In the last month, Whitefish decision-makers have erupted over the concept of following state laws intended to create more affordable housing. Three op-eds appeared in the Flathead Beacon this month, all decrying these developments as an assault on local control. They make a similar argument: Whitefish knows best, Helena is overreaching, and state housing law is an insult to a town that has “succeeded” through foresight and planning. There is a striking incuriosity about why that power structure is being challenged by the state.
Whitefish treats “local control” not as a practical claim about governance, but as a shield; a reverent phrase meant to stop all criticism or actual discussion about responsible growth. The theory is that laws made at the local level will serve locals better. Whitefish’s track record on housing says otherwise. The city is remarkably unaffordable, consistently failing to produce enough housing for our growing population. We sit at the 58th percentile for income but the 96th percentile for home values among Montana communities. The median home price is well north of a million dollars, almost double that of Kalispell or Columbia Falls. About 61% of people who work in Whitefish commute in from outside the zip code. Every year the commute gets longer and the labor market for local employers gets worse.
In 2025, the Montana Legislature passed SB 243 with bipartisan support. The law is straightforward: cities must allow buildings up to 60 feet in their downtown commercial, heavy commercial, and industrial zones, provided the buildings include multifamily housing. These are the zones closest to existing jobs and infrastructure. If you’re going to build housing, this is where it should go. The alternative is sprawl — pushing development further from town centers onto undeveloped land, which costs more to service, generates more traffic, and does nothing for the workers who need to live near where they work.
Rather than comply, the city’s growth policy recommends renaming its downtown and commercial zones to “light commercial,” an attempt to slip out from under the statute’s language. When this was called into question by both locals and state legislators, our council spent the better part of an hour complaining about the prospect of having to allow housing. The council openly discussed their desire to risk a lawsuit rather than comply with the law.
The purpose of a system is what it does. And the purpose of local control in Whitefish, consistently, has been to restrict the supply of housing and reward wealthy homeowners and investors at the expense of the city’s workers and long-term future.
Far from being unique, Whitefish is merely the Montana entry in a long list of exclusive and expensive mountain towns that would rather litigate than build; our own Aspen or Jackson Hole. Back in 2022, Woodside, California declared the entire town a mountain lion sanctuary to try to dodge state duplex legislation, and was laughed out of the news cycle. All of these cities insist they’re special. Every one of them runs the same play: use whatever regulatory tool is available to stop housing, dress the motive up in local-character language, and treat state intervention as an insult.
If Whitefish cared about workforce housing, the Growth Policy would look different. It would aggressively permit multi-family and mixed-use development inside city limits, where water and sewer already exist. It would spend city money attacking the real barriers to affordability: land costs, construction financing, infrastructure gaps, and nonprofit partnerships. Instead of addressing hard tradeoffs about how Whitefish can grow to accommodate our workforce, the Growth Policy freezes existing neighborhoods in amber to the detriment of future generations.
The city council’s sincerely held belief, demonstrated through its willingness to violate state law, is that the picture of Whitefish a tourist can post on Instagram is more important than the droves of families forced to move out to find an affordable place to live.
If the city had a track record of building meaningful workforce housing, a state mandate would actually be an insult. If Whitefish were unique in some economic sense that exempted it from the market dynamics governing housing everywhere else, the resistance would be intellectually serious. If the people loudest in defense of the status quo were the people bearing its costs, then the argument for local control would have real moral weight. None of those are true. Whitefish builds housing at a third of the rate it needs. Economic laws apply here the way they apply everywhere. And the loud defenders of local control are, almost without exception, homeowners whose property values depend on the shortage they’re defending.
The current leadership seems content to wall the town off; to govern as if the job is to protect existing owners from change rather than steward a community real people can live in. When the state finally stepped in, the response was to spend the last month publicly complaining that nobody understands them.
The state understands Whitefish fine. That is how we got here.
Keegan Siebenaler is the executive director of Shelter WF, a housing advocacy nonprofit in Whitefish.