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“You want to build subdivisions?� says Costner, playing a wealthy Paradise Valley rancher in the hit “Yellowstone� TV show. “Move to Dallas. I won’t have ‘em here.�

But the rich out-of-state developer, played by Danny Huston, has his answer holstered and at the ready, in this conversational duel over the future of the Treasure State. 

“It’s called progress, John,� Huston says. “Progress doesn’t need your permission.� 

This is all scripted, of course, a snippet of the dialogue that has made “Yellowstone� one of the country’s most-watched TV shows since it debuted in June 2018. But there are shades of reality here.

Much has changed, both on-screen and off, in the six years since that first episode of “Yellowstone� aired. 

Costner quit the show, and his character was (spoiler alert) killed off in the debut episode of the second part of season 5. The fictional developer, Dan Jenkins, also is dead, having been mercilessly slain at the end of season two by those opposed to his vision of progress, though Jenkins kept promoting that vision until his last breath. 

“I have every right to be here,� Jenkins said with his dying words. “I have every right. I have a right. This is America.� 

Since “Yellowstone� first aired, the forces of growth and development haven’t been contained to the screen. They have also changed the real Montana in major ways. 

Between 2018 and 2022, U.S. Census data shows that nearly 50,000 people exercised their own right to move to Montana — drawn, in part, by what some observers conclude is “Yellowstone� itself.

As builders and developers have scrambled to meet all these newcomers’ demand for housing, they’ve had some success, increasing the number of housing units added annually. 

But Census data suggests that progress has stalled, as the number of housing permits issued statewide has over the past few years. 

And a new forecast of population and housing demand suggests the daunting task of meeting the state’s housing needs will only get more difficult in the coming years. 

That forecast comes courtesy of , a Vancouver, British Columbia-based firm that analyzes real-estate trends for public and private planners.

It predicts some 75,000 new arrivals — enough to populate an additional Missoula-sized city — will try to squeeze into a housing market that’s already bursting at the seams by the end of 2030.

In a state that’s already the in the entire country, a lot is riding on what happens next, including how quickly and how much new housing is built under the Big Sky through the rest of the decade. 

Meeting the need will take a herculean effort, if it’s possible at all. 

Aterio predicts the state will need to add more than 65,000 housing units than it had in 2020 by the decade’s end — and that’s just to maintain the existing imbalance between supply and demand. 

“In the situation we're in,� said Andy Shirtliff, executive of the Montana Building Industry Association and a Helena city , “it needs to be all hands on deck to be able to fix this housing crisis.� 

‘The supply dropped’

Shirtliff has spent his life bouncing around Montana among the cities of Butte, Kalispell, Missoula, Billings and Helena. 

“I grew up in Montana,� he said. “I was born here, raised here, and I can remember going to places and saying, ‘Oh, I remember when it used to look like this. I remember when nobody knew about it.’� 

But that undiscovered quality changed slowly, and then all at once. 

After “Yellowstone� debuted and then the pandemic hit, retirees, remote workers and other newcomers flooded into the state, “gobbling up houses� and “eating up all of the inventory,� Shirtliff said. 

“The supply dropped, and the demand went way up, along with the prices,� he said. 

And developers responded. While housing production in Montana started to grow about 15 years ago, it sharply increased during the pandemic.

Back in 2009, permits for just 1,771 new housing units were filed in the state, according to Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis . In 2020, that number reached almost 4,600. The next year, permits for 6,419 housing units were issued across Montana. 

But experts say a variety of headwinds – including high interest rates, workforce shortages, property tax increases and declining availability of buildable land – have started to send the homebuilding trajectory in the wrong direction. 

Last year, the number of permitted units dipped to 4,668. 

And the slowdown has continued into this year. Through September, permits for just 3,767 units of housing had been issued statewide. 

‘Already behind’

The reasons builders have struggled to meet the Treasure State’s housing demand are many, experts say. 

But one of the first ones Shirtliff points to is the housing crisis itself.

As the need for new housing increased in the state’s fast-growing cities, higher prices pushed out longtime residents. And those displaced people, Shirtliff said, were disproportionately those who worked locally, in those communities, including in the building trades.

“That put a strain on our workforce,� he said. “And so, you know, trying to find people, trying to keep people, trying to train people – that adds into the time and the cost of the house.� 

Add in high interest rates, increasing property taxes, inflation, supply-chain problems and fights over water rights, and the job of keeping up — much less catching up — has gotten even harder. 

Aterio’s data includes precise predictions for how much more housing will be needed in every Montana zip code based on expected population growth and historical housing patterns. 

And while the areas that top the list aren’t surprising — Bozeman, Kalispell, Billings, Missoula and Helena — some of the numbers are eye-popping, like the 6,712 housing units needed to keep up with predicted demand this decade in Bozeman’s 59718 zip code alone or the nearly 8,000 housing units needed in Flathead County. 

Blake Maynard, an executive board member of the Flathead Building Association, believes more could be done to grow the housing workforce and to boost production. But he’s skeptical that proposed new policies or laws are going to lead to an explosion in new housing that will keep pace with the “staggering� number of units that are needed. 

Maynard, who has been in the industry for 30 years, said the obstacles to doing so are many, including a lack of buildable land, onerous regulations and a labor shortage. 

He said his members are trying to find ways to “to decrease costs without sacrificing quality,� but that even alternatives like building with pre-made panels requires skilled laborers who are hard to come by. 

When asked how optimistic he is that Flathead County can produce enough homes to keep up with population growth, Maynard said it’s complicated.

“We’re already behind,� he said. “If demand is there, if we can solve a few other issues, we can definitely support the growth. It’s just at what pace and rate it comes.�

Aterio predicts the pace will be fast and furious. Flathead County will have 17,000 more people in 2030 than it had in 2020, according to the company’s forecast. 

‘How to address those needs’

Shirtliff said the scale of the challenge in places like the Flathead emphasize the need for a collaborative approach to solve the housing crisis. 

“It needs to be a partnership between the city, the county and the state and the private sector on what the needs are, how to address those needs and the reason why we have particular types of zoning, the reason why we have permitting or why annexation is the way it is,� Shirtliff said.

In mid-2022, Gov. Greg Gianforte launched the Montana Housing Task Force to do exactly that: bring people together and hash out a response to the crisis.

Danny Tenenbaum, a former state lawmaker and a current member of the taskforce, said he believes the suite of broad that emerged from the group will help incentivize the construction of more housing in every community in Montana that needs more homes.

Exactly how much housing will be needed statewide, however, is difficult to pinpoint in the Aterio data. 

That’s because Arterio’s 2030 prediction doesn’t just add units in zip codes that are expected to grow but also subtracts units in those that are expected to decline in population. 

When shrinking zip codes are removed from the data, Aterio data forecasts that Montana will need 66,000 more housing units by 2030 in its many growing areas than it had in 2020.

It’s those areas “where existing supply isn’t meeting demand� that the state housing taskforce is focused, Tenenbaum said.

Some of the taskforce’s recommendations were implemented in the Montana Legislature’s last session. 

“The 2023 MT Land Use and Planning Act is the big one,� Tenenbaum said. “It requires local governments to set annual numerical targets for new housing starts and then update their zoning maps and streamline permitting to actually meet those targets. They have until 2026 to comply. Some have gotten it done early. It applies to all municipalities with a population greater than 5,000, which includes many towns in more rural parts of the state.�

Obstacles to affordability

Missoula is one of the cities that has already set such a target. 

In a recently released draft of a , the city called for building between 1,100 and 1,500 homes every year to keep up with expected population growth. 

That’s more than double what was built last year, when only 448 new homes were permitted for construction. It’s also a significant drop from 2021, when 1,338 housing units were permitted.

Eran Pehan, director of Missoula’s office of Community Development, Planning and Innovation, believes the city can build enough housing to keep up with population growth. Her office estimates Missoula will need at least 22,000 new homes by 2045 to accommodate an estimated population growth of 37,000 more people in that same timeframe.

“While there are huge drivers in home construction that local government cannot control, like interest rates, labor and the cost of supplies, having the right land use policy and development codes in place can help to encourage development even when these barriers exist,� Pehan said.

She said the new Land Use Plan, if adopted by the city council, will allow builders to construct more types of housing in all neighborhoods in Missoula. More than 44% of Missoula’s land area is zoned exclusively for single-family homes, and the new plan would drastically change that to allow duplexes and other types of housing in more areas.

Pehan said the plan will encourage more homes and more home types, with an emphasis on adding smaller units across the city. 

But Dave Edgell, a retired builder in Missoula who founded and ran a construction company for many years, has a hard time believing such changes will be enough for the city to double its production of homes, as rising costs make it harder for developers to make affordable housing projects pencil out.

“Land prices and interest rates make a big difference,� Edgell said. “Wages are a big factor in people being able to afford the rents you have to charge to break even.�

He said it can take up to three months or longer to obtain a building permit from the city, depending on the size of a project.

Edgell acknowledges that “allowing more density will help,� but he’s pessimistic that such a new growth policy will be enough to overcome the daunting obstacles to affordability. 

“Everyone running for local and national office talks about making housing affordable, but so far I haven't seen any real solutions,� Edgell said. 

‘Different product’  

Jacob Kuntz thinks he might have a solution. 

Since becoming of Helena Area Habitat for Humanity, Kuntz has been working to implement a radically dense form of housing , at least for a state that draws people seeking the kind of wide-open lifestyle depicted on “Yellowstone.� 

The setting for Kuntz’s experiment is a 250-acre parcel of Superfund in East Helena, a municipality that has welcomed the possibility that it will in size by decade’s end. 

There, Kuntz and the Habitat team are planning to 1,700 housing units into a mixed-income development of apartments, duplexes, townhomes and single-family houses.

It’s an ambitious plan, and it remains to be seen if Kuntz’s organization can pull off such a massive project after historically only building one or two houses a year. 

But while that project still faces approvals and hurdles, Kuntz is dreaming much bigger. 

He sees the East Helena development as a pilot for a “different product� that could be replicated statewide, transforming how housing is built in Montana. 

“We're not interested in a one-off,� Kuntz said. 

He knows it will be tough, in part because the status quo has been so profitable for builders.

“I'm not seeing motivation in Montana's building industry to build anything but apartments or the single-family home,� Kuntz said. “And that's because the single family homes at half-a-million dollars are selling all day, every day in the state.�  

But that model, he believes, is not sustainable, due to high infrastructure costs incurred by local governments as well as high housing costs that could make Montana too expensive for working people to afford. 

It’s also going to take something that he acknowledged is extremely hard to come by: big pieces of undeveloped land that are accessible to Montana’s rapidly growing cities. 

The sprawling Yellowstone Dutton Ranch would work. Except, of course, that it doesn’t really exist.