Work begins on housing plan

There are roughly 40 different tools and endless ways to combine those tools to create affordable workforce housing for Whitefish.

The Whitefish Affordable Housing Task Force gave an introduction to those potential tools and its plan to find solutions to Whitefish’s affordable housing crisis during a meeting last week at City Hall. About 75 people attended, giving their first input to a six month process that will narrow down the options and create the Whitefish Strategic Housing Plan.

Melanie Rees, with Rees Consulting, a Crested Butte, Colorado-based firm, described the “recipe” for creating a successful housing plan for the city.

“We want to customize it to your community — that’s why we started with talking to you,” she told the audience. “It needs to have multiple strategies and there’s no one way to solve the workforce housing problems. It needs to be incremental and you need to build upon your success. And it needs to be fair — it can’t be overly burdensome to one sector of your economy.”

She also noted that the plan needs to be well informed, have local funding, have expertise involved, be adaptable over time, have community support and political support.

The potential tools for creating affordable housing include flexible development standards, developing zoning codes designed for affordable housing including solutions like tiny houses, developing public land for affordable housing, creating incentives for short term rentals to convert to long term rentals, waiving fees as incentives for developers building affordable housing, requiring new commercial buildings to offer employee housing, and partnering with nonprofits.

Wendy Sullivan, with WSW Consulting, which is working with Rees on the plan, said the plan needs to fit the community’s needs.

“Any program can be tailored to what you need,” she said. “The first step is to get ideas for what resonates with the community and then pair that down to what we think can work.”

A few ideas rose to the top as favorable to those attending the open house including using public land for housing and creating zoning designed for affordable housing. One idea — increasing or reallocating the city’s resort tax to assist with affordable housing — showed strong support. However, state law caps the resort tax at Whitefish’s current 3 percent.

The Whitefish Workforce Housing Task Force is a group made up of city and Whitefish Chamber of Commerce representatives, community members and business owners.

The need for more workforce housing has been on the radar for years, but has became more of a priority for the city and chamber, which began looking for solutions starting with a needs assessment and now is following up with the strategic plan for how to address the housing shortage.

The needs assessment completed last year showed Whitefish needs to add almost 1,000 housing units by 2020 to make up for a current shortage of available workforce housing and plan for the future.

The housing study found that a growing economy, rising home prices, scarce rental availability and few homes listed for sale at lower price points, and a shortage of housing at prices that are affordable for the workforce are all part of the issues facing Whitefish.

Katie Williams, City Councilor and member of the task force, said the housing plan will outline tangible strategies to tackle the issue and provide housing for the professional who wants to live here and for the next generation to live in Whitefish.

“We want to make sure we are using the right tools,” she said. “We want to have a success story.”

Sullivan outlined the issues facing Whitefish including a trend that seems to be at the center — houses are being purchased as second homes and being used as vacation homes, rather than being occupied by locals.

The Whitefish housing market is challenging for a town where 50 percent of the jobs are low-wage, tourism-related with an annual income of $27,000. About 56 percent of workers commute in to Whitefish currently, she noted, while 34 percent of whom would prefer to live in Whitefish.

“Locals can’t compete with the incomes of the second home owners,” she said. “Most locals need housing that’s priced around $300,000 or less. The new units produced in the last few years have come on at a median price of $450,000. That’s a big gap.”

Sale prices for homes have increased about 7 percent annual and rental costs have increased by 10 percent annually, but wages have only gone up by 2.5 percent, she noted.

Rees said it’s not too late for Whitefish, which still has about 71 percent of its homes occupied by locals. She pointed to Vail, Colorado, which has 70 percent of residences are second homes, while just 30 percent are occupied by locals.

“You still have a strong community in Whitefish,” she said. “It’s not like Vail — that’s not a community.”

The task force has an extensive schedule that involves smaller group meetings, work sessions and open houses in July and September before a final plan is expected to be presented to Whitefish City Council in November. For more information, contact the chamber at 862-3501 or visit www.whitefishhousing.com.