HomeMy WebLinkAbout04-08-24 Public Comment - S. Kirchoff - guthrie building and _deep incentives_ commentFrom:Steve Kirchhoff
To:Bozeman Public Comment
Subject:[EXTERNAL]guthrie building and "deep incentives" comment
Date:Sunday, April 7, 2024 7:31:13 PM
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Dear Mayor Cunningham and Bozeman City Commissioners:
Many citizens have written to the city commission urging the commission to reclaim review
authority over the Guthrie project. The commission is urged to conduct the review themselves
because the Guthrie building is the first project to take advantage of the “deep incentives”
recently adopted into Bozeman code. The Guthrie is a test of the “deep incentives” and a
precedent-setting occasion for our community.
I agree with this view, but with a twist to the way the word “precedent” is being used. I
believe the precedent is not the Guthrie building itself—not its bloated ugly bulk or its lack of
parking, not the dubious quality of its affordable housing, not the overcrowding of the
neighborhood streets that it will surely bring, not the imperiled safety of neighboring school
kids, and definitely not the ‘modified type iii Airbnb’ nature of its many for-profit units. No,
none of these things interest me: all of these are standard-issue, run-of-the-mill Holloran
horror-show. Every Bozeman citizen of feeling has already been sickened by these (making
them infinitely more informed yet less happy than their elected officials are).
And I am not here to pass judgment on Andy Holloran’s peculiarly disgusting stranglehold on
the minds of the Bozeman city commission. Nor do I wish to point out the confusing labyrinth
of contradictory and overlapping chapters of Bozeman’s “duly approved” land use codes, the
inarticulate mess of self-undermining language that commissioners rely on to decide how and
where and in what fashion the city grows—from the growth policy to the NCOD to the UDC to
the affordable housing ordinance—and, of course, to the bete noir of this message—the
“deep incentives” program.
Bozeman’s many chapters and sections and sub-sections of planning language and zoning
code so frequently contradict each other and do so with such casual disinterest in their
contradictions that reading them is like reading an existentialist comedy by Samuel Beckett—
because in reading both, the punch-lines make one cry. Finally, I have no interest in pointing
out that a majority on the city commission has completely lost touch with Bozeman citizens
and has—contrary to all reason and accurate self-reflection—conflated its whimsical,
developer-serving mentality with the One True Understanding of Reality.
I have no interest in calling out these things. I lack interest in pointing them out, not because
they are not worth pointing out, but because doing so simply brings forward, painfully, the
persistent problem of being an engaged Bozeman citizen in a town whose leadership proffers
no listening ear to the people who elect them—the people who live inside the conditions on
the streets and in the neighborhoods the commission creates (and re-creates)—yet to whom
the commission gives only cursory attention.
Back to the matter at hand: my subject is the true precedent of this project review. It is not the
particulars of the Guthrie site plan and COA; rather, the true precedent at stake is the “deep
incentives” program itself. To put it in terms of health: the “deep incentives” program is the
disease and the Guthrie building is its symptom.
I have been told that the goal of the “deep incentives” program is to stimulate the creation of
affordable housing, and if I believed this were really the goal, I would consider it a laudable
one. But there are many reasons to believe that such is not the goal behind its creation, and
there are persuasive reasons to reject the “deep incentives” program as an utter failure
before it ever gets to debut on the stage of the Bozeman cityscape.
Apparently it has not dawned on anyone in the city that using its development regulations as a
bargaining chip to leverage affordable housing from developers is the same thing as
confessing that regulation causes Bozeman’s lack of affordable housing. This confession—to a
crime never committed—is the true precedent of the Guthrie project, one that should be and
must be avoided by the city.
In truth, I cannot fault the city for grasping at straws. After all, the problem of housing
unaffordability is a big one, not just in Bozeman, Montana, and the United States—rather, it is
a global problem. And the genesis of it? Experience tells me lack of housing affordability has
everything to do with the behavior of “free markets,” and little, if anything, to do with proper
regulatory regimes enacted by public officials. In fact, housing unaffordability shouts out loud
the private market’s hostile resistance to providing adequate housing for all classes of society.
But the problem we face, and which the “deep incentives” wrongly addresses, is worse than
what I have said so far. What the “deep incentives” program truly represents is the reach of
the private market and private interest deep into the realm of public interest, to the detriment
of the public. By allowing this trespass of private into public interest, the city has abrogated its
responsibility to protect the people—their welfare and safety—by erasing its codes for public
protection and inserting calculations ensuring private profit into the blanks left by the erasure.
Where the code once protected the public realm, they now seek to “make developers whole.”
The “deep incentives” program is an unjustifiable betrayal of the public by our city
commission. The Guthrie building is standard Holloran crap, but the “deep incentives”
program is a true crime against Bozeman residents.
Sincerely,
Steve Kirchhoff