Montana Tackles Housing Crisis with New Mapping

Montana Governor Greg Gianforte announced housing reforms, together with a developer and city council members. The state’s housing crisis has been a major issue, and identifying a logical way to present housing data is a critical first step. Geographic information system (GIS) software teams from the city of Philadelphia and the Frontier Institute in Montana recently spoke about how they’re mapping out community data to paint a clearer picture of the factors contributing to the housing crisis.

By designing interactive maps and digital dashboards using GIS company Esri’s software, Montana and Philly have been able to move the needle on the affordable housing crisis. The Frontier Institute team created the Montana Zoning Atlas, an interactive GIS map that lets public officials and residents access a visual representation of Montana’s housing data.

In Bozeman, Montana, local officials were skeptical that regulatory reform could be an effective way to address the rising cost of housing, said Kendall Cotton, CEO of the Frontier Institute. To visually explain the potential impact of regulatory changes on the housing crisis, Cotton and his team decided to create the Montana Zoning Atlas.

The atlas was created using Esri’s ArcGIS software, which allowed the team to create color-coded maps displaying data “down into the parcel level,” Cotton said. With the atlas, Cotton’s team could visually demonstrate that existing regulations were limiting the types of homes that could be built on land parcels.

Under existing regulations, single-family home builds were outpacing multi-family dwellings. The atlas also helped demonstrate “how regulations stack on top of each other,” Cotton said. “We use this to make the argument to local and state leaders that something’s got to be done to address this.”

Mapping out 13 counties in Montana was no small feat for the Frontier Institute’s team of three employees, who had no background in GIS. Fortunately, Cotton said the GIS tools were “pretty user-friendly.”

The biggest lift in developing the Atlas was the manual data collection process. In some cases, the Frontier team had to drive to city records offices to locate physical maps. Data quality presented another challenge. “There’s a lot of kind of bad data out there,” Cotton said.

A records office might say it had a particular housing zone, but it wasn’t mapped out — “it didn’t exist on the map,” he said. In addition, some records offices had physical copies of their maps with the zoning districts drawn in with a highlighter. Cotton’s team would scan them.

They had to create their own shapefiles in order to put those zones on their map, which took hundreds of hours of staff and volunteers’ time.

Ultimately, those hundreds of hours of data collection and GIS mapping proved fruitful. It was eye-opening for officials to see that Missoula’s pattern of single-family homes was beginning to resemble the sprawl of Los Angeles. Missoula repealed and replaced its land use plan and developed a new zoning code and new zoning map that “enables an 85% increase in housing capacity compared to what they did before,” Cotton said.

Now Montana is a leader in statewide housing reform policy, and it really started with this foundation of good data that we were able to build that clearly showed and demonstrated to local and state leaders that this was a problem that needed to be addressed, Cotton said.

The Frontier Institute is now applying its GIS skills to other mapping projects, including the Ed Handle Montana project, which provides parents with information on local education options for their children. The think tank has also started a project to map out the availability of multi-cloud defenses and affordable, free-market healthcare providers in Montana, Cotton said.

GIS allows the Frontier Institute to take its policy work to the next level and give people resources that are extremely impactful and useful. By providing data and information visualized in a way that’s extremely useful for people online, the institute is making a real difference in the state.

For instance, the Montana Zoning Atlas has become a valuable tool for local officials, residents, and developers, helping them to better understand the state’s housing situation and make informed decisions about development and zoning. This, in turn, has the potential to positively impact the lives of many Montanans who are struggling to find affordable housing.

In the end, the use of GIS mapping in Montana’s housing reform efforts has been a success, and other states and cities can learn from this example and apply similar approaches to their own housing challenges.

Making informed decisions is key.