Montana puts ‘red’ and ‘blue’ values in housing
State lawmakers in Big Sky Country are once again demonstrating big-time bipartisanship, perhaps setting a model in governance. This time, they have tackled an issue vexing communities around the United States: how to lower the price of housing.
For the second consecutive legislative session, Republicans and Democrats in Montana’s Legislature have worked with a broad coalition of interest groups to pass changes in zoning and other reforms. The just-approved bills aim to reduce paperwork and the price of new housing by removing parking-space mandates, allowing taller buildings, and expanding permissions for backyard cottages.
This year’s changes build on a package passed in 2023 dubbed the “Montana Miracle” for its speed and scope. Part of that “miracle” was finding common ground between typically urban, blue-state priorities for housing densification and rural red-state preferences for limited government reach.
With pandemic-related in-migration and population growth, Montana has experienced a spike in home prices. In 2024, its housing market had the largest gap between the average home price and the state’s average income – higher than California’s gap – according to the National Association of Realtors.
Rents also increased, squeezing residents and “gutting the core of our communities,” Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican, told the American Planning Association in 2023. “We knew that if we didn’t get our arms around affordable housing, we wouldn’t have communities.”
The spark for these reforms was lit in mid-2022, when Mr. Gianforte established a Housing Task Force “to cast a really broad net and bring me your best ideas.” It included lawmakers and government officials as well as community-focused nonprofits and free-market think tanks. Task force members played to their strengths, according to Kendall Cotton, president of the conservative Frontier Institute.
“We were able to go to mostly Republicans,” Mr. Cotton told Bloomberg CityLab, “and talk about free markets [and] property rights,” emphasizing freedoms to build additional housing. Other members, he said, went to “folks on the left [to] talk about climate and social impacts” of easing zoning restrictions to allow densification and reduce sprawl.
Similar alliances have since emerged in Arizona, Texas, Minnesota, and North Carolina, though with varying success.
“Not everything is so hyper-partisan,” Democratic state Sen. Ellie Boldman, who sponsored the building height bill, told the news site Governing. “There’s always room to try to find the common thread of what our values are and bring everybody together.”
