The Missoula City Council has delayed its vote on the city’s new zoning code, a sweeping reform effort that will allow for the development of more housing of more types in almost all Missoula neighborhoods.
The city rescheduled the vote, originally slated for a special council meeting Dec. 22, to allow more time for the Missoula city-county planning board to consider the new framework. The board has spent much of the last month doing just that, finalizing its changes to the code during a Dec. 9 meeting. The council now says it will vote during a Jan. 26 meeting, following preliminary committee votes earlier in the month.
The changes the planning board proposed include revised policy language, amendments to the code itself — for example, allowing childcare services in places zoned for industrial and employment uses — and new place type classifications for specific parcels and neighborhoods across the city. You can read a summary of the changes here.
The council will have to approve the amendments, in addition to the plan itself, for them to take effect. Councilmember Mike Nugent told the Missoulian’s Griffen Smith that the council will likely approve at least some of those changes as a package.
We too have spent much of the last month talking to people around Missoula about the zoning reform effort, not only because it would, in the long run, transform Missoula’s urban landscape, but also because the plan’s proponents — including Mayor Andrea Davis and others in city hall — are framing it as a tool to help address the city’s affordability problem by adding to the housing stock, citing research that shows a bigger, more diverse housing inventory at all price levels can slow rent and home price appreciation, if not reverse it.
“The way I think of this is we’re unlocking more that you can do, more where people already live.”
The city’s 2045 land use plan calls for the construction of 20,000 new housing units in the next 20 years in order to increase the city’s housing vacancy rate, and it proposes to do so not just through upzoning — allowing higher density housing — but also by reducing parking requirements, setbacks (the required distance between a construction and the property line) and more.
But while the council seems likely to approve the new code in some form or another, there are a few lines of opposition. For one, not everybody in Missoula wants more development, more people, more changes to the urban fabric, even if it does feel like that ship has already sailed. If you’re a homeowner in the Rattlesnake, for example — lucky you! — you might be uncomfortable with changes allowing taller buildings to be built in your neighborhood. Others might recognize the need for more housing, but question whether the changes will actually resolve the housing crisis for those with the most immediate need — or if they’ll just open up more pathways for builders and existing property owners to make a buck.
Indeed, the proposed zoning changes coincide with a national debate in liberal and progressive policy circles about affordability and regulation — one exemplified by the recent book “Abundance,” authored by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which argues that the U.S. can resolve both its cost-of-living and its environmental problems not through subsidy and regulation but by slimming zoning codes, incentivizing technological innovation and boosting energy production. But this isn’t an uncontroversial proposal, with some on the left labeling the “Abundance” philosophy as effectively a backdoor for a libertarian hollowing of the state and social services.
We can already see some of this philosophy taking hold in Missoula. One argument that Thompson and Klein make is that lawmakers limit progress by tying otherwise good legislation to a raft of environmental and social justice conditions that limit participation. Earlier this year, the city announced that it would seek to catalyze construction on city-owned land by demanding fewer concessions from developers such as affordability requirements, investments in public infrastructure and so on.
To help make sense of this debate, we sat down with two affordable housing advocates who are supporting the code reform process: Chris Chitty, an architect, developer and member of ProHousing Missoula, and Shibu Arens, a policy manager for the Front Step Community Land Trust. Here are some highlights from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and concision:
The Pulp: This is obviously a pretty big document. What in there is the most exciting to you from a housing affordability and availability standpoint?
Chris Chitty: I think just the zoning districts allowing way more flexibility, not being so strict about what can be built where, whether it be neighborhood commercial or they’re just allowing there to be different multifamily typology — cottage courts, duplexes, that kind of thing. Just having those things be allowed places where they haven’t been allowed since the ’20s. We should remember that this was all allowed at some point in the past.
Shibu Arens: There’s specific little policy things like setbacks — changing setbacks to allow for more flexibility. I think the city went further than the [state legislature’s recently updated requirements] on parking, on required asphalt surface area for housing. Again, just allowing more housing to be built, more flexibility for housing rather than other uses of space.
Chitty: I think, a lot of times, that the sort of constraints and the levers that control what gets built where tend to sort of be hidden and invisible, but they exist, and they’re in code, and in financing and labor availability. We really are just wanting the market to supply more different types of options that promote different types of people. And I couldn’t predict exactly what that’s going to look like, because there’s this complex and multi-variant system, but I do feel like we’ve opened up possibilities for different things.
Arens: And different sizes and different levels of costs, different levels of affordability, different ownership schemes, different form factors.
“For forever, we’ve told people that if they buy a house, they bought the right for that neighborhood to never change, and that’s an inherently destructive and sort of corrosive dynamic.”
The Pulp: I’m curious, from the perspective of a community land trust, how the existing code has hampered your work, and how these revisions might help it?
Arens: There’s a three-legged stool of supply, stability and subsidy. We, as a CLT, provide stability for homeowners, and we need subsidy to be able to do that. I feel like we have had projects in the past where we’re working with smaller lots in existing neighborhoods — donated or sold to us as philanthropic gifts — and mandated parking spots and setbacks eat away at what we’re able to build. There have been projects that we haven’t been able to do because of that.
Right now, a lot of our CLT homes serve people at 80 percent of area median income, but some serve up to 120 percent of AMI. You need 200 or 220 percent of AMI to afford a median home. So we’re serving people making about the median income. Long term, the hope is that the market can serve more median earners, and that the CLT can serve people on the lower end of the income spectrum. Then we’re not using our super scarce subsidies that we’re always fighting and advocating for on median earners. We can put those to work for people who are really having a hard time right now.
The Pulp: So, part of the logic of this plan is to reduce outward sprawl and promote infill development — to build more housing but also to preserve green space and agricultural land. But if affordability is our primary concern here, why shouldn’t we just keep building subdivisions in East Missoula or the Wye or Miller Creek or whatever?
Chitty: I mean, we could. This is like the dirty little secret of affordability, putting up scads of lowest common denominator housing is a really tried and true method of doing that. We also know that what comes along with it is traffic, sprawl, auto dependence — you know, disconnectedness from your community. This is also a community decision to do something different, because we’ve seen how that works.
Arens: And I think ProHousing Missoula isn’t coming at it from a “development at all costs everywhere” perspective. I think a lot of our members come from the bike and pedestrian activist community, and I think a lot of our members want to see corner cafes and shops, or neighborhood shops in the middle of the block, not just the corner or whatever. I think the quality of life stuff is pretty closely tied to it.
I will say, though — and I don’t want to disagree with Chris, because he’s the one who really knows about building — but I feel like we’ve had that scheme of sprawl and developing outward and it has not produced enough housing for us. We haven’t produced enough housing since the Great Recession. Housing crashed. The way I think of this is we’re unlocking more that you can do, more where people already live. There will be more vacant lots, more spaces that aren’t being used to their highest utility in town that we can hopefully do more with now.
Chitty: One more thing: For forever, we’ve told people that if they buy a house, they bought the right for that neighborhood to never ever change, and that’s an inherently destructive and sort of corrosive dynamic. In the end, we need things to change, ideally at a slow, incremental rate that people can adjust to. But we have to start.
