What is Pro-Housing?
Pro-Housing is a policy movement that is dedicated to more affordable and livable cities.
Being Pro-Housing doesn't mean supporting every development proposal unconditionally. It means starting from the position that housing is a fundamental need, that building homes is a good thing, and that the burden of proof should fall on those who want to stop housing, not on those who want to build it. Every time a community blocks new homes, it doesn't reduce demand for housing; it simply forces that demand somewhere else, usually onto the people least able to absorb it.
ShelterWF is proudly pro-housing because the evidence overwhelmingly supports this approach. We are not ideologues but empericists. The economics of housing tell a remarkably clear story.
We are going to walk through this story in detail, because we believe that anyone who looks at the evidence honestly will reach the same conclusions we have.
Principle 1: Housing Follows the Same Rules as Everything Else
We start with the most basic idea in economics: supply and demand.
When there is more demand for something than there is supply of it, its price goes up. When supply catches up to demand, prices stabilize. When supply exceeds demand, prices fall. This is how markets work for cars, for groceries, for lumber, and for housing.
This might seem obvious, but it's worth stating plainly because an enormous amount of confusion in housing debates comes from treating housing as if it were somehow exempt from these forces. People will say things like:
🗣️"you can't build your way to affordability"
🗣️"new construction only serves the rich"
🗣️"the market will never produce housing that regular people can afford"
But housing is subject to the same supply-and-demand dynamics as every other good. These statements look pretty ridiculous if they were said about anything else:
🗣️"we need to stop making new cars-- we need existing cars to be more affordable"
🗣️"new cars only get bought by the rich"
🗣️"the market will never produce cars that regular people can afford"
The difference with housing is that we have put tremendous barriers on increasing the supply of housing. No mater what, housing supply is hard to increase quickly. It takes years to plan, permit, and build homes. When demand outpaces supply, prices can rise sharply before the market has time to respond.
This is exactly what happened in Whitefish and across the Flathead Valley. The pandemic brought a sudden surge in demand from remote workers and out-of-state buyers. Housing supply, constrained by years of restrictive zoning and slow permitting, couldn't respond. The result was a near-doubling of home prices in three years.
The question, then, isn't whether supply and demand matter for housing. Of course it does. The question is what's preventing supply from keeping up with demand. And that leads us to the most important finding in modern housing economics!
Principle 2: Housing Undersupply Is the Primary Driver of the Affordability Crisis
There are many factors that people point to when explaining why housing is expensive: greedy developers, short-term rentals, corporate investors, foreign buyers, construction costs, interest rates, the desirability of living somewhere beautiful. All of these factors exist. Some of them make the problem worse at the margins. But the weight of economic research points to one factor as the primary driver: we simply do not build enough homes.
Freddie Mac has estimated that the United States is short approximately 3.7 million housing units. This deficit has been growing for over a decade, as housing construction since the 2008 financial crisis has consistently fallen below the rate needed to keep up with population growth and household formation. The shortage is not concentrated in one region—it spans the country, from coastal cities to mountain towns to the rural Midwest.
In Whitefish specifically, the evidence is dramatic. The city has been building roughly 100 to 150 new units per year. ShelterWF's independent analysis found that actual demand is between 323 and 404 units per year—meaning Whitefish is building at one-third to one-half the rate needed to meet demand. Every year that passes with this gap widens the shortage and drives prices further beyond what working people can afford.
Principle 3: There Isn't Enough Housing in Whitefish.
A common pushback to the supply argument goes like this:
🗣️"Whitefish is expensive because rich people want to live here. No amount of building will change that."
This argument does recognize that demand for housing in Whitefish is high. Whitefish is a desirable place to live: we have world-class skiing, proximity to Glacier National Park, and a charming downtown! But high demand doesn't have to mean high prices.
Consider the difference between two hypothetical towns:
- Town A has strong demand, and allows builders to respond by constructing new homes at the pace the market demands. Prices rise modestly and stabilize.
- Town B has equally strong demand, but blocks most new construction through zoning restrictions, lengthy permitting processes, and political opposition. In Town B, the same demand chases a fixed (or slowly growing) supply, so prices skyrocket.
Whitefish is Town B. The Flathead Valley's population has been growing at roughly 2% per year since 2000, accelerating to 3.9% annually after 2019. This growth was going to happen regardless of local policy. The question was always whether Whitefish would accommodate it by building homes, or would instead push the growing population into longer commutes, higher prices, and displacement.
We chose the second path. Not always as a conscious decision, but through the accumulated weight of thousands of small decisions. Each individual zoning restriction, each denied development, each minimum lot size made it progressively harder and more expensive to build.
We can't control how many people want to live in Whitefish. What we can control is how many homes are available for them to live in. That is the lever available to us, and we are choosing not to pull it.
Principle 4: Local Land-Use Regulation in Whitefish stops Affordable Housing
OK, so if there is demand for more housing in Whitefish and it's profitable for the market to build, why aren't we building enough?
It's because we make the most affordable and environmentally friendly types of houses the hardest to build.
Building codes that ensure structural safety, fire codes that protect residents, environmental regulations that safeguard water quality serve legitimate public purposes. The problem is that layered on top of these sensible protections is an elaborate web of land-use regulations whose primary effect is to limit the number of homes that can exist.
Here's what the regulatory landscape looks like in Whitefish:
Zoning restrictions on housing type. Eighty-seven percent of Whitefish's zoned land is designated for residential use. Of that, 77% allows only single-family detached homes and duplexes. On the vast majority of residential land in Whitefish, it is literally illegal to build a triplex, a fourplex, a townhome, or an apartment building. The housing types that are most affordable to build and most accessible to working families are banned in most of the city.
Minimum lot sizes. Whitefish's zoning code requires minimum lot sizes that force buyers to purchase more land than they need. This acts as a mandatory consumption law—you cannot buy a small, affordable lot and build a modest home on it. You must buy a large lot, which means paying for expensive Whitefish land whether you want a big yard or not. The result is a de facto price floor on housing that excludes the very "starter homes" the market would otherwise produce.
Parking minimums. Until recently, the city required developers to build multiple parking spaces per housing unit, regardless of actual demand. A single surface parking space can cost $5,000 to 10,000 to construct, and uses up space that would otherwise be more housing. For small, affordable units (the type most needed) parking requirements can add more to the project cost than the apartments themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PIfIO-GuzRA
Height restrictions. By limiting building heights to two or three stories across most of the city, Whitefish's code caps the number of homes that can fit on any given parcel. A four-story building on the same footprint as a two-story building can house twice as many families while barely changing the street-level experience. Height restrictions directly reduce housing capacity.
Discretionary review processes. Even when a project meets every requirement in the zoning code, it can still be subjected to discretionary review. This required public hearings before planning commission and city council where opponents can raise objections and elected officials can deny the project for political reasons. This "death by process" adds years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to project timelines and creates uncertainty that deters developers from proposing projects in the first place. Hundreds of potential housing units have been denied through the Planned Unit Development (PUD) process in Whitefish in just the past five years.
Aesthetic and design requirements. Until 2026, Whitefish's architectural review committee enforced requirements on materials, architectural style, massing, and design. These added cost without adding housing. And remember: These restrictions were only applied to multifamily developments, with single-family homes exempt. That price tag that gets passed directly to the buyer or renter.
Each of these regulations, taken individually, might seem like a minor inconvenience. Taken together, they constitute what economists call a "regulatory tax" on housing—a series of government-imposed costs that are just as real as material costs or labor costs, and that fall hardest on the most affordable types of housing. Research by Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko found that in heavily regulated markets, the regulatory tax can account for the majority of the gap between the cost of physically constructing a home and the price at which it sells.
Principle 5: More Subsidy Won't Fix a Supply Shortage.
When people recognize that housing is unaffordable, a natural impulse is to reach for subsidies: government funding to build affordable units, rental assistance to help families pay the rent, down-payment programs to help first-time buyers, philanthropists to fill the gap. ShelterWF supports all of these tools. They are necessary, and we actively advocate for increasing funding for subsidized housing.
Subsidies alone cannot solve a housing crisis that is fundamentally caused by insufficient supply.
The City of Whitefish's Housing Needs Assessment estimates that to meet housing demand, 86% of new rental units would need to be priced below market rate through subsidy. Given that only 12.2% of rental units built over the past decade were actually subsidized, this target isn't just ambitious—it's a mathematical impossibility under current funding constraints. There is no realistic scenario in which government subsidies close a gap of that magnitude.
ShelterWF's revised analysis, using more accurate demand projections, tells a very different story. When you account for the full scale of demand—including commuter demand and realistic population growth—and allow the market to produce enough total housing units, the share that requires subsidy drops to roughly 20–25%. That's still a significant lift, but it's within the range of what programs like the Legacy Homes Program and Low-Income Housing Tax Credits can plausibly achieve.
The lesson is profound: the single most effective thing a city can do to reduce the need for housing subsidies is to allow enough market-rate housing to be built. Every market-rate unit that goes unbuilt pushes one more household into the "needs subsidy" category—not because their income changed, but because the price of available housing was inflated by artificial scarcity.
Think of it this way: if a city restricted the supply of grocery stores so severely that food became unaffordable for most residents, the answer wouldn't be to subsidize everyone's groceries indefinitely. It would be to grow more food. The subsidies might still be needed for the lowest-income households, but they'd be a targeted program rather than an impossible attempt to patch a system-wide failure.
Principle 6: New Market-Rate Housing Benefits Everyone—Including Low-Income Households
One of the most persistent objections to building market-rate housing is the claim that it "only helps the rich." The argument goes: new construction is expensive, so only wealthy people will live in it, while everyone else sees no benefit.
This objection, though intuitively appealing, has been thoroughly tested by researchers—and the evidence contradicts it.
The mechanism is called filtering, and it works through what economists call "chains of moves" (sometimes called "vacancy chains" or "moving chains").
When a new apartment building opens, its residents don't appear from thin air. They move from somewhere—usually from an older, slightly less expensive unit elsewhere in the region. That unit is now vacant and available for someone else, who in turn vacates their old unit, and so on down the chain. Each link in the chain makes a unit available at a lower price point than the one before.
A landmark 2019 study by Evan Mast at the W.E. Upjohn Institute used address-history data to trace 52,000 residents of new multifamily buildings in large cities, tracking where they came from, who moved into their old units, and so on for six rounds. He found that building 100 new market-rate units ultimately frees up 60 to 70 units in below-median-income neighborhoods, with almost the entire effect occurring within five years.
A separate 2019 study by Asquith, Mast, and Reed examined what happens when new market-rate buildings are constructed in low-income neighborhoods specifically. Contrary to the fear that new construction accelerates gentrification, they found that new buildings decrease nearby rents by 5 to 7%, driven by a supply effect that overwhelms any "amenity" effect of neighborhood upgrading.
A 2021 literature review by Phillips et al. at the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies examined every major study on the relationship between market-rate development and neighborhood rents and found consistent evidence across methodologies and geographies: new construction reduces or slows rent increases.
And a 2021 study from Helsinki using comprehensive population-wide register data—a level of data quality rarely available in the U.S.—confirmed that the supply of new market-rate units triggers moving chains that quickly reach middle- and low-income neighborhoods, loosening the housing market for people across the income spectrum.
The upshot is simple: when you block market-rate construction, you don't protect low-income residents. You trap them in a market where an artificially limited supply of homes is being competed for by everyone, including higher-income households who would have moved into new construction if it existed. The best thing you can do for low-income renters—short of building subsidized housing directly—is to let the market produce enough total housing that competition eases across the board.
Principle 7: The Asymmetry of Error—Why We Must Err on the Side of Building More
An important principle in housing policy is what we call the the asymmetry of error: the consequences of building too little housing are catastrophic, while the consequences of building too much are negligible.
If a city underestimates its housing needs and zones for too few homes, the results are severe and compounding: prices escalate, workers are displaced, businesses can't find employees, traffic worsens as commutes lengthen, inequality deepens, and the community slowly hollows out. These are precisely the conditions Whitefish faces today. And once a housing shortage becomes severe, it is extraordinarily difficult and expensive to reverse—you can't undo a decade of underbuilding with a single project.
If a city overestimates its housing needs and zones for more homes than are eventually needed, the consequences are almost nonexistent. Development that isn't needed simply doesn't occur. Nobody is forced to build housing if the market doesn't support it. Zoning capacity is like a speed limit—it sets the upper bound of what's possible, not a mandate for what must happen. If you set the limit higher than needed, drivers simply go at whatever speed they were going to go anyway.
This asymmetry means that the rational approach to housing planning is to err significantly on the side of more capacity, not less. Yet the consistent pattern in Whitefish—and in most American cities—is the opposite. Housing need is underestimated, supply is restricted, and the costs of the resulting shortage fall on the people least able to bear them. ShelterWF's analysis found that the city's official Housing Needs Assessment captures only 23% to 46% of actual demand. We are not erring on the side of caution. We are erring on the side of crisis.
Principle 8: Cities Must Grow Inward, Not Outward
When we refuse to build housing within existing city limits, growth doesn't stop. It pushes outward—into the forests, farmland, and open spaces that define the Flathead Valley's identity.
This is the great irony of NIMBYism: the impulse to "protect" a community by blocking housing actually destroys the landscape that makes the community worth protecting. Low-density sprawl consumes more land per person, requires expensive extensions of water, sewer, and road infrastructure, generates more vehicle miles traveled and more carbon emissions, and fragments the wildlife habitats that make Northwest Montana ecologically extraordinary.
ShelterWF believes that at least 75% of new housing development in Whitefish should take place within one mile of downtown. This position is supported not just by our own analysis, but by the city's own planning consultants, Crandall Arambula, who made the same recommendation.
The logic is straightforward. The infrastructure already exists in this radius—the roads, the water lines, the sewer connections, the schools, the parks. Building where infrastructure already exists is vastly more cost-effective than extending it miles out of town. Every dollar spent extending a sewer line to a new subdivision on the edge of town is a dollar not spent maintaining the roads, parks, and services that existing residents depend on.
Residents living within walking or biking distance of downtown generate less traffic, use less energy, and are more likely to patronize local businesses. Compact development supports the transit, bike infrastructure, and walkable neighborhoods that Whitefish residents said they valued most in the growth policy visioning sessions.
And critically, compact development is the only strategy that can simultaneously address housing affordability and environmental conservation. Every home built within city limits is a home that doesn't require paving over a greenfield. Building "up and in" rather than "out" is how we welcome new neighbors while fiercely protecting the wilderness that surrounds us.
Our polling confirms that the public understands this: nearly seven in ten Flathead County voters (69%) said they want growth focused within existing city footprints rather than sprawling outward. Only 16% preferred continued outward expansion.
Principle 9: Every Neighborhood Must Contribute
One of ShelterWF's bedrock principles is this: no neighborhood should experience rapid, overwhelming change, but no neighborhood should experience no change at all.
This is both a moral principle and a practical one.
The moral case is straightforward. When certain high-income neighborhoods successfully lobby to exempt themselves from density or multifamily housing, the housing pressure doesn't vanish. It gets displaced onto lower-income neighborhoods—the parts of town with less political power, less organized opposition, and less access to the legal and financial resources needed to fight development they don't want. This is how exclusionary zoning creates and reinforces economic segregation. The people who benefit from blocking housing in their neighborhood are not reducing the total amount of development. They are dumping it on someone else's neighborhood.
The practical case is equally compelling. The current land use plan for Whitefish concentrates the vast majority of new housing growth onto just three sites while leaving most of the city essentially unchanged—or even downzoned—for the next 20 years. This is a fragile strategy. If any one of those sites doesn't develop as planned—because of wetlands, because of financing, because of market conditions, because of political opposition—the city's entire housing strategy collapses. The fallback is annexation and sprawl, which contradicts everything else in the growth policy.
By contrast, a strategy that distributes modest growth across all neighborhoods is inherently resilient. If one block develops slowly, the slack is picked up elsewhere. No single neighborhood bears a disproportionate burden, and no single development decision carries existential stakes. A duplex here, a triplex there, a small apartment building near a bus stop—these incremental additions, spread across the city, can add up to hundreds of new homes without drastically altering any single block.
ShelterWF advocates for a land use framework where every neighborhood in Whitefish contributes equitably to housing growth. This doesn't mean turning single-family neighborhoods into Manhattan. It means gentle density that is, by design, almost invisible—the kinds of homes that were commonplace in Whitefish before modern zoning codes banned them.
Principle 10: "Neighborhood Character" Is Defined by People, Not Buildings
The phrase "neighborhood character" appears frequently in Whitefish planning discussions, almost always as a reason to oppose new housing. But what does it actually mean?
For some, it refers to architectural style—rooflines, setbacks, materials. For others, it refers to traffic patterns, noise levels, or the "feel" of a street. These are legitimate aesthetic preferences, and thoughtful design can accommodate many of them. Apartments can be designed to match surrounding rooflines. Height transitions can buffer between taller and shorter buildings. Parking can be placed at the rear. Landscaping can provide screening. The design challenge is real but solvable—and it is routinely solved in cities around the world that manage to combine beauty with density.
But too often, "neighborhood character" is used as a proxy for something else entirely: a desire to prevent the arrival of neighbors who are different—younger, less wealthy, or renters rather than homeowners. The term provides a socially acceptable vocabulary for exclusion, allowing opponents to frame what is fundamentally an economic objection as an aesthetic one. As the growth policy's own housing element notes, "the term 'community character' is sometimes used as a rationale to oppose new housing projects, especially when proposed developments are perceived to disrupt the established aesthetic, scale, or traffic patterns of a neighborhood."
Our polling suggests the broader electorate sees through this framing. When asked to choose between creating housing options that regular people can afford versus limiting new housing to protect existing neighborhood character, 64% of Flathead County voters chose affordability. In Whitefish—the highest-cost community in the valley—the preference was even stronger.
ShelterWF believes that a neighborhood's true character is defined by the people who live in it—by the teachers who walk to school, the baristas who know your order, the retirees who tend community gardens, and the kids who play in the park. When housing costs force all of those people out, what's left isn't "character." It's a stage set—beautiful buildings on quiet streets, inhabited part-time by people who could afford to be anywhere.
A neighborhood full of families, workers, and year-round residents is more vibrant, more resilient, and more genuinely "characterized" than a neighborhood of dark windows and empty driveways. If we want to protect what makes Whitefish special, we have to protect the people who make it special. And that starts with allowing them to live here.
Principle 11: Requirements on affordability
The Bottom Line
The Pro-Housing case is not complicated. It rests on a chain of reasoning that each link of evidence supports:
Housing is unaffordable because demand exceeds supply. Supply is inadequate because regulation makes it illegal or impractical to build enough homes. The solution is to reform those regulations so that housing can be built at the pace and in the forms that the market demands. When we do this, prices moderate, displacement slows, commutes shorten, sprawl decreases, and communities become more diverse and resilient.
This is not theory. This is what the research shows, what the data from cities that have reformed their zoning confirms, and what the overwhelming majority of Flathead County voters say they want.
The only thing standing in the way is the political power of those who benefit from the current system—homeowners whose property values are inflated by artificial scarcity, interest groups who profit from gatekeeping the planning process, and a small but vocal minority who have conflated their personal aesthetic preferences with the public interest.
ShelterWF exists to tip that balance. We believe the evidence. We trust the public. And we're not going to stop until Whitefish is a place where everyone who works here can afford to live here.
Do you like this page?