We recently recorded the first two episodes of our new podcast, The Public Comment with ShelterWF. Episode one, with Nathan Dugan of Livable Flathead, covered Escaping the Housing Trap by Chuck Marohn and Daniel Herriges. Episode two, with co-founder and planning commissioner Mallory Phillips, covered The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. Two different books, two different angles, and they land on the same fact: zoning in America was a top-down project of the federal government, imposed on local communities, and the story we tell ourselves about where it came from is wrong.

How the federal government built zoning

Before World War I, economic zoning barely existed in this country. Then in 1917, the Supreme Court struck down explicit racial zoning in Buchanan v. Warley. Cities could no longer write "this district is for white residents" into law. So they stopped writing it down and reached for a workaround: zoning that never mentions race but reserves whole neighborhoods for expensive single-family homes that lower-income families, disproportionately Black families, couldn't afford. Rothstein documents that the pivot was explicit. Ernst Freund, the leading administrative law scholar of the 1920s, said openly that keeping Black residents out was a bigger driver of zoning's spread than the single-family districts it claimed to be about.

The federal government then did the work of making this system universal. Three mechanisms stand out from the two books:

Model ordinances: In the 1920s, Herbert Hoover's Commerce Department published a model zoning code and a zoning primer and pushed them nationwide. The single-family-only zoning invented in Berkeley, California, explicitly to exclude, became the template for the entire country. Overworked city staff copied what the city next door adopted. That's how a race-exclusion tool from Berkeley ends up in the municipal code of a Montana town with almost no Black residents.

Money: Washington tied transportation funding and mortgage insurance to cities adopting these codes. If your city wanted highway dollars or wanted local banks to write federally-backed loans, you adopted zoning. Meanwhile the Federal Housing Administration refused to insure mortgages in neighborhoods without racial covenants, which meant banks wouldn't lend, which meant integrated communities were financially impossible to build for most of the 20th century.

Backdoor codes: Even the "neutral" technical rules were designed to exclude. Lawrence Veiller, who helped write the original model codes, recommended in 1910 that reformers load fire regulations onto apartments specifically, because zoning would be fought in court and "no one would question fire regulations." Pile fireproofing requirements onto multifamily buildings, exempt single-family houses entirely, and you've priced apartments out of existence without ever saying who you're keeping out. We still live with that asymmetry. Montana's fire code for apartments remains dramatically stricter than the one for single-family homes, and a lot of it adds cost without adding safety.

Montana wasn't a bystander. In 1890, every county in this state had at least one Black resident. By 1930, eleven counties had been cleared entirely. Helena had a thriving Black middle class at the turn of the century, with newspapers, businesses, and a literary society, and by 1970 it was down to a few dozen residents. Miles City drove out its Black community with mob violence. The state banned interracial marriage in 1909. Butte's thirty-plus Chinese laundries were exactly the businesses Berkeley's original single-family zoning was written to exclude, and Chinese immigrants were legally barred from owning land here. The Flathead Valley isn't 95% white because of the weather.

The lie we tell about zoning

Here's the story you'll hear at any planning meeting: zoning emerged because communities wanted orderly growth. Keep the coal plant away from the school. Sensible people, sensible rules, bottom-up.

That story is doubly false.

First, it didn't come from the grassroots. As laid out above, it came from federal agencies, model ordinances, and funding conditions written by a small number of people in power, then copied across the map. Communities didn't demand zoning. They received it, along with the incentives to keep it.

Second, zoning isn't necessary for good city planning, and mostly works against it. Almost no other country on earth uses American-style single-use zoning, and their cities work fine. Meanwhile the places people love most in Whitefish, downtown and the Avenues, were built before the zoning code existed and would be illegal to build under it today. A system that outlaws its own community's favorite neighborhoods is not producing good planning. It's producing rigidity: when demand shifted after 2020 and people flooded into the Flathead, our codes couldn't flex, supply couldn't respond, and prices doubled. Rigid systems are brittle systems, and they fail in exactly the way ours did.

Why this matters for the Flathead

The racial intent behind zoning got sanded off decades ago, but the machine kept running. Point the same exclusionary tools at class instead of race and you get modern Whitefish: minimum lot sizes, single-family-only districts, and a growth policy that still invokes "neighborhood character," a phrase with a documented segregationist pedigree. The people who make this town run get priced out to Kalispell and Evergreen while we debate whether a fourplex fits the character of a neighborhood built by railroad workers in modest homes.

ShelterWF believes the growing pains of the Flathead Valley are real, and that zoning amplifies every one of them. Growth pressure isn't something we can switch off. We can't control demand. We can control supply, and right now our land-use rules, born in Washington and Berkeley a century ago, are the biggest thing standing in the way. That's why we fight for common-sense reform: legalize missing-middle housing, grow inward instead of sprawling outward, and let our neighborhoods change gradually the way every good neighborhood in this town's history did.

If it was built by policy, it can be unbuilt by policy. Both episodes are out now wherever you listen. Come to the next planning commission meeting, sign up for our newsletter, and help us fix this.

Homes should be abundant, not exclusive.