant that supported long-awaited safety improvements on Highway 200 near East Missoula — money that had already been authorized by the Joe Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act’s Neighborhood Access and Equity Grant Program. The same cuts eliminated $74 million for Highway 93 improvements in the Flathead Indian Reservation.

In the spring, cuts to federal food aid programs meant a $180,000 loss for the Missoula Food Bank and Community Center. By the summer, the Trump-backed congressional spending package — the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill — cut off the refugee community in Missoula and nationwide from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid.

Art and science programs took a hit as well. Humanities Montana, the state’s arts council, lost about $1 million — 90 percent of its budget — as part of cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities. SpectrUM, the University of Montana-affiliated nonprofit science center located inside the Missoula Public Library, lost two federal grants totaling $500,000 as part of cuts to the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. Other university research projects and programs also saw cuts or funding freezes.

These organizations have managed to hang on despite the shrinking of already tight budgets. But it’s not easy. Humanities Montana, for example, received a pair of large private donations earlier this year, but not before the organization had to lay off several staffers. And even with the money, it’s no guarantee of long-term sustainability. As for the highway funding, the Missoula County commissioners have asked the state’s federal delegation to restore the funding, but so far, to no avail.