Rent caps needed to control housing greed

The housing shortage in the Flathead Valley has reached a crisis level. New housing projects are being built all over the valley, but they cannot keep up with all of the people moving here from other states. Most of these houses and apartments are rented out before they are even done being built.

This housing shortage has driven up property and rental prices to an unsustainable level and is a key factor to a lot of the homelessness we are seeing today.

In the Daily Inter Lake a few weeks ago, I read an article about newly constructed apartments that were for rent. A one-bedroom apartment was $1,500 and a two-bedroom was $2,000.

This is absolutely unacceptable, based on the state's minimum wage of $9.95 per hour. The standard norm is that rent cost is roughly 1/3 of your income.

If an apartment costs $1,500 you have to make $4,500 per month, you would have to earn $1,125 per week. This is equal to $28.13 per hour. There are not a lot of jobs in Montana that pay this kind of wage, which is why there are so many jobs open today.

I think that a lot of businesses will be forced to close permanently because they will simply not be able to afford to pay nearly three times the minimum wage for a minimum-wage job.

The wages in this valley do not even come close to matching the rent cost. This is not fair-market housing. It is greed, pure and simple. Instead of these greedy, vulturing hyenas being fined for price gouging. They continue to be rewarded with more and more money.

Recently, the Montana Legislature tabled a bill to raise the minimum wage to $11.39 an hour. Why? In reality, the minimum wage should be at least $18 an hour, but this will never happen.

One thing that the Legislature could do is to impose rent caps. Rent caps have been done in other states, and for the same reason it needs to be done here to control the greed.

The Kalispell City Council and the Flathead County commissioners have both voiced their negative opinions concerning the homeless. Yet, these two groups are partially responsible for some of the homelessness in our community. They are more than willing to approve almost every VRBO application that comes in front of them.

Instead of approving these applications, they should establish caps on VRBOs. Only allow X number of VRBOs for X thousand citizens living here. In my opinion, we are already past that limit and should not allow any more of the VRBOs to be approved. Especially to all the out-of-state companies and corporations that keep buying every home they can just to turn them into VRBOs.

This is just another contributing factor to the homelessness in the valley. Maybe a law needs to be passed that only allows Montana citizens to be able to own a VRBO in our state. Unless the city councils, the county commissioners and the state senators allow these caps to be enacted, we will be facing a far worse homeless situation than we have today.

The senior citizens and those on disability must live on a limited fixed income. The meager Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) was not even half of what the inflation rate was. These citizens cannot afford any more rent increases. I fear that many of our elderly and disabled citizens will be made homeless unless our elected officials step up and do something to help prevent this from happening.

Good luck getting the Montana Senate to approve rent caps. Many of them own rental properties and will never vote to cut their income unless all senators that own rental properties were forced to abstain from voting due to conflict of interest. This will never pass.

The city council and county commissioners need to approve a whole lot more low-income affordable housing. We see help wanted signs everywhere. Grocery stores, restaurants and almost every fast food establishment and gas stations all have signs that they are hiring. None of them seem to have enough employees to have a full crew.

If there are any Flathead Valley residents that agree with this opinion, I strongly urge you to contact the powers that be at city council, the county commissioners and the state senators, and demand that something be done to bring housing costs down to a tolerable level or get out of office, because so far, they have done nothing to help us.

James Glazier lives in Kalispell.