This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 1st,

2003. I'm Caleb Brown.

How has Montana advanced a more realistic set of housing policies

amid a large influx of people from other states.

Kendall Cotton of the Frontier Institute discussed his group's role in making it easier to build in Montana.

People like to poo-poo California style housing policies,

as they're called, even though we must admit California's housing policies have improved somewhat

Yes, they have.

And significantly, and it's driven by essentially an

emergency in housing in California so when we say California style housing

policies we're talking about the ones that existed prior to a couple of years ago.

Correct. In Montana, as in many other states, there are people who are very concerned about maintaining natural beauty, about not living next to skyscrapers, about not living next to hog farms, and many other issues and there are somewhat small but they're

very loud group of people who are very concerned about living with literally any

inconvenience that living near people will deliver.

Yeah. And the people who are concerned about the the minor inconveniences posed by

living in, oh, a neighborhood, often they win. They win a lot. And so what,

just give me the sense of what has happened in Montana and the work that you guys have done to try to help everyone sort of reorient their thinking about what we are do as property owners and what being a property owner

imposes upon us in terms of how we associate with those people who own the adjoining property.

Sure. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, so let's flashback two years ago. That's when, you know,

really the current affordability crisis for housing in Montana

started ramping up we had a lot of folks moving in from other states on the coast

you know a lot of folks during the pandemic said hey why aren't we away from

...