Submitted by:  Anna Shchemelinin

Despite promising to publish opinions from all sides of the political spectrum, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle hasn't yet posted my letter to the editor (LTE), which I submitted after attending the Affordable Housing presentation by Bozeman Mayor, Terry Cunningham, on September 23. Regardless of whether BDC decides to post my LTE, their 300-word maximum format is not enough to adequately describe the event. So, here are my notes:

1. Very few people attended the presentation. Most attendees were Democratic Socialists, members of Bozeman Tenants United, and proponents of social housing.
2. No verbal communication was allowed with the Mayor during the presentation. To ask questions, attendees had to write them on note cards and give the cards to the assistant. The Mayor's assistant read all the questions but didn't turn all of them in to the Mayor to answer. The justification for not answering all the questions was the lack of time; there was no explanation of how the assistant selected the questions she deemed worth answering.  
3. Terry correctly explained to the public that supply and demand are major driving factors for the increase in housing prices, pointed out that objective (or kind-of objective) factors, including the limited water supply, restrict the supply of housing, and that the demand was affected by Covid, people working remotely, and people buying second homes as vacation property. He failed to mention the impact of illegal immigrants on the demand. Quite the opposite, he claimed that we shouldn’t think that newly-built apartments are occupied by someone "out of here;" he assured us that when talking about affordable housing, he is speaking about local working families and MSU students.
4. According to the Mayor's words, unaffordable housing is the primary reason for homelessness and urban camping in Bozeman. 
5. I submitted a question asking how it is possible that while American working families struggle to find affordable housing, illegal immigrants, including members of two drug cartels that operate in Bozeman, don't have these problems and have enough money to afford sending money transfers back to the countries they came from. The assistant left out my question and did not give it to the Mayor to answer.  
6. Mayor Cunningham briefly mentioned that building multi-story buildings next to single-family, one-story homes is not a good idea. However, he rejected Alison Sweeney's idée fixe of "naturally occurring affordable housing" as unrealistic due to Bozeman's lack of such housing. (https://www.betterbozemancoalition.org/resources)
7. When discussing the "tools" for more affordable housing, the Mayor explained that the city could not enforce rent control because it's currently "not legal" in Montana – not because governmental price control of anything is proven to hurt both buyers/renters and sellers/landlords. Completely 'coincidentally,'  the first question given to him was about how to change the legislature to make price control legal. He also blamed legality problems when he answered the question about why the city "allows building luxury condos." 
8. Reducing the number of required parking spaces, meaning the number of cars per household, was named as one of the solutions to improve affordability. The Mayor didn't say how people with no cars are expected to get to work, buy food, or enjoy the outdoor activities that made Bozeman famously attractive to Americans. Neither did he explain who he expected to live in third-world architectural design buildings such as a 155-unit building behind Kenyon Noble in which a one-bedroom apartment costs ~ $1,400/month. 
9. The Mayor didn't mention social housing by its exact name. However, he noted a possibility of the future in which developers replace profits with "community benefits," and people voluntarily pay rent according to their income. 

After the official part of the meeting, I requested the Mayor to explain the data from Frontier Institute's analysis of local budgets for FY 2025, which shows that "Since FY 2015, the City of Bozeman's budget has grown 95.03% faster than the growth of the economy, as measured by population growth plus inflation." (https://frontierinstitute.org/reports/fy-2025-real-local-budgets/) He justified the budget growth by saying that Bozeman voters approve all levies. He didn't reply to my question about why the city wants voters to approve levies to fund services that should be covered by the increased number of housing units and the increased prices for each unit. Instead, his assistant asked me to leave. 

I have no comments on the Mayor's call to "grace and compassion to all, regardless of their source of income." I have zero "grace and compassion" to drug cartels, human traffickers, and limousine liberals who think that an uninterrupted supply of house slaves is an essential service the City of Bozeman must provide for them.