Tackling Missoula County's housing crunch

Housing Specialist Jordan Lyons explains the three main goals in the first draft of the County's Housing Action Plan: Breaking Ground. He talks through the difficult elements impacting housing in Missoula County, like why Missoula County has a shortage of about 2,400 housing units, with home prices rising much faster than incomes. Jordan explains how the market will not fill in the gap in the housing units Missoula County needs in the short-term, but that the plan sets a course for sustainable growth in our housing supply and prioritizes the members of our community who have been shut out of housing they can afford. 

The public is invited to review the draft plan and provide feedback at missoula.co/housing or by leaving a message at 406-258-3444. Public comment closes Friday, Nov. 12, so don’t wait to review the plan and share your thoughts. 

Public input on the draft County Housing Action Plan received by Nov. 12 will be incorporated into a new draft the Missoula Consolidated Planning Board will consider at a public hearing in December. The final version of the Housing Action Plan will be presented to the Missoula Board of County Commissioners as a growth policy amendment in early 2022.

Thank you to Missoula's Community Media Resource for podcast recording support!

Transcript

0:06

Hey, there, everybody, welcome back to Tip of the Spear with your Missoula County commissioners, Dave Strohmaier, Juanita Varo and myself, Josh Slotnick, and today we have a very special guest. We have joining us, Jordan Lyons, our housing specialist. Glad to be here. Long-time listener. First-time caller. Well done. Well done. So can you tell us a bit about your new position with the County? Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so I'm Jordan Lyons. I'm the housing specialist at Missoula County. And if you have lived in Missoula County or know about it for a while, you know that housing affordability has been a big issue here for a long time. And you know, our housing prices, our home prices and rental costs, they're just high relative to incomes here. And that's been kind of a long simmering problem. And then in the last couple of years with the pandemic and everything like that, we all know that that home prices and housing costs have, you know, just gone crazy. So fortunately, I think it's really great that the county commission and CAPS, Community and Planning Services, had the foresight to already have in the works a housing specialist position and look for a consultant to get a housing action plan and really, really take this on and do something about this issue. And so that's where I come in. I started in February. I have lived in Missoula since about 2007, and in that time I've mostly worked for housing nonprofits. I used to work at Missoula Housing Authority and then more recently I worked at U of M, where I was an advocate for student renters. What is a typical day look like for you in a position like this? This plan is my life right now.

County Housing Action Plan: 1:38

Breaking Ground. And so this is what I've worked closely with our consultants and staff at Community and Planning Services and other departments around the County and a lot of stakeholders from the public housing providers and people like that to really get their all their input to get the best approach that we can to make Missoula County a place where everybody can afford to live. Fantastic. So you just mentioned the website. Are there other ways in which folks can get engaged with with this project? Because as you've suggested and in noting work done with the City, this is a community wide challenge and we're looking for countywide input. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we definitely want input from all over Missoula County and I've been going around to the community councils and other community groups, as well as groups of professionals. And yeah, the because basically the more input we get, the better the plan is going to be. Easiest way to comment probably is to go on our website. missoula.co/housing, where you can just fill out a form or my email address is right there and you can send that to me, but you can also sure give me a call and my number is 406-258-3444. I would love to tell you to, if that's all right, about our kind of our three big goals. We identified great, you know, with that vision of making Missoula County a place where everyone can afford to live. We have we kind of found in creating the report that kind of the big upstream issue that causes all these various housing issues is that we really have a county-wide shortage of about 2,400 housing units. We just don't have the amount of housing units that we need for the number of people who live in Missoula County and we're growing right. And so to address that issue, we have kind of three big goals and the first goal is to use the County's toolkit to increase the housing supply. And so those tools and the toolkit are things like zoning, developing infrastructure, using land that the County owns or acquiring land. And then the second goal is providing more funding for programs to help people access and stay in stable housing. We all know when there's a housing shortage, there's not enough housing to go around. It doesn't affect everybody equally, right? It affects people with lower incomes, more so than than people with higher incomes. And so the those people with lower incomes need public support to be able to afford housing. That's just that's been the world we've lived in for, you know, for a long time in the United States, and it's more true now than ever. So we have programs. We do things that help people who are experiencing homelessness at risk of homelessness, having a hard time affording their rent or purchasing a home. We need to grow those and really align them and make sure they're there, really. We're really wrangling those resources to tackle this problem. And then the third big goal is that Missoula County government, our role is really important, but we can't do it all, and we really need to partner with other with other entities. So we need to really partner with the city. We need to partner with housing nonprofits and housing providers in the private sector to to really improve policy around housing. And Jordan, while you're you're on that topic, well, where did the 2,400 units come from? And if we were to wake up tomorrow morning and there were 2,400 homes under construction here in Missoula. What would that look like for the housing market? Because I suspect some might worry that, OK, we get the 2,400 units and lose aspects of our quality of life. And so we have the worst of both worlds. We have a significantly addressed the cost of housing in the community and we've lost other things that we find valuable. Yeah. So where it comes from is that our county has a certain number of households. You need a few more houses, like a few more housing units than you have households, so that you have enough supply, that there can be some affordability and there's not so much friction. I just have a concern that those the the algorithm or the equation that was once used to design that was at a time super accurate, a certain percentage greater than the population. That's how many housing units you have to have right now. We seem to be in a whole new world where the demand is almost bottomless because we are not meeting the needs of folks who live here right now who have expanding families or want to move from their apartment to their first home. But to all these people across the United States that can bring their work with them via their laptop and are looking at places like Missoula as a viable option? And I wonder, and this is not to say that we don't want to get housing on the ground, but could we actually build our way out of this, given that demand is not restricted to this valley, but it's so broad? I think that's a really important message to get out there, too, because some members of the public and you know, now that I've got a lot of public comment coming in, I can see, you know, to some members of the public and and, you know, depending on what industry people work in and things some people just say, you know, if you just cut all this red tape, this will all work itself out. And you know, and that's not really right. And so that's part of what we need to do. We need to make sure it's, you know, efficient and things like that. And again, like balancing that within the context of those other needs, because a lot of those regulations exist for reasons they ensure our safety and health and quality of life. So yeah, so, so building is part of it. But it's yeah, we can't just let the market just build our way out. And I would say when we think about that context of issues, I think that's where, yeah, economic development is really important. We do need to make sure that hopefully people are able to access these jobs with higher incomes. And it's not all just people, remote or even people working here. And we talk a little bit in the in that goal three about those partnerships. We talk a little bit about working with economic development, and that's where, you know, a good partnership comes in because that's not like a huge area of my expertise. We need to address this on many fronts and then we also just need to recognize, you know, many of the folks that kind of make make the community go more and more of them are needing publicly supported housing. And so it definitely is not something we can just like let the market figure it out through like we need to do as much as we can for those folks with the low to moderate incomes to be able to afford housing to. What are some of the main themes of the comments that you've received so far? So we go through all these actions and ask people how much they agree or or how important they think each of the actions are. I'll give you an example of one that that people tend to think is pretty important, and that is established zoning county wide to create more certainty about where development should be concentrated. So that's an example of one that there seems to be like pretty strong consensus. People feel that's a pretty important priority for Missoula County. And does that surprise you? So like 15 years ago when you were doing this, do you think that people would have thought that tool would be as important? You know, we're asking how important is it and not how strongly they agree. So it's hard. It's hard, a little hard to tell. I know, I know zoning can be controversial, especially when it's, you know, like, you know, your home in an urban zoned area. But I do think it is really important to be able to plan and and encourage growth where we want to and not let it just be a free for all and also to, you know, make sure it's predictable. And then, you know, another really important zoning related recommendation we have in in the plan is to create incentives for developing affordable housing. So that's a really resource smart way. I think that we can we can encourage affordable housing. I wanted to give you an example, too, of one I thought was interesting that a lot of people were saying it's important and a lot of people are saying it's not important. The one that looks to me like it has the widest spread is study the impacts of vacation rentals and second homes on the housing market. You know, to me, people can't agree if that's important. That maybe tells me the study is important. Like, that's something people have strong opinions about. Isn't the City doing that right now? Yeah, they are. Yeah. And and hopefully we can build on that and look at. I think that's going to be a really important example of where the county and the city are a little distinct, like those vacation rentals that might look a little different in Seeley Lake than it does in Missoula. Well, what's so interesting about the issue is is that it runs the gamut from those who are owners of of properties for investment income to someone who lives right next to me who is retired and is able to stay in his home because he's able to rent out basically an and ADU on his property, also It in the county at the very least. At first, the first thing I think we need to do here is just find out how many of them there are and where are they? And then we could figure out if they need more or less regulation than they have. Yeah, I know it's pretty unknown. Right. And hopefully we'll be hearing more from the city. But I did kind of hear that one thing they will find out in their study is it'll have some data, like how many of these vacation rentals are just a bedroom and how many are a whole unit. And from from the sounds of it, it sounds like a lot of these vacation rentals are whole units, so they are probably places where they could be a rental or even a home, somewhat like an owner occupied home. It'll be really interesting to see what they find, and hopefully we can we can really build on it and really understand, you know, this issue countywide. One thing I'm always curious about when I hear about a homeowner and a vacation rental helping them to afford their home. I wonder, too, must that be a vacation rental or could they have a long term rental? And that would still help them afford their home? So. Well, here's a great example where certainly one size does not fit all. Here are a few years ago my wife and I were looking at constructing basically an ADU that would be a vacation rental. What would have allowed us? And unfortunately, we missed the window construction prices and material prices went through the roof, so we're no longer actively considering this. But what the short term rentals would have afforded us is the ability to have family, friends come visit at other times, which a long term standard sort of rental arrangement would not. So there's those cases where added flexibility might be something that a property owner is looking for. There's obviously fantastic benefits from a household to have to add this to your kind of household's ability to generate income. But we've become this incredibly popular tourist venue this year. This this year, we could see two million tourists come to Missoula County. We're attempting to meet the lodging needs of all those folks, even with hotels really takes a big bite out of the rental market, and it behooves us to just get super thoughtful about how we balance this income generating opportunity for people like your retired neighbor who it's really important and that we have almost almost zero percent vacancy rate, which drives around super high and really affects people who are on the bottom end. So there isn't a one size fits all. It's a nuanced, complicated thing. Yep. And I think with more data with a good study, yep, we can have a really good policy that's going to really find some good balance there, And the data will really help. Jordan, you mentioned the city and some of what they're looking at relative to vacation rentals. But just more broadly, how does our planning process that we're in the middle of right here relate to planning, housing planning in the city that the city has already done or that might they might be doing in the future because clearly, Missoula County embraces the City of Missoula. We're not two completely independent things that do not affect one another. And we also, as I'm sure the city doesn't do not want to create a bunch of shelf art plans that just sit on the shelf. So. So what is our collaboration with the city look like? The City is a super important partner for us in this, and we're really lucky that they went through there a place to call home policy developing that, and that's something we can really build on and look at. How are the county's needs, the what do we have in common and what's distinct? And we were really fortunate in putting together a steering committee of different stakeholders that Emily Harris-Shears the the the Affordable Housing Trust Fund administrator at the city was on our steering committee. So that's that's been great to have that interface. And I think we're we're going to really need to work together with them, especially about some of those, the most immediate things will be when we talk about where, where we want to, where we want infrastructure to be, where we want to encourage development to happen because a lot of that is in, you know, frankly, areas of the county that feel like maybe they are part of the city or that maybe they should be or are there or, you know, the you know that the urban part of Missoula County kind of or suburban anyway? On a personal level, how does it feel to hold this responsibility for pulling this off? Tell us about, yeah, what do you feel about your position? Well, you know, since I control everyone's housing in Missoula County, no, I, you know, I feel a lot of responsibility and I I'm so glad to be working on it because, you know, I've had. The the struggles, I've had low wages, but I've I've been really fortunate I personally have participated in some of these housing programs through the years, which has been great. I feel an awesome responsibility. I I feel like I want folks who are living here working, raising families like like me to be able to to stick around here and really make it work. So but I feel really good about this and think that, you know, kind of like the name says, we're breaking ground. We're looking at this as like kind of that foundational effort. It's a three year time horizon on this. And hopefully, you know, when we do the next plan, maybe we're maybe we're putting up the first floor or something like that. So I feel I feel really excited about what's to come with this. Awesome. Can you give folks the website again?

Yeah. So you just go to http: 15:52

//missoula.co/housing Fantastic. Thanks so much. Thanks a lot for all you working for. Come to town. Always great to be here.