Long Range Planner Alan Tiefenback told the Whitefish City Council that while the city doesn’t build housing, it can make the process easier with policies, regulations and zoning. His comments came at an informational work session last week to review the housing and transportation elements of Vision Whitefish 2045, the city’s growth policy update. 

Currently, there are 5,700 residential units in town. Tiefenback says it’s a “pretty good spread of housing,” with a little more than half of them being single-family homes, 20% multi-family homes, 10% townhomes and 10% duplexes.  

Tiefenbach shared a table showing median house prices and median household incomes. In 1964, a house in Whitefish cost $12,000, and the median income was $5,500. In 2020, the median home price was $447,000 and just five years later, it leapt to $1,430,000.  

Tiefenbach said the town has grown at about 1%-2% per year, and that rate is now slowing down. 

Population growth prediction is a topic of extensive discussion. Tiefenbach said expecting growth of 3,000 to 5,000 people for the next 20 years is based on several growth scenarios and is the one the state has calculated. 

The Montana Department of Commerce said Whitefish needs around 7,700 housing units by 2045. 

"If you take 7,700 and you minus the 5,700 units that I know we have, we come up with 2076. So that's what the state of Montana is telling us,” Tiefenbach said. “The reason why I say that is because there's a lot of disagreement about [it].” 

He said the majority of the 150 pages of public comment for the housing element were about the population projection being too high or too low. 

The Whitefish Community Housing Committee had three work sessions on the housing element draft, helping to refine the goals and objectives, before it went to the Planning Commission. 

Writing the transportation element of the growth policy involved assessing seven or eight different transportation plans already in play in the city, including the 2022 Transportation and the Safe Streets for All plans. 

"I provided a snapshot of what we have, and then we reviewed all of the plans to see if they were consistent with each other,” Tiefenbach said. “And I pulled the general ideas of these plans into a 25-page document.” 

He said the No. 1 thing people said when asked about their vision for Whitefish in 20 years was that it would be multimodal. 

“Everybody said we want to be walkable. We don't want to have to have a car to drive here,” he said. “That was No. 1.” 

The term mixed-use means the city would allow residential and commercial in the same building or development. The idea is not to push commercial uses into existing residential neighborhoods. 

Tiefenbach said 75% of the comments he’s received have been pro mixed-use. 

“The idea of mixed-use and nodes is not radical. It's more radical to not do it,” he said. “As a land use planner with 25 years of experience, I know what mixed-use is. 

“It's making sure that when we develop new developments ... there's a coffee shop, there's a place where you can get a sandwich, so you don't have to get in your car and drive,” he added. 

Don Arambula from Crandall Arambula, the firm hired privately by Heart of Whitefish to consult on the land use element, joined the meeting virtually and shared a conflicting view of mixed-use. 

“I just want to respond a little to Alan's passioned desire for mixed-use, and I appreciate that he's got 25 years of experience planning mixed-use, but I've got 35 planning and building,” Arambula began. “I would have to tell you that the idea of creating mixed-use neighborhood centers in a city of 8,000 people, that increases the potential of retail by 250% to create competing cores with your heart of your downtown. It's a radical idea.” 

The plan places equal emphasis on all modes of transportation. 

“This transportation element is going to think about this a little bit differently than in the past in that we are not treating trails as an amenity or recreation,” he said. “We are treating most of our trails, with the exception of the Whitefish Trail, as transportation infrastructure and they're treated equally.” 

He said the Whitefish Trail is typically used for recreation, not transportation. All other bike trails are considered essential non-motorized infrastructure, and are called active transportation routes. 

"There are five components to the Whitefish transportation network, and we're seeing all equal under this road network,” he said. “Active transportation network meaning walking, biking, wheelchairs, public transit, air and rail.” 

The four general goals of the element are multimodal, connectivity, the land use/transportation relationship and increasing public transit. 

There had been a misunderstanding about the status of Columbia Avenue. Whitefish Public Works Director Craig Workman said it will not change. Columbia Avenue remains a local road from Second Street to Seventh Street and a collector road from Seventh Street to 13th Street. 

The City Council will hold a public hearing on the land use element on Feb. 17. The entire plan will be reviewed at the March 2 Council meeting.