“Montana Miracle”  

Image: Missoula’s compact-city goals are well served by its evolving active transportation network.  

Growing In – Montana Style

Sprawl is not the answer to the housing crisis. That is the message of the ‘Montana Miracle”. These recently-adopted state laws facilitate infill development and reduce the need to convert farms, forests, and other greenfield sites. Perhaps the greatest significance of these laws is that this so-called miracle could be replicated anywhere by bringing diverse stakeholders together and demonstrating how land use reforms can create win-win outcomes: protecting beloved landscapes while promoting abundant, affordable housing.

As in other places throughout the world, rural Montana is threatened when the land within cities is used inefficiently yet elected officials allow development outside the urban footprint on previously undeveloped lands (which go by the name of green fields).

Over the last four years, a diverse coalition of Montanans realized that urban sprawl threatens the wide, open spaces that make Montana Montana and endangers the vitality of towns that refuse to evolve. This unlikely alliance urged the Montana legislature to require cities to grow in as a way of preserving the character of land outside cities. 

This values-based strategy was supported by publication of the Montana Zoning Atlas in 2022. Governor Gianforte subsequently appointed a 26-member bipartisan task force that included Democratic and Republican state lawmakers, realtors, developers, local public officials, bankers, planners, researchers, and activists that led to the near-unanimous adoption and signing in 2023 of four laws that promote various forms of infill development including allowing duplexes in single-family residential zones, requiring cities to approve one accessory dwelling unit (ADU) per lot as a matter of right, and legalizing mixed use and multiple-family buildings in commercials zones.   

Writing in Planning magazine, Taylor Moore observed that these laws were considered miraculous because Montana suddenly went from having few YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) laws to having a bunch of them. The 2023 laws, known as MLUPA (Montana Land Use Planning Act) were immediately challenged but ultimately upheld by the Montana Supreme Court in 2026.

While this lawsuit was winding its way through the judicial process, the legislature passed another set of laws in 2025, dubbed the Montana Miracle 2.0, that expanded the ADU requirements, streamlined adaptive reuse of historic properties, cut parking requirements, removed local restrictions on buildings of six stories or less, and legalized residential buildings with single-staircase designs.  

MLUPA delayed compliance until May 2026. However, some Montana cities were implementing its policies well before that date. Missoula has already adopted Our Missoula 2045 Land Use Plan and Map with six land use policy themes, the first of which is “Focus Inward – Focus development and infill within the Plan area to minimize strain on infrastructure and prevent sprawl into sensitive and constrained lands.”

The city proceeded to implement Our Missoula by adopting a new Unified Development Code that allows multi-family housing, eliminates parking requirements, and legalizes mixed use development throughout the city. With these changes, Missoula has the zoning capacity to accommodate the projected housing demand for the year 2045 within the current city limits.

These regulatory reforms refute the notion that the housing crisis can only be solved by allowing sprawl to destroy the natural areas and farmlands that motivate many people to move into and remain in Montana. The threat that sprawl poses to those beloved landscapes motivated Missoula to adopt solutions that focus growth in rather than out.

Montana is not unique. Throughout the United States, sprawl has wasted vast amounts of highly-productive farmland and destroyed greenspace that once sheltered wildlife, gave people contact with nature, and provided green infrastructure benefits including protection from floods and wildfire. By creating a forum for diverse stakeholders to weigh the consequences of growing in versus out, other states and cities could create their own miracles.

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