Opinion: How NIMBYISM chokes off affordable housing even in Big Sky Country

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Opinion | How NIMBYISM chokes off affordable housing even in Big Sky Country

By Kendall Cotton
June 9, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EDT



The view from a hiking trail in Missoula, Mont., in 2019. (Tailyr Irvine for The Washington Post)

Kendall Cotton is president and CEO of the Frontier Institute in Helena, Mont., and member of the State Policy Network.

Fifty years ago, my grandfather scraped together $15,000 to buy a small “shotgun”-style house on a tiny lot in the middle of Missoula, Mont. Adjusted for inflation, that would mean about $105,000 today. Yet the median price for a single-family home in Missoula now is more than $550,000. ... We often hear about the fading dream of homeownership for millions of Americans — especially young people hoping to raise a family — in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities. But the problem extends from coast to coast, with Missoula as a telling example of why there simply aren’t enough houses to meet demand. The shortage drives the cost of existing homes to levels that are prohibitive for countless low- and middle-income Americans.

President Biden’s recently announced Housing Supply Action Plan reflects a growing political consensus that an intervention is needed. People of all political stripes can unite around pro-housing reforms to give landowners more freedom to build new homes where they are needed most. ... The Biden administration’s housing plan calls the lack of available and affordable land through exclusionary zoning regulations, such as minimum lot area requirements, parking mandates and prohibitions on multifamily housing, as “one of the most significant issues constraining housing supply.”

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Exclusionary zoning practices reserve vast portions of cities for single-family homes and prohibit building denser multifamily homes, such as duplexes and triplexes, that are more affordable by design. Other regulatory layers drive up building costs and can effectively prohibit multifamily homes when the requirements (see minimum lot areas and parking mandates above) can’t be met in the existing space.

In emerging housing markets such as Montana’s, we are seeing the pain caused by exclusionary zoning firsthand. A pandemic property gold rush coupled with low housing inventory has pushed median home list prices in some of the state’s fast-growing cities over $800,000. The organization I lead, the free-market Frontier Institute, recently published a Montana Zoning Atlas report on how exclusionary zoning worsens the housing shortage: More than 70 percent of primary residential areas in Montana’s most in-demand cities either outright prohibit or penalize affordable multifamily housing development.

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