Missoula to hire outside consultant to evaluate city's own affordable housing policy (2024)

Five years after passing a landmark set of policies to encourage the creation of more affordable housing in Missoula, the city is poised to hire a consultant to evaluate the city’s strategy.

Anne Geiger, the city’s strategic initiatives manager with the Office of Community Planning, Development and Innovation, gave a presentation on the issue to the Missoula Housing Resident Oversight Committee earlier this month.

“The city’s housing strategy has been in place for five years,” Geiger said. “Part of that adopted strategy was a review at five years.”

Missoula City Council adopted the document, called “A Place to Call Home: Meeting Missoula’s Housing Needs” in June of 2019. The housing policy proposed over two dozen individual strategies aimed at addressing rising housing costs in Missoula. But the pandemic and other factors, such as high construction costs, have meant that housing prices just kept rising since the document was adopted. The median home sales price of all homes sold in Missoula County in 2020 was $350,000, according to the Missoula Organization of Realtors. In 2024 so far, that number is $562,000, a 60% increase.

Geiger said the city recently won a $25,000 grant from the Montana Department of Commerce to help evaluate the housing policy.

“It’s a small grant but it’s going to help in terms of bringing on a consultant in terms of helping us with an evaluation and review of the housing strategy,” Geiger said. “We anticipate having the consultant start their work in January. The timelines for the grant are pretty generous. The latest we’ll get the results is next fall.”

As of May 2024, 19 of the strategies in the document were implemented in some form. About five had been 50% implemented and another five had been 75% implemented. The remaining three strategies had only been about 25% implemented.

In May, former city housing policy specialist Emily Harris-Shears said the city had marked some progress with the policy.

She said some of the successes of the city include the creation of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which has been used to preserve or create dozens of units of income-restricted housing in Missoula. She also said that the city conducted a study on short-term rentals and implemented a registration and fee process for those homes. The city also tweaked zoning rules to allow more housing types in more areas.

Geiger said the consultant’s review of the housing policy will be crucial.

“We’re excited,” she said. “Their work can be fairly specific. (City) staff will be supporting the consultant quite a bit in terms of providing data. We’re hopeful the consultant will have pretty specific recommendations as far as how the city can sort of best use its limited resources as far as increasing the amount of affordable housing in our wonderful city.”

Geiger acknowledged that a lot has happened in five years.

“When this policy/strategy was written over five years ago, I mean the world has changed so much,” Geiger said. “So where can we, you know, be spending our limited resources, staff time, any money that might be coming in that the committee might be prepared for? So yeah, we’re excited.”

At the same meeting, Colin Lane, an alternate member of the housing resident oversight committee, gave an update on the city’s “future growth scenarios” workshops that were held recently. Lane attended and said he was impressed.

“The city’s long-range transportation folks are doing a good job thinking about our zoning,” Lane said. “Emily Gluckin (a city planner) presented to this committee four or five months ago and talked about how much of our land here in the valley is zoned for single-family. They’ve now got a little bit more information about specifically how many homes do we need to create a healthy environment in our city.”

The answer, Lane said, is that the city needs to create about 1,200 homes a year to meet demand.

“Which is a lot more than we’re doing this year, but it’s nice to have a number,” he said. “And there was lots of information about density, increasing density, and what that would do to the average home price here in Missoula. They did a great job and we’re excited to hear the next steps. I think I would personally love everything to move faster but that’s not how the world works.”

Lane and other members of the committee said that many people at the workshops were enthusiastic about increasing density all across the city if it means housing prices go down.

“Overwhelmingly I think the public has been voting (at the workshops) for more density,” Lane said.