How High Housing Costs Could Determine This Rural State’s Senate Race

And how tenants in one city are banding together to combat the toughest rental market in the country.

By Paul Blest, More Perfect Union

I spent a lot of time watching political debates across America this year — for work, to be clear — and the first question in many of them was usually about immigration or the economy, broadly speaking. In the crucial race for U.S. Senate in Montana, however, the opening question in the late September debate was about housing. 

Businessman Tim Sheehy, the Republican candidate, laid much of the blame for the state’s housing crisis on immigration, as well as inflation and interest rates. Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, a three-term incumbent facing the toughest challenge of his career, blamed individuals like Sheehy. 

“It’s caused by people who have hundreds of millions of dollars coming into this state,” Tester said, nodding toward his Minnesota native opponent, “[and] buying home after home after home.”

Montana has the least affordable housing market in the entire country, with home prices nearly doubling between 2018 and 2023 to more than $530,000. That pain is felt acutely in cities like Bozeman, the state’s fourth-largest city. Despite being just miles away from the hyper-exclusive Yellowstone Club, the only private ski resort in the world, Bozeman is home to some of the most pervasive income inequality in the country. 

My colleague Brooke Darrah Shuman recently went to Montana to investigate the housing crisis in three different parts of the state — and how tenants in Bozeman are fighting to take back control. 

Montana, like many states, has undergone a makeover in the past several years. During the pandemic, an influx of high-income remote workers fled to Montana, buoyed by the state’s natural beauty and conservative tax policies championed by Gov. Greg Gianforte.

The shift has remade the state’s electorate, which Tester has represented since 2007; a recent New York Times report showed that the partisan lean of people moving to Montana since the 2020 presidential election favors Republicans by 46 percent, a shift even further right than Florida’s.

The exploding demand for housing has also begun to squeeze out low-income residents. In Bozeman, 55 percent of residents are renters, and more than half of them spend in excess of 30 percent of their income on rent. The median newly built home costs nearly $1 million. 

Gianforte and the state legislature have passed laws to encourage new construction, but the reforms are laden with giveaways to developers and landlords. At the same time, Gianforte and the legislature have been hostile to tenants, passing a law in 2021 to force Bozeman to end inclusionary zoning, a policy requiring developers to set aside a share of units for affordable housing, and following that two years later with a ban on rent control. 

“We're seeing all of this development for apartments that are being built, but I'm still seeing…more and more people living in campers,” Ozaa EchoMaker, a Bozeman resident, told More Perfect Union. “If there's really housing, why is nobody in it? And it's because it's unaffordable.”

In 2022, EchoMaker and a group of Bozeman residents formed the group Bozeman Tenants United, which is part of a national federation of tenant unions that includes counterparts in Kansas City, to organize for stronger rights and protections for renters. In just two years, the organizers have been remarkably successful, winning a ban last year on short-term rentals like Airbnbs and electing a fellow organizer, Joey Morrison, as the city’s next mayor.

They also want to pass national rent control and the right to legal representation in eviction hearings. The fate of both of those efforts could rest on Montana’s next U.S. senator, and while Sheehy has led polling through much of the race, a recent Montana State University-Billing survey found the candidates tied. 

Sheehy, the CEO of an aerial firefighting company, said in a June debate that he’d built affordable housing for employees because “our folks couldn’t afford to live here.” But the Heartland Signal reported shortly after that rents at the property’s rents were several hundred dollars above the area’s average. 

Sheehy primarily champions the private industry in building housing. One of his main backers is the political action committee aligned with the Koch group Americans For Prosperity, which opposes inclusionary zoning and rent control and published a white paper arguing lawmakers should “proactively preempt” local rent control ordinances a year before the Montana legislature did just that. 

Tester is pushing a slate of housing bills including a first-time homebuyer tax credit and a bill encouraging the owners of mobile home parks to sell property to residents rather than developers. “If we don’t do things to incentivize more houses on the market, and make sure those houses are affordable for working families, for young families, then we’ll never get it to a point where this problem is solved,” Tester said during the debate last month. 

Brooke went to Montana because it’s square in the middle of a national fight over the right to housing, public lands, and building a fair economy rather than just one of extraction and luxury for the rich. And no matter who wins the Senate election, Bozeman tenant organizers have charted a path for average people to take power to try to drive down housing costs.