Whitefish leaders huddle to address housing crisis

The lack of affordable rental housing has reached a crisis level in Whitefish as the conversion of long-term rentals to short-term vacation rentals continues at a brisk pace.

Businesses across town have limited hours of operation due to staffing shortages. Tourism is at an all-time high this summer, yet businesses can't fully reap the benefits because workers can't find affordable places to live nearby.

Those were a few of the issues discussed at a July 26 roundtable meeting at the Montana Tap House. The meeting was organized by Ed Docter, who owns the tap house and the Tamarack Ski Shop; Casey Malmquist, a local builder and developer; and Toby Scott, a member of the Whitefish Planning Board, in hopes of forming a group focused on developing workforce housing.

"Basically, our objective is to create something out of this," Docter said, speaking to a crowd of around 60 people gathered at the meeting. "We've got a lot of minds here; we've got a lot of people that want to help, without a doubt."

A lack of staffing has become a constant headache for many businesses in Whitefish and the Flathead Valley this year, and Docter said he can't just stand by and watch the town fall apart. Because of the struggles facing his business, as well as many other shops, bars and restaurants in town, he hosted the meeting to gather to discuss their options for providing affordable housing for the local workforce.

Docter said he anticipates losing an employee every few days in August as they no longer can afford to live in Whitefish. He said while looking online recently, he could find only one rental listed in Whitefish and it was a low-income apartment, but his employees wouldn't be eligible for it.

"My dishwasher makes too much money to qualify for that, but nowhere near enough money to ever buy the smallest condominium in this town — no way, not at all," he said.

MALMQUIST, WHO has called Whitefish home for 30 years, said he's been discussing the housing issue with Docter and is volunteering to consult on the project, offering his previous experience with workforce housing. He helped with a subsidized housing project in the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota around the time of the economic downturn in 2008. The oil fields were booming at the time, but the area had almost zero housing available for the influx of workers moving there.

The company he was involved with built around 1,000 residences, and not a "man camp" that was typical of oil field workforce housing. The company built high-quality apartments, townhouses and single-family homes, Malmquist said.

"We kind of looked at that project like colonizing the moon. We had to create a base and sort of build up from there," he said. "They were the most successful company in the Bakken because they focused on people and provided a high-quality level of housing."

Malmquist hopes to take what he learned from that project and apply it to the current situation in Whitefish. He said the city's housing crisis has been mounting for years.

Malmquist, like Docter, hopes to see the city of Whitefish, business owners and concerned citizens come together to create solutions for workforce housing and gathering people in a meeting last week was a start.

"It's going to take the community to do this," Malmquist said. "This community has had so many successful public-private partnerships — the performing arts centers, the library, the Wave, the ice rink. We've done this before, and we can do it again.

"We've been talking about this for years," said of the housing crisis. "It's here. It's critical. It's at a crisis level right now."

Scott said he is involved as a concerned citizen. He walks up Central Avenue, sees several businesses closed on any given weekday and wants to help change that.

ORGANIZERS COLLECTED contact information from those who attended the meeting and said they hope people with specific skills will come forward to assist in the effort, such as attorneys, developers, real estate agents, bankers and individual builders.

Several people shared stories and asked questions at the meeting, including business owners, city officials and representatives of the Whitefish Housing Authority. An affordable housing developer from Missoula attended the meeting as well and offered ideas to get housing projects moving forward quickly.

City Manager Dana Smith said the city is interested in potential ways to partner with businesses to improve the workforce housing situation.

"The city can't do this alone. I think we all understand that," Smith said. "But we have the housing authority working with businesses, and I think we can solve this problem together; there's a lot that needs to be done. We do have strategies we're working on, but nothing that will be the silver bullet to solving this problem. So the more partnerships that we can create and maintain the better."

The purpose of the meeting was not to solve Whitefish's housing crisis in one day, but Docter said he hoped it would be a starting point.

"I don't know how I'm going to do it. I don't know how I'm going to go forward," he said of his own struggling business. "But the only way I can go forward, like a lot of you, is knowing help is on the way. That's what we need; help has to be on the way."