Housing Needs Assessment fundamentally flawed

The release of the 2025 Whitefish Housing Needs Assessment should have been a moment of clarity for our community. A robust assessment is supposed to provide the roadmap we need to solve our affordability crisis, creating urgency to zone for and build the necessary shelter for our workforce. 

However, the document released contains a fundamental flaw that threatens to derail our Growth Policy. The report concludes that Whitefish needs to add approximately 100 new housing units per year over the next decade. 

On the surface, this might sound like a reasonable, manageable statistic. But anyone paying attention to the reality of Whitefish’s housing market knows that this number is dangerously inaccurate. 

For the past ten years, Whitefish has already been building over 100 units annually. If that number were sufficient to meet demand, we would see stable prices and affordable options for renters and first-time homebuyers. Instead, we have seen prices skyrocket and our local workforce forced out of Whitefish. 

The core issue lies in the methodology. The assessment calculates housing needs primarily based on past population growth (about 1.5% per year) along with minor adjustments based on surveys for overcrowded households. 

The massive, glaring blind spot in this calculation is that it completely ignores the biggest source of demand for housing in Whitefish. It counts the people who currently live here, but it fails to account for the people who would live here if they could afford it. 

It ignores the teachers, firefighters, service workers, and doctors who have been priced out and shunted to Kalispell, Columbia Falls, or Coram. Currently, over 60% of the people who work in Whitefish live outside the zip code. In a functioning city, these essential workers would be able to compete for market-rate apartments or starter homes. By excluding them from the data, the report effectively erases their demand from the equation. 

This creates a cycle of circular reasoning. Because we have historically made it difficult to build housing, our population growth has been artificially capped. The assessment then uses that capped growth rate to justify restricting construction in the future. We are using the symptoms of our housing shortage to justify the cause of it. 

Nobody can perfectly capture what the exact number of units per year Whitefish would need for true affordability. My best guess puts it at least double the city’s number. But the 100 units we are building right now is not the number that a functional market would produce. It is the maximum number allowed by the restrictive land use, zoning, and community review processes currently in effect. 

This is not just an academic disagreement over statistics. This number is already being weaponized in city meetings. As we speak, opponents of density and zoning reform are using this 100-unit projection to argue that we do not need to change our land use laws. They are arguing that "business as usual" is sufficient, even as our community becomes exclusive to the ultra-wealthy. 

The market in Whitefish will not serve everybody, even if we build much more housing. We will still need more money going to incredible organizations like the Whitefish Housing Authority or Housing Whitefish that provide deed-restricted and subsidized housing options. 

However, we cannot subsidize our way out of a structural deficit of this magnitude. We cannot deny or restrict market-rate housing types in the hopes that hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies will magically appear. We need a functioning market and a robust safety net. 

The housing and land use elements of the Growth Policy are being finalized in the coming months. If we allow this flawed data to dictate our future, we are choosing to lock in the affordability crisis for another two decades. We need residents to show up and demand a plan that reflects the actual needs of our workforce, not just the historical trends of a broken system. 

Show up to the meetings for the housing element of the growth policy on Dec. 8 at 2 p.m. or Dec. 17 at 6 p.m. to make your voice heard. 

Keegan Siebenaler is the executive director of Shelter WF.