Putting Students in Their Place: Missoula’s Proposed Occupancy Limits

While the University of Montana regularly reminds the Missoula area of the positive economic impact the University has in terms of student, faculty, and university spending and the jobs associated with that spending, a vocal group of Missoula residents sees a quite different and negative economic impact of the University.

They claim that the growth in University enrollment has outstripped the growth of student housing and, as a result, students have been competing with other residents for the limited available housing. In particular, groups of students team up to rent large houses that otherwise would be available for families with children. This, they claim, has eliminated affordable housing and especially driven the cost of housing for families sky-high, forcing families with children to move out of the city into the surrounding suburban and ex-urban areas. As a result, Missoula city schools have been losing students and closing while outlying schools have been forced to expand their school systems. This, it is claimed, has contributed to urban sprawl, increased congestion, loss of open space, and the pollution and congestion that goes with high levels of commuting.

As a solution to this problem, the Missoula City Council is being urged to adopt limits on the number of unrelated individuals who can live in a residence. This they claim will keep students from bidding against other residents for housing and bring housing prices back down to an affordable level.

Unfortunately, the results of such occupancy limits are likely to be the opposite. By restricting the number of unrelated individuals that can live in a residence, the effective number of housing spaces will be reduce as people are forced to live in smaller groups. This reduction in the number of housing spaces can only drive the per person cost of housing upward. One way to avoid such higher housing costs will be to move to the periphery of the Missoula housing market, adding to suburban sprawl, not reducing it.

There is some logic to what the advocates of occupancy limits are proposing. Those limits will have impacts that vary by the size and type of household. The competition for larger houses will be reduced because groups of students will no longer be allowed to bid for them. This will reduce the cost of housing for larger families as well as for upscale married couples who want to live in spacious quarters. At the same time, however, it will force all other residents to compete for the remaining smaller living units, driving the cost of that type of housing up.

The equity of this depends at least in part on the relative number of people in each of these categories. In Missoula County less than a third of all family households have four or more members. The average family household has only three members. Those family households that have children living in them, on average, have less than two children. Of all households in Missoula, both family and non-family households, only 20 percent are family households with four or more members. That means that the proposed occupancy limits would harm two-thirds of all family households and 80 percent of the total of all households. The occupancy limits are neither family nor resident friendly.

Assumedly before such a discriminatory policy is adopted we should be sure that there is a significant problem that needs to be solved. Just how threatening are these pesky students who form non-family households? The average non-family household in Missoula has 1.4 residents. There are slightly over 400 non-family households that had four or more residents. That represents about one percent of all households and five percent of all large households. In addition, of course, only some of these 400 large non-family households are not student households. It would appear that this is a relatively small problem that is not crying out for a new law to solve.

Of course there is also the question of whether occupancy limits work. Missoula had such limits through 1996 when a legal decision struck those limits down. One might ask whether having those limits in place during the late 80s and first half of the 90s solved any of the problems the advocates of occupancy limits are concerned about. During the 1990-1996 period property values skyrocketed in the Missoula area. Since then their growth has moderated. During that earlier period, the bedroom communities around Missoula were growing much faster than they have been since. The difference between the growth in enrollments in Missoula city schools and the surrounding suburban communities was greater in the earlier period when Missoula had occupancy limits in place. Suburban sprawl did not start or accelerate beginning in 1997.

The fact is that there is no evidence that students are the source of the housing or school problems in the Missoula area. There is also no evidence that the proposed solution to this non-problem will have anything but impacts the opposite of what the advocates of occupancy limits suggest.

This is not as irrational as you might think. The advocates of occupancy limits are not really trying to solve the problems of suburban sprawl, affordable housing, family housing, or neighborhood schools. What they are trying to do is use a city ordinance to create the type of neighborhood they would prefer to live in. Upscale, late middle age couples whose children have left home and who are now seeking quite living in spacious homes are likely to find the frenetic activity and confusions associated with the lives of young single adults disconcerting. They might well like the help of the city government in protecting them from the “nuisance” that young people represent. That’s quite understandable. That is why some private housing complexes have “no children” and “no single people” occupancy limits. That is also why we have nuisance statues on the books already.

But such legitimate private preferences should not be wrapped in the guise of the public interest. Rather than hiding our private interest in an invented public interest, we should state our own interests directly and have the confidence to defend them openly. Wrapping those interests in a false public interest argument undermines civic morale and public discourse. Many special interest groups are notorious for doing this. We should not extend that bad pattern.