Mayor Engen, Citizens Discuss Missoula’s Housing Woes

By Dillon Tabish, 3-14-08

	Caption: Mayor John Engen leads a public discussion on issues of affordable housing Thursday in City Council Chambers. Photos by Dillon Tabish

Everyday Missoulians like firefighters, teachers, young couples and single parents are finding it difficult to stay in Missoula because of a lack of affordable housing, and Thursday night Mayor John Engen led a public discussion on how best to address the issue.

Roughly 100 people gathered in the City Council chambers to discuss housing concerns and how to develop an affordable housing strategy, which Mayor Engen says is one of his top three goals as mayor. The consensus Thursday was that it’s one of the public’s top priorities, too.

The topic of affordable housing has in the past been a contentious one in Missoula, but Mayor Engen hopes to start a new and constructive conversation. Clearing up misconceptions seems to be the first step.

“I’m not interested in putting another house in someone’s back yard in the University neighborhood,” he said. “We don’t have to wreck a neighborhood to build affordable housing.”

An 18-minute video titled “Housing in Missoula: A Community Conversation” was aired and highlighted the concerns of Missoula residents who are being forced out of the city limits for the simple reason that housing costs outweigh local wages and salaries.

According to Chief of Police Rusty Wickman, who appeared in the video, many police officers can’t afford a home in Missoula on a single income, and the Police Department had to change policy that forced officers to live within four to five air miles of downtown.

Fire Chief Tom Steenberg sees a similar problem with city firefighters.

“It’s unfortunate that people who work for the city can’t live in the city,” Steenberg says in the video produced by Office of Planning and Grants staff, city communications director Ginny Merriam and MCAT.

According to the OPG, 78 percent of Missoulians couldn’t move to Missoula today. A 2007 report by the Missoula Organization of Realtors showed that the median home price in Missoula’s city limits jumped to $205,000, while the Housing Affordability Index for Missoula dropped to 65 percent, meaning the average family in Missoula had 65 percent of the income required to buy that median-priced home.

OPG Director Roger Millar, in an interview earlier in the day, emphasized that when affordable housing is discussed, no one is discussing “freebie” homes. Rather, planners are trying to keep the majority of Missoula residents from being pushed out by an economic minority.

Millar refers to Montana and other Western states as the “third coast”—there’s the West Coast, the East Coast, and now the Rocky Mountain Coast, he says. Someone in Orange County, where the median home price is around $1 million, can sell and move to Rocky Mountain states like Montana and buy a comparable home for around $250,000, put the remainder in the bank and live off the interest. It creates an inbalance in housing prices, Millar said.

Other factors contribute as well to the increasingly expensive housing market, including a hike in the cost of land and construction materials.

Thursday night’s discussion was the city’s first step in its attempt to balance that, and Perry Ashby of Westmont Builders & Developers said Missoula will turn the dialogue into action.

Much of Thursday night centered around public comments, but several questions were also posed in the video, like how the lack of affordable housing affects our quality of life or the local economy. According to Merriam, the open-ended nature of the discussion was deliberate because Mayor Engen wants to remain unbiased throughout the process.

“He is really intent on restarting the conversation about housing and keeping it on a track that is positive and constructive,” Merriam said.

Mary Monroe, a single mom with two kids, 12 and 14 years old, came to Thursday’s meeting and left pleased with the discussion.

“I’m a recipient of the Missoula Housing Authority and quite frankly I would not have made it as a single parent raising two kids had these programs in the community not been available to me,” said Monroe, a renter. “It’s nice to see people get together and come up with creative ways to deal with this issue.”

A few of the creative ways included cooperative housing, accessory dwelling units and higher density zoning. Other suggestions regarded policy changes and available money on the local and federal level that would provide support.

Ward 4 Councilmember Jon Wilkins said he can’t see his kids living in Missoula because they won’t be able to afford it.

It’s important to keep what we got, he said, but we need to help solve the housing problem in Missoula and more federal money is one way of doing that.

Local developer and builder Kim Chambers said higher density housing is an acceptable way to provide more homes even if it sacrifices a few amenities along the way.

“We might need to give up some of our gardens to house our people,” she said.

After nearly two hours of discussion, Mayor Engen reined in final questions and comments, and ended the night thanking everyone for being involved in what he believes to be the start of an important process, to which he received a round of applause. According to Merriam, the Mayor and others will gather comments, suggestions and concerns and work on finalizing the City of Missoula Affordable Housing Program draft.

Afterward, he smiled as people filed out of council chambers.

How did he think the night went?

“I couldn’t be more pleased,” he said. “The number and variety of folks here couldn’t have been more fantastic.”

Editor’s note: Anyone interested in having the 18-minute video shown to a group or organization can contact Ginny Merriam by phone (552-0627) or email ().