Business owners, residents gather to discuss ideas for solving affordable housing shortage

The lack of affordable rental housing is ever apparent in Whitefish as people are being forced out of their rentals due to the housing market skyrocketing this year.

Around town businesses are often posting signs on their front doors stating they are closed at least one day a week due to lack of staff. Tourism is at an all-time high this summer, yet businesses can't fully reap the benefits because their employees have nowhere to live that is affordable and for that reason are forced to leave.

Those were just a few of the issues surrounding affordable housing discussed at a roundtable meeting at the Montana Tap House last week. The meeting was organized by Ed Docter, owner of Montana Tap House and Tamarack Ski Shop, Casey Malmquist, local builder and developer, and Toby Scott, city planning board member, in hopes of forming a group focused on developing workforce housing.

“Basically our objective is to create something out of this,” he said, speaking to a crowd of around 60 people gathered at the meeting. “We’ve got a lot of minds here, we’ve got a lot of people that want to help without a doubt.”

A lack of staffing has become a constant headache for many businesses in Whitefish and the Flathead Valley this year, and Docter says he can’t just stand by watching the town fall apart. Because of the struggles his business is facing as well as many other restaurants, bars and shops around town, he hosted the meeting to gather to discuss their options around providing affordable housing for the local workforce.

Docter explained that at his business throughout August he expects to lose about one employee every few days as they can no longer afford to live here or find available housing. He said while looking online recently, he could only find one rental in Whitefish listed and it was a low-income apartment, but his employees wouldn’t be eligible for the apartment.

“My dishwasher makes too much money to qualify for that, but nowhere near enough money to ever buy the smallest condominium in this town — no way, not at all,” he explained.

Malmquist, who has called Whitefish home for 30 years, says he has been discussing the housing issue with Docter and is volunteering to consult on the project bringing in his previous experience with workforce housing. He helped with a subsidized housing project in The Bakken in North Dakota around the time of the economic downturn in 2008. The oil fields were booming at the time, but the area had almost zero housing available for the influx of workers moving there.

The company that was building the housing for their workers ended up being able to build around 1,000 residences, and not a “man-camp” like many of the other companies. They built high quality apartments, townhouses and single family homes.

“We kind of looked at that project like colonizing the moon, we had to create a base and sort of build up from there,” Malmquist said. “They were the most successful company in The Bakken because they focused on people and provided a high-quality level of housing.”

Malmquist hopes to take what he learned from building affordable housing in that project and apply it to the current issues in Whitefish. He says for years this problem has been mounting, and now it's here and it's a crisis.

He, like Docter, hopes to see the City of Whitefish, business owners and concerned citizens come together to create solutions for workforce housing and gathering people in a meeting last week was a start.

“It’s going to take the community to do this,” Malmquist said. “This community has had so many successful public-private partnerships — the performing arts centers, the library, the WAVE, the ice rink — we’ve done this before, and we can do it again.”

“We’ve been talking about this for years, it’s here; it's critical, it's at a crisis level right now,” he added.

Scott says he is involved as a concerned citizen. He walks up Central Avenue and sees several businesses closed on any given weekday — something he wants to help change.

Organizers collected contact information from those attending the meeting and say they are hoping people with specific skills will come forward to assist in the effort, such as attorneys, developers, real estate agents, bankers and individual builders.

Several people shared their stories and asked questions at the meeting that included business owners, city officials, and those involved in the Whitefish Housing Authority and other affordable housing programs. An affordable housing developer from Missoula attended the meeting as well and offered ideas to get housing projects moving forward quickly.

City Manager Dana Smith said the city is interested in potential ways to partner with businesses to improve the workforce housing situation.

“The city can’t do this alone, I think we all understand that,” she said. “But we have the housing authority working with businesses, and I think we can solve this problem together, there’s a lot that needs to be done. We do have strategies we’re working on, but nothing that will be the silver bullet to solving this problem. So the more partnerships that we can create and maintain the better.”

The purpose of the meeting, according to Docter, was not to solve all the issues with affordable housing in Whitefish in one day, but he hoped it would at least be a starting point.

Moving forward Docter says they collected contact information for those that attended and have an interest in being involved with a potential housing corporation. Many decisions, such as for-profit or nonprofit status and figuring out to what degree the city will be involved, are infront of the group, but those in attendance left the meeting with an inkling of hope for a solution to the local housing crisis.

“I don’t know how I’m going to do it, I don’t know how I’m going to go forward,” Docter said of the coming months with an employee shortage in his business. “But the only way I can go forward, like a lot of you, is knowing help is on the way. That’s what we need, help has to be on the way.”