Democratic candidates pitch ideas to address housing costs [Independent Record, Helena, Mont.]

May 16—With housing prices dramatically increasing across the state and making some communities unaffordable for Montanans, the three Democrats running in the western U.S. House primary all have their own ideas for how to alleviate the pain.

Communities in the newly drawn western district include some of the hardest-hit when it comes to affordable housing. In March, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported Gallatin County home prices were up about 66% since before the pandemic and rent in the region rose 11% from 2020 to 2021. The median price of a home sold in Missoula last year was $450,000, the Missoulian reported recently. That was a jump of more than 28% from the year prior.

As people struggle to find places to live, businesses and local governments in communities like Missoula say they can't hire employees to fill critical open positions because those workers can't afford to live in town.

The race is between Cora Neumann, a Bozeman nonprofit executive who has focused on public health issues; Monica Tranel, a Missoula lawyer who has experience in the energy and natural resources sectors; and Tom Winter, a former state lawmaker from Missoula who works to expand access to broadband.

Monica Tranel said that it's important to correctly diagnose the issues and that the right solutions look different from community to community.

"In this district in western Montana, the pressure points on the housing problem are different. Butte used to be a city of 100,000 people, now it's a city of 30,000. The solutions for Butte look different than they do from Missoula or Bozeman or Whitefish," Tranel said.

She pointed to the Alpenglow Apartments in Whitefish, which were completed in 2021 and are deed-restricted to be affordable options. She said while those apartments make a dent, only about a quarter of similar projects get funded in the state.

"Out of the federal government, what I can do in Congress to help the housing issue, which is so much a local problem, is really the levers of funding," Tranel said. That would mean figuring out how to meet the needs on the ground and make money easier to use and access for builders and developers with eligible projects.

Tranel said that, if elected, she also would make sure tax credits for projects go to people who are "capable of building and accountable for what they're building."

Another way Congress could have a say is to make sure corporate investors are not getting the same financial incentives that individuals and families do, Tranel said.

She also said part of the job in Congress would be raising awareness about the issue.

"You can hold hearings. You can have town hall meetings. We can show up and ask questions and get publicity, which is so necessary to shine a light on things that are happening," Tranel said. "That's what I want to do. That's what needs to happen. People need to understand what's happening for their communities."

Cora Neumann said growth in the state has been unavoidable. If elected, she said she'd push levers in D.C. to increase the affordable housing stock in Montana.

"We're in this, this is happening," Neumann said. "You can't stop it, but we need to make sure our working families, the engine of our economies, the heart of our communities, has housing that they can afford."

She said it'd be one of the first things she'd want to address if elected, calling it a "crisis."

One of the things Neumann called for was fully funding the Federal Housing Authority and being creative with options that are under that program. She also said the USDA's Rural Housing Service has programs for states like Montana to do provide subsidies to help first-time homebuyers, among other things.

While in Kalispell, Neumann said she recently met a construction worker who had been saving up to buy their first home, but found that they couldn't afford anything in the area.

"We need to make sure that the people who are driving our economy and keeping it intact have the housing that they need," Neumann said.

She also said he would look to connecting investors looking to make socially responsible investments in projects.

"The money is there, and where there's a will there's a way," Neumann said.

"I'm looking forward to exploring ways that the federal government can help unlock those investments and make sure that we have affordable housing and mixed use housing across this district, working with governments and nonprofit organizations to get it done," Neumann said.

Tom Winter said that places like Missoula are at a turning point, while towns like Bozeman are already unaffordable. He said if elected he would want to look at ways to encourage changes in zoning to open up more options.

"You can use federal housing policy (and) federal money to incentivize states and municipalities and counties to change their zoning," Winter said.

During a candidate forum in Missoula, Winter gestured out over the University District and said neighborhoods like it had gained because of single-family zoning policies while others had suffered.

"Our single-family home and homeowner policy ... was built over the course of 80 years to ensure that wealthy white people didn't have to live next to Native, Hispanic or Back people," Winter said. "It was. We are the inheritors of that, whether we like it or not. And we gain from that, whether we like it or not. And what we must do is change it."

Winter also said not enough landlords in Montana will rent to people with Section 8 housing vouchers.

"That's called source-of-income discrimination," Winter said. " ... It's a discrimination against people who are poor so they can rent to people because the assumption by the landlord is that those people will be dirtier."

Winter said he wanted to see a dramatic revision to a system he said "incentivizes people to put as much money as possible into their extremely expensive single-family homes and scare everyone else away from being a part of it. We must acknowledge it, we must change it."

He called the problem an indicator of the country's broken economy and that there needed to be a larger solution than just less-expensive rentals or lower home prices.

"We wouldn't be having this conversation if there wasn't extreme wealth inequality," Winter said.

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