Montana’s Fear of "California-Style Zoning" Spurs Reform
(Source: Unsplash/Matthew Lancaster.)
How do you light a fire under Montanans? Tell them that “Montana is exactly where Los Angeles was 100 years ago and we need to avoid that future.” Kendall Cotton, President and CEO of Montana’s Frontier Institute, sounded this alarm bell for zoning reform that is resonating in the fast-growing state.
With a 10% population gain between 2010 and 2020, followed by another pandemic-era surge, Montana is grappling with an influx of new arrivals—along with the housing affordability crisis they’ve spurred. Now residents, activists, and government officials have coalesced around a set of reforms to keep the picturesque state from becoming what all say they want to avoid: California.
Senate Bill 323 would allow multiplex housing in places currently zoned for single-family homes. It would set new building rules according to population, allowing duplexes on lots currently zoned single-family in towns with 5,000 residents, and triple and quad construction allowed in cities up to 50,000. It seeks to address an overall housing shortage, and an acute one for affordable housing, by allowing a much wider range of building types.
Other zoning-related reforms in play this legislative session include bills that would allow multifamily housing where office or retail is already permitted, and a comprehensive land-use revision that would enable more construction by administrative approval. Each has already passed the Montana Senate by large bipartisan margins, including a whopping 47–3 vote for SB 323. Taken together, the legislation represents an aggressive effort to address the state’s housing challenges.
A 2022 poll by the University of Montana shows the urgency of the issue: 77% of respondents called “lack of affordable housing” an “extremely” or “very” serious problem in Montana, while 55% expressed similar concern about sprawl-style development usurping ranches or open lands.
The latter issue was the focus of a campaign for the housing reforms by the Frontier Institute, a think tank that advocates for limited government. It identified “California-style zoning” as a culprit for Montana’s housing problems, and an example to be avoided for its future. CEO Cotton, who served on a housing task force convened by Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, said this framing has “gotten a great response” in a state struggling to accommodate so many new residents. For Cotton, the comparison is literal: “If our cities are zoned like they’re Los Angeles, they’re going to grow like Los Angeles.”
The Institute compared zoning rules in California with those currently on the books in Montana and discovered “frightening similarities,” according to Cotton. It found that, just as Los Angeles uses single-family zoning to restrict development on as much as 74% of residential lots, so, too, do Montana cities like Kalispell, Whitefish, and Columbia Falls. Absent a solution to allow more and more-varied development within city limits, the only other option is outward expansion, and “all of the open space and rural lands that we love are going to be run over by urban sprawl,” says Cotton.
The success of the legislation may also be a road map for how to advocate for housing reform in a traditionally conservative state. M. Nolan Gray, director of California YIMBY and a Strong Towns contributor, observes that Montana’s proactive stance “shows that many of these types of zoning reforms actually have broad ideological and partisan appeal.”
Both Gray and Cotton suggest it would be fruitful for zoning reform advocates to tailor their messages to decision makers, with themes that would appeal to conservatives.
Among the issues they say are more likely to carry weight in a red state are freedom for property owners over what they can build, removing government impediments to free-market solutions, and access to homeownership for young families.
Gray offers another powerful conservative argument for Montana’s zoning reform efforts: “It’ll, of course, cost taxpayers nothing.“
For Montanans, conservation was also a powerful motivator. “Whether you’re a conservative or a bleeding-heart liberal, what draws you to Montana is our beautiful outdoors,” says Cotton. He also credits Governor Gianforte for seeking “a conservative model for addressing housing that hasn’t really been articulated.”
Just as important, the alliances that can form on this issue transcend traditional politics. In Montana’s case, “It’s pretty amazing when you look at groups like ours—probably more on the right, more free market, libertarian-oriented—that are coming together with groups like Shelter WF, which is a left-wing advocacy group, and the Montana Environmental Information Center,” says Cotton.
This shows there’s a varied path to get to zoning reform, with Gray noting that “folks in Montana are using the rhetoric of property rights to advocate for essentially the same types of policies that in a blue state might be framed as responding to climate change.”
Gray, whose organization fights to end restrictive zoning, is hopeful for the future. “It’s a good sign for the long term that a lot of these reform issues aren’t stuck on one side of the aisle.”
Longtime Strong Towns readers will also appreciate Cotton’s great description of the traditional development pattern in Montana’s historic mining boomtowns. “If you looked back at the photos, you saw tiny little shotgun houses and dense development, duplexes, triplexes, little row houses popping up everywhere. And the ranchland was left alone.”
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.