Council leaning toward mandatory housing program

The Whitefish City Council is leaning toward implementing mandatory inclusionary zoning for affordable housing, but they're still weighing how they want to proceed.

At a work session on April 20, the councilors directed city staff to do further research and come back with two options — requiring affordable housing "across the board," depending on the size of new projects, or limiting the requirement to planned-unit developments (PUDs).

PUDs are rezones usually associated with new subdivisions that allow deviations from standard zoning requirements. Typically, the developer and the city negotiate the location of streets and building lots and make tradeoffs for open space and other amenities in exchange for increased housing density, variances for height and road width, and other bonuses.

The council showed interest in an ordinance recently enacted in Bozeman that requires developers to provide affordable housing in subdivisions that have 10 or more lots or are more than five acres in size.

The Bozeman ordinance calls for 0.4 affordable housing units per acre, so two units would be provided on a five-acre project. It also provides a long list of incentives, such as density bonuses and an expedited permit process, to help developers.

Currently, the city has a voluntary arrangement with developers to create affordable housing. In exchange for a bonus density or a reduction in the open-space requirement, developers must provide 10 percent of their units as affordable housing or pay $11,000 per unit to the city's affordable housing program.

Over the past four years, however, the affordable housing program has acquired five voluntary units and a pledge for two units and $1.6 million.

At the work session, the councilors referred to the 2008 Housing Needs Assess-ment report prepared by Applied Communications, which includes former Whitefish city planning director Bob Horne and his wife Kathleen McMahon.

The report concluded that builders and developers are not meeting the demand for affordable housing in Whitefish, and it's time for the city to take a more proactive position.

According to the study, the maximum affordable mortgage for a household making 90 percent to 100 percent of the area median income was $144,000. No houses in that price range were sold in 2007. The study concluded that Whitefish needs to acquire 20 affordable housing units per year to meet its goals.

City manager Chuck Stearns provided the councilors with information on affordable housing programs in Mount Crested Butte and Georgetown, Colo., cities where he worked before coming to Whitefish last year.

Councilor Nick Palmer, who as the chairman of the Whitefish City-County Planning Board was the lead author of the board's 2004 report on "Workforce Housing," joined other councilors in calling for a mandatory affordable housing program here of 3-4 percent. Palmer said Whitefish's voluntary program is obviously not working.

Mayor Mike Jenson, however, supported Stearns' suggestion that the city should first make work-force housing mandatory for PUDs at a 5-10 percent requirement before committing to an across-the-board mandatory requirement.

The council concluded by directing staff to bring back more information on both options so they could continue to study the issue.