Outside Montana, No Housing “Miracle” in the Mountain West This Year

Montana passed a transformative land use reform package in 2023 – the “Montana Miracle”. This year, Montana’s legislature is again considering a lot of housing bills. The western United States overall has been the most dynamic region for pro-housing legislation, which makes sense since California is the state most associated with the housing crisis: California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Arizona, and Colorado have all passed meaningful reforms, and are considering more.

However, most small, conservative Western states have yet to match Montana in ambition, despite similar population influx in some cases. On the cusp is Utah, whose recently-completed legislative session is instructive. Several bills did not make it:

• HB 88 would have allowed ADUs on single-family lots in urban areas (with curtailed setback requirements, but otherwise without many of the standard protections for ADUs); would have allowed modular units in urban residential zones; and would have made changes to municipalities’ housing production reporting requirements.
• HB 90 would have capped minimum lot sizes at 6,000 square feet in populous counties; originally, the cap was 4,000 square feet and the bill also legalized housing (very vaguely) in commercial zones.
• HB 398 would have created a shot clock for ADU permitting
• SB 152 would have banned localities from requiring garages.

The bills that ended up passing and being signed into law add up to something meaningful, but pared back from its initial scope:

• SB 262 would have required local governments to create “density overlays” to allow missing middle housing and smaller lot sizes; those provisions were stripped out before passage. What ultimately passed was a bill modifying rules for certain affordable housing grants.
• HB 37 incentivizes modest local density bonusing for affordable housing – originally the bill encouraged density overlays (similar to SB 262) with more detail, but the final bill omits any reference to specific middle housing types.
• HB 368 mostly concerns municipal incorporation and annexation rules, but also has shot clock provisions, provisions protecting against redundant plan review rounds, third-party permitting provisions, and limits on governments’ ability to require private landowners to fund public infrastructure improvements
• SB 181 limits local requirements for the dimensions and placement of parking spaces for 1- and 2-family homes, without capping parking requirements numerically; the original bill also contained substantial reforms to affordable housing grant programs, but those were nearly all amended out.
• HB 175 amends the state construction code to regulate dwellings up to 2 stories and 4 families under the more permissive IRC rather than the stricter IBC. Utah is uniquely fond of reaching directly into the building code and fiddling with it legislatively, as evidenced by other bills such as HB 313, which makes a host of edits to the construction code, including ones which seem intended to support HB 175, ADUs, and third-party permitting.

While I’m not an expert in Utah housing law or the construction regulations at issue in HB 175 and 313, I would call these reforms decent, but not revolutionary.

In other conservative Mountain West states, the revolution has yet to arrive. Idaho passed S 1164, a timeliness requirement for responding to permit applications (without a guarantee of permits issuing if the deadline passes); a proposal for a study committee on housing was also introduced but went nowhere. Wyoming considered a few decent bills but ended up passing nothing:

• HB 0202 was a shot clock bill
• HB 0197 would have imposed a proportionality requirement on impact fees
• SF 0040 would have reformed the criteria for filing a protest petition against a rezoning, but the two chambers couldn’t agree on a version before adjourning.

Nothing’s been introduced yet in Alaska, but there’s still time.

When it comes to the prospects for YIMBY bills getting through red-state legislatures, Texas’s session this year will be a much more important test (not least because Texas is larger than all these states put together and has major cities). Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina are all also better bellwethers of Republican policymaking on housing in growing states. That said, the contrast between Montana – which is taking up a bunch of housing bills this year again – and the other small Mountain West states, especially Idaho, is stark.