Guest opinion: Luck shouldn't decide Whitefish's housing future

My family’s roots in the Flathead go back to 2011. I’m a Whitefish resident and taxpayer, and I want to build homes for the people who work here: homes a firefighter married to a barista could raise their kids in. 

I found four and a half gently sloping acres with views of Glacier National Park, Big Mountain, and the Gulch. It's a site where every home, whether a castle or a cottage, gets a view. It's ideal for development. 

What I found was a process that changed its rules mid-game. The city's own future land use map designated this land Suburban growth, while the hundred-year-old neighborhood across the street, with its fourplexes, was designated Urban. Two-thirds of the parcels within 500 feet are permitted at twelve units per acre, or more. The city now demands two and a half acres per home of me. 

Staff told me to submit the annexation agreement and pay the fee. I brought it in a week later and was told a moratorium had been imposed for Vision Whitefish 2045, and that nothing would be processed for six months. Six months of carrying costs later, the designation had been changed to Rural. 

Before the sudden shift to Rural, I had proposed two options. The first was fourteen homes mixing missing-middle and estate-style units. The second was a forty-five-unit workforce colony at ten units per acre, below the median permitted density of parcels within 500 feet. When I asked Council to restore the Suburban designation, it rejected both, over the recommendations of its own Planning Commission and staff. On four and a half acres, the only thing the city will allow is a single castle. 

The public has been clear: Whitefish needs workforce housing. This decision served a handful of neighbors instead of the community. 

A former city planner called how this played out "really bad luck." Luck should not be how land-use decisions get made in Whitefish. 

Reynolds Cameron, Whitefish