Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte blames Paramount’s hit 2018 soap opera “Yellowstone” for what he calls his state’s most pressing crisis: housing affordability.
A flood of wealthy out-of-staters, inspired by Kevin Costner’s fictional ranching life, “fell in love” with the last best place and have made it their new (or second) home, Gianforte said. When the pandemic hit, that trend only accelerated.
It’s been an economic boon for Big Sky Country: Montana’s economy grew faster in 2021 than it had in four decades. But it’s also meant median single-family home prices in the city of Bozeman have surged from under $500,000 pre-COVID to about $800,000 today. Statewide, home prices have soared by 60% since early 2020.
Kelly Lynch, executive director of the Montana League of Cities and Towns, an association of 127 municipalities, said native Montanans like herself are experiencing “culture shock” from all the new remote workers and vacationers.
“I can’t even explain to you how different it looks here,” she said. “People wear fur walking down the street.”
At the same time, Bozeman has filled up with campers and RVs where unhoused workers and locals priced out of better housing are living. The conditions are dangerous in a place where temperatures regularly fall into the negative double digits.
The issue of rich Californians pricing working-class Montanans out of their communities could have been a political loser for the governor. After all, Gianforte himself is a native Californian transplant and billionaire tech CEO. He said it was clear he had to tackle the issue.
“The bottom line, demand outstripped supply and we saw housing prices really spike,” Gianforte said in an interview with Business Insider. “We knew we had to do something about it.”
In July 2022, the governor announced a housing task force made up of about two dozen economists, advocates, politicians, and builders, who would come up with a set of policy recommendations to ease the crisis. The bipartisan group delivered its first report just three months later.
When Montana’s state legislature reconvened in early 2023 — something it only does for 90 days every other year — it passed a slew of housing and land-use reform bills that make it much easier to build. The raft of legislation loosens zoning, allows more housing density, and requires localities to devise a land-use plan, among other things. Dozens of Republican lawmakers joined virtually all of their Democratic colleagues in supporting most of the various bills.
The so-called Montana Miracle has been celebrated by progressive housing advocates across the country. While the governor won’t call himself a YIMBY, he’s relying on his colleagues who’ve embraced the pro-development moniker to keep the housing wins coming as he campaigns for a second term.
A politician who was once best known for assaulting a reporter on the eve of his election to Congress is now perhaps better known for shepherding the kind of transformative housing policies many blue state governors can only dream of.
One law allows residential construction in commercial areas, like downtown Missoula.
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A free-market approach
The laws that Gianforte signed last year are focused on stripping away government regulations and empowering landowners and developers to do what they want with their property.
One allows accessory dwelling units — extra, smaller homes or converted basements and garages — on single-family lots. Another allows duplexes to be built anywhere single-family homes are allowed. And another allows residences in commercial areas. But they shift some of the responsibility to local governments — one law requires cities to create land-use plans for future population growth.
The policies are supply-side fixes for the crisis — creating more housing to drive down costs — rather than subsidizing renters or lower-income homebuyers. And they focus on reducing government red tape to unleash the free market, which helped conservatives get behind the reforms.
“What we did by removing regulations, increasing the workforce, removing restrictions on permitting — we’ve enabled the private sector to fix this problem for us,” Gianforte said. “As a conservative, I think free market approaches are the way to do it.”
It also helps that supporters of the housing policies have sold them as a way to prevent the kind of suburban sprawl — and resulting affordability crisis — plaguing California.
“The fear is that in 25 years, we’re going to have a California-style housing crisis,” Kendall Cotton, who leads the free-market pro-housing think tank the Frontier Institute, told BI last year. “We’re going to have miles of urban sprawl eating up all of the Montana areas that we love, and changing the character of our state.”
These arguments were compelling enough to convince a significant number of Republican legislators to get behind the effort. Still, Democrats were much more supportive of the various pieces of pro-housing legislation than their GOP counterparts.
“The fact that we that we were able to pass what I consider to be a bunch of at least initial progressive policies has, I think, pissed off a lot of Republicans in the state as well,” Nathan Dugan, the co-founder of a pro-housing group in Whitefish and a member of the housing task force.
One Republican state senator, Daniel Zelnikov, said it was “really kind of fun” to suddenly become a national hero of progressive YIMBYs after a floor speech he gave decrying surging housing costs went somewhat viral on X.
“It was interesting because progressives used it against their own progressive leaders because we — a bunch of rednecks from the back hills — are doing more for folks than the YIMBY folks,” Zelnikov said.
The Montana League of Cities and Towns wasn’t supportive of the housing bills that override local authority, including the bills allowing ADUs and duplexes, but Lynch said they were “really happy” with the process.
“It could have been much, much worse for us, but I think the fact that we were all engaged with each other and built those relationships I think helped us come up with a good mix where everybody got a little bit of what they wanted,” Lynch said.
There’s bipartisan support in Montana for protecting public land and preventing sprawl.
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Running on housing
Gianforte was “pretty distant” when it came to overseeing the housing task force, Dugan said. Zelnikov called him “a very big delegator” when it comes to working out policy details. This hands-off approach made swaying Republican legislators trickier, Dugan added.
“I’ve never actually met him or shook his hand, despite being in the same room at times,” Dugan said. “We would have liked to see him, as people that were working on all these bills in the session, be a little bit more involved from his office when things were a little bit tough.”
But these days, as Gianforte is gearing up to run for a second term, he’s putting housing front and center, touting the laws he’s signed and other measures he’s taken to deal with the crisis. Last June, he extended the housing task force through the next legislative session. Since then, he’s spoken about the state’s housing reforms at a national gathering of YIMBYs and with a centrist think tank in Washington.
“The governor says every time it’s bipartisan policy,” Zelnikov said of Gianforte’s promotion of the housing legislation. “He’s touting bipartisan. That’s not a thing these days.”
Progressive housing advocates say there’s still a lot of room for improvement. Democrats point to rising property taxes across the state and insist the state needs more subsidies for affordable housing construction and for lower-income renters and homebuyers. There was “not a lot of talk about affordable housing for folks in Montana who might never be able to afford the market” during task force discussions, Dugan said.
One major effort Gianforte squashed was a bill that would have created new protections for mobile homeowners — including 60 days’ notice for renewing leases and the option of one-year leases in mobile home parks.
The legislation was the only Democrat-authored bill to make it through both chambers. “We made amendment after amendment to really forge a compromise on that bill. It was truly bipartisan,” said Karlen, who authored the bill along with Rep. George Nikolakakos, a Republican who also owns multiple mobile home parks.
But Gianforte vetoed it, arguing it “compromises” landowners’ property rights and “disincentivizes landlords from maintaining or increasing the inventory of mobile home rental lots.”
There are some signs that the laws are already starting to grease the wheels of housing production. A mixed-use 210-unit housing development in Whitefish, which includes 21 affordable units, credited one of the laws with speeding the approval process. The governor pointed to home vacancy rates rising and rents falling recently in places like Missoula.
But many of the reforms aren’t expected to see results for a while. Multiple have been held up by lawsuits. In the meantime, thousands of Montanans are still fighting for an affordable place to live. Karlen called talk of a Montana Miracle “a premature victory lap at best.”
“There’s still a lot of work to do,” he said.
