HomeMy WebLinkAbout10-14-22 Public Comment - K. Lynch - Housing Recommendations Remove Local Decision-MakingFrom:Kelly Lynch
To:Kelly Lynch
Subject:Housing Recommendations Remove Local Decision-Making
Date:Friday, October 14, 2022 1:12:41 PM
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MLCT Comments on Housing Task Force Draft Report.pdf
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Hello,
Thank you to everyone who could join us last week for our 91st Annual Conference. We hope
everyone came home with new knowledge, new friends, and even some new swag. Many of you had
the opportunity to practice telling your stories with partners AARP of Montana and Voices of
Montana. You can listen here if you want to hear your colleagues from around the state.
In non-conference-related news, Governor Gianforte’s Housing Advisory Committee released its
recommendations for the next legislative session last week. We want to thank Great Falls Mayor Bob
Kelly, who served on the committee and worked hard to protect local decision-making.
Unfortunately, some recommendations force every community to allow accessory dwelling units
(ADUs) on every residential lot, remove local restrictions on how small lots can be, and stop local
governments from requiring parking spaces for new development.
In response, I submitted a guest editorial around the state fighting to protect local control because
our members know what their communities need. The Daily Interlake, Independent Record, Choteau
Acantha, Missoula Current, and Havre Daily News have all published the article Housing
recommendations remove local decision-making, and we expect more. I hope you will take a
moment to read it and post it on your social media.
As well, the attached comments were submitted this morning to Director Dorrington in response to
the draft Housing Advisory Council report.
Finally, if anyone is interested in serving on the Housing Advisory Committee to replace Mayor Kelly,
please let me know immediately. I will be forwarding five names to Director Dorrington.
Sincerely,
Kelly A. Lynch, JD, AICP
Executive Director
Montana League of Cities and Towns
P.O. Box 7388
Helena, Montana 59604
406-442-8768 office
406-465-5711 cell
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To: Director Dorrington, DEQ
From: Montana League of Cities and Towns
Re: Comments on Recommendations and Strategies to Increase the Supply of Affordable, Attainable
Workforce Housing, Preliminary Draft, October 3, 2022
Date: October 13, 2022
The Montana League of Cities and Towns (MLCT) is an incorporated, nonpartisan, nonprofit association
of all 127 incorporated municipalities in Montana. Most Montanans live, work, and play in our member
communities. Thank you for this opportunity to submit our comments on the preliminary draft of the
Governor’s Housing Task Force report.
Providing adequate housing that is affordable and attainable for all Montanans is and has been a priority
for our members. The housing shortage is nothing new in Montana. For years, local leaders have been
working to address it because they see the impact it has on their communities – big or small. They are the
ones with the firsthand knowledge and understand the complexity of the factors that contribute to the
housing crisis. We appreciate the Governor’s convening of a task force to dig into the issue and identify
concrete steps that state and local officials can take to increase the supply of housing in Montana.
Unfortunately, a problem cannot be fixed if it is not accurately defined. The Governor’s Executive Order
quoted the National Association of Home Builder’s report that the average cost of regulation constitutes
23.8% of the price of a new home. This term “regulation” from the NAHB was immediately narrowed to
“land use regulations” and “zoning restrictions” throughout the Executive Order. Consequently, the
assumption of the Housing Task Force from the beginning has been that local land use and zoning
regulations are the primary inhibitor to the construction and availability of affordable housing in Montana.
Indeed, the Executive Order narrowed the Task Force’s focus to only three reasons for Montana’s housing
crisis: “expanding the State’s construction workforce,” “reforming land use regulations,” and “reforming
zoning restrictions.” It makes little to no mention of the other regulations that NAHB calculates into that
total regulatory cost, including complying with OSHA and other federal and state labor requirements and
changes to state building codes over the past 10 years, which account for almost 8 percent of those costs.1
Four of the 18 recommendations in the report are dedicated to recommended strategies and policy changes
that remove existing local land use and zoning regulatory decision-making and prohibit local governments
from requiring developers to minimize impacts on local services, existing residents, and the environment
as part of constructing new housing developments. While there are a plethora of potential regulatory
1 Paul Emrath, PhD, Government Regulation in the Price of a New Home, Special Study for Housing Economics, National
Association of Home Builders (2021)
Montana League of Cities and Towns (MLCT)
700 W Custer Ave (59602)
PO Box 7388
Helena MT 59604-7388
Phone: (406) 442-8768
FAX: (406) 442-9231
Email: info@mtleague.net
mtleague.org
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reforms available to both state and local governments that address the three aspects of the housing shortage
– supply, stability, and subsidy2 - the Task Force focuses inordinately on the first.
Montana’s municipalities support the majority of the recommendations in the report, including
supplemental funding for state permitting programs, allowing development of state lands with housing,
fixing Montana’s outdated tax system, tying eligibility for new infrastructure funding and housing tax
credits to local zoning reform, and increasing investment in growing and training the construction
workforce. But we strongly oppose the inclusion of recommendations 2A, 2B, 3B, and 3C in the report,
and ask the Housing Task Force to remove these recommendations entirely or identify them as best
practices that local governments can adopt to help address the housing crisis. Recommendations 2A, 2B,
3B, and 3C are prescriptive, one-size-fits-all, inflexible state-down regulations that remove local
residents, local elected officials, local circumstances, and local needs from the discussion entirely.
Recommendation 2A would force a 2,500 minimum lot size across all municipalities in all of Montana.
Again, there is no support or documentation given for this number. As the NAHB itself acknowledges,
minimum lot sizes nationally have been falling steadily for decades, with lot sizes at just over 8,000 sf as
of 2019. The Rocky Mountain region already boasts some of the lowest lot size averages in the nation, at
7,400 sf. The proposal in the report is a third of that average size.
Recommendation 2A doesn’t
stop there. It imposes a
statewide minimum density in
all Montana cities and towns
of 18 units per acre. Although
the report includes an
illustration of the “type” of
home construction that would
be possible with these
densities, the photo actually
shows development at about 7-
10 units per acre (gross).3 Not
only does the recommendation
fail to specify whether the
density is net or gross, it fails
to provide an illustration of
what 18 units per acre (net)
actually looks like (left).4
2 For a comprehensive discussion of these aspects and list of reforms to address each of them, see The Affordable City:
Strategies for Putting Housing within Reach (and Keeping it There), Shane Phillips (2020).
3 Recommendation 2A also contains a graphic of Missoula taken from the Zoning Atlas prepared by the Frontier Institute.
The Zoning Atlas is an inaccurate presentation of how much residential development is allowed in Montana’s largest cities,
as it admittedly fails to include all zones that allow for residential development. Not surprisingly, three of the Housing Task
Force members are affiliated with the Frontier Institute, and Recommendations 2A and 3C appear to come directly from the
Zoning Atlas Report.
4 Photo from The Urbanist, Visualizing Compatible Density, Bob Bengford (2017).
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Under Recommendation 2A, every city and town in Montana would have to allow that level of density of
development on every residential lot in the jurisdiction, with only one parking space required per unit and
all units allowed to build a minimum of three stories in height. Many of our members have already spent
months soliciting community input, considering safety needs, encouraging multi-modal transportation,
and evaluating mass transit service levels in overhauling their local parking ordinances. This proposal
would disregard all of that process, imposing a one parking space requirement in every community
regardless of circumstances.
Finally, recognizing that neither the state nor local governments can impose on private contractual
agreements, Recommendation 2A acknowledges that none of these requirements will apply within
developments that have a homeowner’s association. This will shift all such discussions in these areas to a
private, unregulated, unelected board of neighbors, while leaving all other neighbors to bear the burden of
high-density developments with insufficient parking spaces and no public participation in that decision.
Recommendation 2B proposes that all municipalities must also allow an accessory dwelling unit (ADU)
on every single-family lot in every city and town in Montana. Similar to the recommendation for small
lots, local jurisdictions would not be allowed to require any parking spaces for these units. Although
serving an ADU is for all purposes the same as serving a primary dwelling unit with police, fire, water,
sewer, school, and garbage services, Recommendation 2B proposes to limit impact fees that offset the
local costs of providing those services. Again, recognizing the legal limits of imposing these allowances
in HOAs, Recommendation 2B acknowledges that none of these requirements will apply within an HOA.
Recommendation 3B proposes that Montana’s mid-size municipalities must also allow duplexes in all
single-family zoned areas, and the largest cities must also allow triplexes and fourplexes on all residential
lots. The report uses a photo of an existing older single-family home reportedly converted to a triplex to
illustrate how Recommendation 3B would work. But the proposal would allow for much more intensive
development. Combined with the previous recommendations, any city or town with a population of 5,000
or more would have to allow at least a duplex up to 3 stories in height plus an accessory dwelling unit on
every residential lot in its jurisdiction, with limited parking (below).
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Further, it’s unclear how this minimum requirement intersects with the requirement to allow at least 18
units/acre on each lot within the municipality, since that higher density floor would allow far more than
just a duplex and ADU.
Finally, Recommendation 3C provides a laundry list of other aesthetic, landscaping, park dedication, or
other lot dimensions that Montana’s cities and towns would no longer be able to require of developers.
Although most items on the list are not typically regulated by local governments (house color, cladding
materials, number of windows, etc.), they are commonly restricted by HOAs. These limitations, however,
will not apply to HOAs, retaining their ability to tightly control every aspect of the homes subject to the
HOA with little to no homeowner recourse.
These recommendations combined would transform Montana’s cities and towns into densely populated
urban centers with no public participation and no consideration of whether local services or facilities are
equipped or sufficiently funded to handle these additional service needs. What happens when existing
wastewater treatment facilities simply cannot serve new development because of restrictions imposed by
EPA regulations? Where do elderly or disabled residents park when their residential streets are filled with
cars from new apartment buildings built without adequate parking? Who will a neighbor complain to when
a new 3-story accessory dwelling unit looms over their backyard fence?
Many of these zoning reforms will work in many areas of many municipalities in Montana. But they will
not work in every area of every city and town. Our communities need and deserve the opportunity to
discuss, brainstorm, debate, and consider what zoning reforms will make the biggest difference in
providing more housing supply in their town. Our local elected officials need and deserve the time and
deliberative process necessary to determine what service levels and capacity are necessary to provide safe,
healthy, vibrant, and affordable communities. For these reasons, we ask for Recommendations 2A, 2B,
3B, and 3C to be modified to best practice recommendations, tied to eligibility for funding reforms, or be
included in a list of potential zoning reforms that local governments can choose from to best meet local
needs and conditions.
Sincerely,
Kelly A. Lynch, JD, AICP
Executive Director
Montana League of Cities and Towns