Daily Inter Lake

Community Action Partnership of Northwest Montana, a local non-profit that aims to help lift people out of poverty, is making plans to host a series of four roundtable discussions about the feasibility of bringing a tiny home community to Northwest Montana.

The roundtable discussions will take place between July and October, and the organization will release a report that summarizes their findings for the public later in October.

Tiny homes are the product of an architectural and social movement that has encouraged the building of homes that fit the things people need inside their home as compactly as possible without excess space or frivolities.

The homes are designed to encourage a lifestyle that leads to less resource consumption or possessions, to be easier on both the environment and change people’s consumer habits. Tiny homes are generally less than 500 square feet.

Patrick Malone, the Community Action Partnership of Northwest Montana deputy director, said the roundtable discussions are being scheduled in the wake of two unsuccessful bids to build tiny home communities that were voted down by both the Kalispell City Council and Flathead County Commission last year.

“We’ve had some local development proposals we’ve taken to the city of Kalispell and county in the past, but both were turned down,” Malone said.

He said the project his organization hoped to propose in the future wasn’t much different than a mobile home or trailer park, projects that have existed in the valley without much issue for some time. He said they hoped to figure out how to frame the proposal so it was seen as only slightly different than some existing developments rather than a radical new idea.

“In many ways we are already doing, or we have development projects in our communities that are almost identical to what we are proposing but they are identified as RV parks or mobile home parks and they are not near employment services,” Malone said.

He said the only difference between what they were looking for and some of the more recently approved RV parks was they were hoping for closer proximity to city core areas and services.

As home prices are being driven up, the commute cost of lower income people is also driven up as they are increasingly picking homes further from town. That necessitates a more reliable vehicle, another financial burden that can make life hard in the valley for folks on the lower end of the income spectrum.

He said there is a wealth of lots available in the county that could be used for such a community, but many of them are also far away from the city centers. His organization would like to find a way to have the community in a place where it is easier to access spots where its residents would work, eat, shop, go to school and recreate.

“We’ve probably looked at a dozen different properties over the last year,” Malone said. “Time and time again we look at them and say well that would be great but we’d have to start a transportation program or something. The zoning might work, but it just is not practical.”

He said his organization hoped to get all the possible stakeholders in the same room, where they could candidly discuss the existing hurtles and feasibility of bringing a new project to the valley.

The organization plans to hold the discussions behind closed doors without media present so that those in attendance can speak candidly. He said that some elected officials may face the wrath of neighborhood associations and other similar groups if they appeared to be support the idea, and he wanted them to be able to talk without worrying about that.

“They are by invitation only, we want to create an environment where people can talk freely,” Malone said.

Malone said they had no preconceived notions about what would come out of the roundtable discussions, and were just as prepared to mount a new, more well-informed bid to bring a tiny home community to the valley as they were to abandon hope if it appeared it wouldn’t be able to garner enough support to get approval for such a plan.

Their primary objective with bringing the community to the valley would be to increase the affordable housing options available to the community.

Malone said they could construct a tiny home for a person in need of housing for somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 to $15,000, which is well under ten percent of the rapidly rising average home prices in the Flathead Valley. That price would be a very basic home, compared to some other tiny homes on the market that have lots of bells and whistles.

“I know what its like for my kids, and they work hard and actually make a pretty good living but still finding anything that is decent and affordable is a huge challenge,” Malone said. “There is really a big issue around this increasing affordability gap.”