Where should Missoula grow?
Home values here rose 37.9% in real terms between 2019 and 2024, while the City permits about 750 homes a year. The pressure is real and the land is finite.
The instinct is to build where land is cheap, which means the edge. This walks through what that choice actually costs, and where to grow instead.
Start with every low-intensity parcel
City parcels that are vacant, single-family, or mobile home, with no more than one home on them. 18,571 parcels on 11,317 acres — 69% of the city's parcels and 39% of its land.
No filtering yet on zoning, hazard, or transit. Those attach later, as separate layers of evidence rather than as filters on this one. Shown here: the Rattlesnake, upper and lower — 1,962 of the 18,571.
8,177 acres survive both subtractions
Flood and steep slope come off as a share of each lot rather than discarding whole parcels — the supplied taxlots carry both percentages. That takes 920 acres.
Then lots that are already substantially built on count for less. A house covering 35% or more of its lot counts for a fifth of its area; an empty lot counts for all of it. That takes another 2,143.
Measured at the scale of a walk
Each parcel's land is split across the hexagons it touches, by area of overlap rather than by which hexagon holds its centre — so a parcel straddling a boundary is split between both cells rather than assigned whole to one.
Quarter-mile hexagons, about 26 acres each. Darker means a larger share of the land is low-intensity and could take more housing.
38,855 homes under a stated allowance
Acres are not homes. This assigns an allowance by the adopted 2045 Place Type — six per lot Downtown, four in urban residential, one at the rural edge — and counts only what is not already built. It adds 38,855 homes to the 17,152 that stand on these lots today.
This is a scenario the City could choose, not what zoning permits and not a forecast. Every home count downstream scales with it.
Opportunity arrives in clusters
Before drawing policy areas it is worth testing whether there are any. Moran's I is 0.66 with a pseudo p-value of 0.001 — high-opportunity hexes sit beside other high-opportunity hexes far more than chance would produce.
Local Moran's I finds where. The two outlier types matter as much as the clusters: they are the places a blanket area policy would get wrong.
Walking to a bus stop is not access to jobs
One network carries both walking and riding, so the shortest path picks the mode. Boarding costs half the headway; riding costs the scheduled run time. A place beside a stop still scores badly if that route reaches nowhere.
The median hex reaches 59 jobs within thirty minutes. The best reaches 42,017 — a seven-hundred-fold difference inside one city.
Putting a number on the commute
Expected commute distance comes from the road network and the real distribution of jobs, weighted so a closer job counts for more. Two trips a day, 250 days, priced at the IRS rate of 67 cents a mile.
The result runs from $860 a year in the centre to $2,670 at the outer edge. That is a full ownership rate, not fuel alone.
The edge is cheaper to build. It has other costs.
Land at the edge costs a seventh what it costs where this analysis recommends growing, so building there is cheaper, at any density.
Four costs come with it, and they recur. Each year, a household out there drives 733 more miles, spends $491 more reaching work, and emits a third of a ton more carbon — and the City maintains 1,586 more feet of sewer to serve them.
What "invest first" actually means
Housing opportunity times jobs, decayed by travel time, accumulated onto the streets between them. High accumulated demand plus weak service is a place where the land is ready and the service is not — 144 segments, 13.8 miles, all of it inside the built city.
Every one sits on a route Mountain Line already runs, so the ask is operating budget rather than new coverage. None of it reaches past the built edge.
The capacity and the risk are the same ground
Renter share, low income, and severe rent burden, from the 2020–2024 ACS. Displacement risk is claimed only where vulnerability and active development pressure overlap — 23 hexes. Vulnerability alone describes a neighborhood; it does not prove anyone is being displaced.
Three quarters of the homes this city could add sit in exactly these neighborhoods.
Four things the City can do
Contiguous regions built with Max-p, each holding at least 100 acres of opportunity so every one has a reason to exist. Then an ordered rule assigns one action to each.
Three routes. Eight buses.
Only two of twelve Mountain Line routes come every fifteen minutes. 384 of 436 growth areas have no frequent service, so the location advantage exists on paper and not in a rider's morning.
Raising Routes 11, 12 and 5 gives 5,677 homes a useful bus. Eight more vehicles, no new alignments. Then the homes build the ridership that pays for the service that makes the homes work.
72% matches Our Missoula 2045
The adopted plan's intensity was never consulted in the decision — it was held out so it could serve as a check. Fifty-one of seventy-one regions land in the same place the plan does.
The disagreements are the useful part. 16 regions the plan holds at low intensity look like opportunity here, and 4 the plan marks for growth look like caution. That is where the conversation is.