Side effects of cutting out architectural reviews

At last week’s Whitefish City Council meeting, we passed an ordinance to remove our Architectural Review Committee (ARC). This was required by a state statute which effectively banned architectural reviews statewide. It’s a senseless outcome, and a great example of continued poor legislation coming out of Helena with respect to housing policy.

Ostensibly, this bill was meant to reduce the price of housing, but that does not reflect an understanding of how this process actually works. Most residential building projects do not go through architectural review. 

The ones that do are larger projects — apartment buildings, principally. Apartment buildings by their very nature already have architects, engineers and other high-quality designers involved who are accustomed to design reviews and making decent looking buildings. We have huge numbers of apartments under construction already (with design review) and it clearly has not impeded that. 

I have been through ARC multiple times in my day job and found it to be a helpful, free resource to improve design. I cannot imagine any material reduction in housing costs whatsoever will be realized by this.

And there is one large side effect, which is that it also bans design reviews for commercial projects. Commercial buildings are much more important when it comes to architectural standards and make up a significant amount of the board’s workload. 

There was some great testimony from one of the board members about recent applications and how they have been working with corporate, out-of-state companies who are building here to adjust their corporate style to match Whitefish.

I cannot fathom it’s the desire of the citizens of Montana for big brother Helena to tell small towns they have to allow everything to look like an Applebee’s (no offense, Applebee’s). 

Zoning policy is complicated, and that’s why it’s always been a local issue. When Helena decides to make a one-size-fits-all zoning intervention, it often doesn’t work as intended and has side effects that can’t be anticipated because every town’s zoning policies are unique. This is an incredibly disappointing outcome, and please feel free to let your legislators know.

Ben Davis is a Whitefish city councilor.