MISSOULA — After more than five hours of intense deliberation, Missoula’s city council made history Monday night, unanimously passing the Unified Development Code (UDC), which sets the framework for how development will be steered.
The marathon meeting featured debate over last-minute amendments, but all throughout it, you could feel the energy in the room of everyone understanding they were witnessing a pivotal moment for the city.
This matters for a lot of reasons. Zoning largely dictates what kinds of developments can go where, and with the passage of the UDC, larger, denser developments are now encouraged throughout almost all of the city.
So it matters because every resident will see changes in their neighborhood.
Watch to hear from members of the Missoula City Council:
Here’s what the council members had to say on why they supported this sweeping change.
“I just hope the community supports this and does not balk at change. Because I think if we can embrace this change, it will work to keep Missoula vibrant, inclusive, community-oriented,” council member Gwen Jones said.
“I hope that this code will make it so that every neighborhood can do their part and every neighborhood can welcome new neighbors. Every neighborhood can have more density. And I know that's not popular with everyone. But Missoula is growing, as Ms. Jones said,” council member Jennifer Savage said.
“I think this UDC is a balancing act. There are many competing interests and issues to address under one document. We don't know yet if this code will accomplish everything that it intends to do,” council member Mirtha Becerra said.
“This project provides some meaningful and tangible solutions to increase density and increase housing opportunities in Missoula,” council member Justin Ponton said.
“I think we're in an exciting moment and I think we're well posed and supported from all angles to move forward,” council member Betsy Craske said.
“I understood really early on that updating our land use plan and adopting a new UDC would be one of the most consequential actions that I and this council likely took,” council member Eric Melson said.
“I also look forward to being the first town in the American West to address affordability through density, because so far it has not been done. There isn't a single town in the American West that has been able to tackle housing affordability through density, and I hope Missoula is the first one,” council member Kristen Jordan said.
“In my opinion, we're gonna need to come back to this a few times over the next year to year and a half to really make sure that we're flushing this out,” council member Sean McCoy said.
“Whatever that next kid who's coming to Missoula when they're a young person and says, 'How will Missoula have that opportunity whenever that may be?’ And that, I think, is a really difficult tension to try to balance. We are asking a lot of this code,” council member Stacie Anderson said.
“I would say at the end of the day, we're in a good place. I look forward to the tweaks that will be coming in phase two and so forth. This may be one of them, but, I think this is a great starting point for the city,” council member Bob Campbell said.
“I feel the weight of this. And someone also said that if everyone's just a little mad at you, you're probably doing the right thing. And so I feel like we've hit a good balance on this,” council member Amber Sherrill said.
“I think we've substantially increased capacity for a range of those housing types that we've been talking about for three plus years, apartments, row houses, missing middle options, especially in higher opportunity areas where we've mapped and identified, removed arbitrary caps like maximum units per building that made it harder to deliver that attainable unit in walkable locations. I think that's what we're proud of,” said council member Mike Nugent.
This is not the last you’ll hear about zoning, though, as much of the story is just beginning. We’ll continue to follow what happens next with the UDC.
