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Nonprofits

Shelter WF Enters New Year With New Coordinator, and Policy Focus

The nonprofit launched in April 2022 in the aftermath of the Mountain Gateway development’s rejection by the Whitefish City Council

By Mike Kordenbrock
Housing in Whitefish. Beacon File Photo

Kendall Schneider has seen some version of this before. The struggle to find housing, the frustration when businesses are closed down outside their regular hours because they can’t find and keep staff, the good friends and hard-working people who pack up and leave a place they love for a place where they can afford to live.

Schneider, 25, is the new coordinator for Shelter WF, a nonprofit formed in March of 2022 with the mission of confronting housing inequality and empowering grassroots participation in the processes that determine the fate of housing development in Whitefish.

Schneider came to the Flathead Valley about nine months ago for an outdoor education job. In a progression that will sound familiar to some, she fell in love with the area and decided to stay.

As Shelter WF’s first coordinator, a position she assumed in November, her job is to help the still relatively new nonprofit by galvanizing community support, growing membership, and showing people how they can become involved in a political process that can seem unwelcoming or hard to understand.

But before she came here, Schneider was in Summit County, Colorado, a community with a large skiing industry where Breckenridge is the county seat. In Summit County there’s also a housing crisis that Schneider said seems like it’s already “pretty far gone.” In June of 2021, county commissioners declared a “workforce housing crisis,” according to the Summit Daily newspaper. The newspaper also noted in a recent story that a 2021 report focusing on Summit and five other counties, found that from 2019 to 2020 rent increased between 20% and 40%, “and that newcomers to the area with significantly higher incomes than year-round residents were the ones who usually secured what little housing units were available.”

While in Summit County, Schneider worked as a hiring manager for a ski resort, and part of her responsibilities included trying to find housing for employees. Her department was supposed to have about 200 staffers, but there were only 150 units of employee housing. Finding housing for the other 50 people who could round out the staff if officially hired was near impossible.

“So, we basically ran every single day understaffed,” Schneider said. “Even if I did hire them, and try to find them options, and try to help them out, there was just no way they could find housing outside of employee housing.”

People who came to the resort, intent on skiing everything they possibly could, would find their favorite lifts suddenly closed because of the lack of staff, which led to people becoming angry in some cases.

Schneider lives in Columbia Falls, but she has recently tried and failed to find housing in Whitefish. One of the differences she observed between trying to find housing in Summit County, and trying to find housing in Whitefish, is that there are places to rent in Whitefish, they’re just too expensive. In her experience, even if someone could afford to pay for housing in Summit, there was nowhere to live.

All these things led to a kind of bitterness, which she said stands in contrast to the hope she has for Whitefish to take advantage of its opportunities to build the community and try to alleviate the housing crunch that has affected so many of her peers.

“We’re super excited to have her, because she’s able to take on a lot of our local organizing and kind of membership activities that we were kind of struggling to do just as a volunteer board, in addition to keeping on top of all the policies and proposals that are coming through the pipeline,” said Nathan Dugan, Shelter WF’s president. He said Schneider’s position is funded through a grant, and that it will help Shelter WF focus on issues at the state level during the 2023 Legislative Session.

The same grant that was used to hire Schneider has also allowed Shelter WF to hire a lobbyist. Dugan, speaking in late December, said the nonprofit has its eyes on three different areas for policy reform. One, he said, is zoning reform, with the general goal being to make it easier to build things that aren’t just a single-family home on a single large lot. Secondly, Dugan said Shelter WF wants to see property tax relief specifically targeted at people who need it based on having a lower income, or a fixed income. The goal would be to help people who could actually lose their housing if their taxes increased significantly, according to Dugan. The third priority policy area is protections to keep people in their homes, “rather than throwing them out onto the street when a building gets sold, right away,” Dugan said, adding that he thinks such protections would help avoid exacerbating preexisting housing issues.

The nonprofit is also hoping to continue building its paid membership, which helps fund staff positions and other policy efforts. Shelter WF reported just over 60 members at the close of 2022. Dugan said membership growth overall is slower than the nonprofit would like to see, but that he’s hopeful Schneider will be able to accelerate growth, and that they have already seen some uptick in membership growth in the last couple months.

“I think we kind of got a lot since we first formed as an organization, but it’s kind of trickled in since then,” Dugan said.