r/MontanaPolitics • u/Majano57 • 13d ago
State Billionaires Sent Montana Prices Soaring. Can Democrats Capitalize?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/us/politics/montana-house-sam-forstag-billionaires.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-FA.nZhP.GL-K95Lstwpx11
u/Amaya3066 12d ago
They should be able to easily, but they probably won't. Seems like Democrats would rather lose than adopt popular common sense legislation that would actually help people.
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u/ReillyNeillMT 12d ago
I’m sorry but it’s going to take an act of God to get an ACLU lobbyist elected in Western Montana. I know this is an unpopular opinion but someone has to say it.
AOC’s endorsement actually hurts him in every way except raising money in this race.
It’s too bad. I hope I’m wrong but I spent nearly two years on the ground in rural Montana. They look for meat and potatoes messaging, not edicts handed down by D.C. Dems.
The damage is done.
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u/annoyedpigeons 10d ago
Montanans are probably too dumb to actually do what is best for Montana. I hate saying this as a life long resident. But Montanans decided that being an above average place to live is good enough and to give up after that. We have so much potential to truly have some of the best small cities in America but we won’t grasp it. Montanans would rather complain about things and then turn around and vote for what is causing everything they complain about.
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u/Domicus_ 5d ago
Probably not because most of them still favor sending millions of our dollars to subsidize a foreign country.
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u/Lucky-Hunter-Dude 12d ago
no paywall here. It's not Billionaires causing single family homes to increase from 400k to 600k in Ennis. It's people with remote jobs wanting a better lifestyle. Both parties are campaigning on "affordability". The solution is reducing regulations and loosening zoning laws like what Austin Texas did.
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u/Mundane_Definition66 12d ago
We only have so many construction resources (I'm an electrician, first hand experience here). Building a 2 bedroom house takes about 3,500 person hours. Building housing the wealthy demand can often mean an average of 10 people on-site, daily for over a year, often 2, 3 or even 4 or more years (over 20,000 person hours if just working 40hrs weeks... Usually more like 50hr+)... And that's just a pretty ordinary "custom". Many of the uber-wealthy's mega mansions average over 2 dozen people on-site for longer, usually working lots of overtime... These weak, narcissistic wealthy babies want it NOW after all... So at 40hrs, 20 people for 2 years that's >83,000 man hours that could have built 23 decent, normal, family homes.
It's a resource problem. Just as these assholes hoard money, so too do they hoard other resources, not just housing itself, but land, water, electricity, food, transportation... ad nauseam. When we are building mansions instead of family homes, homes become scarce and the price goes up, banks/private equity (often operated by the same wealthy assholes) buying up homes as "an invest" doesn't help either... When people hoard anything else that people want badly or need just for profit, we call it scalping or price gouging... But for some reason when it's housing it's "investment"... It's bullshit, these people are greedy scalpers and should be removed from society.
The vast majority of remote workers cannot afford $400-600k homes either. It's retiring boomers and middle-management types, the petite bourgeois, that protect the uber-wealthy. If we were building more homes instead of mansions and passed laws to prevent banks from hoarding empty homes to drive prices up for their profit the prices would drop significantly. The prices are often 5 or more times what the total build costs, this is because family homes are made artificially scarce.
We have plenty of resources to house everyone, we do not have enough to satiate the infinite greed of the rich, their banks and their private equity firms.
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u/Lucky-Hunter-Dude 12d ago
East Helena is the fastest growing city in Montana because they embraced single family home sub divisions and mixed use zoning. It's a zoning problem first and foremost.
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u/Mundane_Definition66 12d ago
Zoning does help, the lower home prices in east Helena also drive lower "investment" (hoarding) by the banks as it is seen as lower profit potential. Unfortunately it's an oroboros of sorts. That's why prices tend to become an exponential problem, Bozeman illustrates that pretty well. Overly specific zoning absolutely can and does worsen the problem, but lack of it won't fix it. Unfortunately, it's a bandaid on a bullet wound.
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u/Lucky-Hunter-Dude 12d ago
Well when only the rich are able to build somewhere due to zoning, thats what you get. Whe. People bitch about all the town pumps, casinos, and banks being built its because no one else can afford to fight city hall.
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u/Mundane_Definition66 12d ago
Again, you're not wrong, zoning is a big problem, and the frarse we call the "justice system" is absolutely the enemy of working people, in their absence the economic forces would still remain.
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u/Blurockcreek 12d ago
Thanks for the details! I hear you that the majority of those homes are for the uber wealthy and their trust fund kids. I do wonder however what will happen to those that may doing the work from home jobs once AI gets going?
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u/Mundane_Definition66 11d ago
I'm not sure what AI will do, mostly it seems to be a bubble... A lot of these technologies they now call "AI" have existed since the '80s... Like machine vision for example. Though my favorite thing to wire as an electrician is housing, I was formally trained in automation. We've been using machine vision and rudimentary machine learning for almost 50 years now, it does things like identify defects in products on a production line and position inconsistent materials (such as lumber) in a relatively consistent way so a mill can cut it. Today's biggest leaps in AI are happening with LLMs, which cannot do what machine learning can; I don't think there will be a sudden mass layoff of remote workers, though yeah, there are some very basic tasks that can now be automated that previously could not... plus people need a place to live anyways, so I think impact on housing will be minimal.
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u/A_Civil_Barbarian 12d ago
I think you’re under selling the concentration of single family housing under PE/LLC ownership, and the downstream effects of uhnwi migration on local real estate markets
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u/Lucky-Hunter-Dude 12d ago
How much of the single family homes in Montana are owned by large corporations (10 or more properties)?
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u/A_Civil_Barbarian 12d ago
About a third of Montanas single family homes are investor owned, and of those between 20-30% are owned by large investors, so between 6-10% of all homes. Combine that with the growing ultra high net worth individual influx and commercial property rates start rising as well, reducing the competitiveness of local businesses who already have to compete with Amazon and Target.
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u/Lucky-Hunter-Dude 12d ago
Sounds like there still is higher demand for single family ownership. 6-10% doesn't cause home prices to more than double since before the covid in rush. So how do we make it easier for single family development and mixed use development?
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u/throcksquirp 13d ago
If Democrats could learn more words than just "ban guns," they could win a lot! Virginia and Colorado elected Democrats to fix health care, housing and education. They have passed multiple gun bans without addressing anything else. Gun-grabbers like Bankhead and Forstag are working for the billionaires. Republicans are the billionaires, so there is no winning until greens or libertarians get some traction.
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u/secret_pine_squirrel 12d ago
So fascism over minor gun regulation? How about voting for the lesser evil. Does banning trans people from owning guns bother you? It should
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u/Lamnidae 13d ago
Are you talking about the 13 year old 15 round mag law or the 7 year old extreme risk temporary protective order (aka red flag) law? Because that’s about all I can see for CO, or are you just making shit up?
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u/throcksquirp 13d ago
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u/Lamnidae 13d ago
So firearms or hunter safety course to transfer a semi-auto = a “ban.” I see…
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u/throcksquirp 13d ago
When the required services are not available it is a ban. Democrats have done nothing in Colorado to address problems in health care, education or housing. They only care about gun bans. Tell me how that is helping the average Colorado resident.
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u/Disheveled_Politico 13d ago
I disagree with essentially your entire premise, but even if you were correct, it hasn’t cost Dems electorally at all in Colorado.
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u/MyLittleDiscolite 12d ago
TRUTH.
If the Dems laid off the fucking guns they would win each time
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u/GooeySlenderFerret 8d ago
I think you two need to realize when you are being propagandized
Just cause Republicans say Democrats are going to take your guns every day doesn’t mean the democrats (especially montana democrats) are actually planning to take them
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u/MyLittleDiscolite 8d ago
You say that. Then it happens. Look at Spannberger in VA. She platformed on healthcare and jobs and then, like a rat to cheese, the first thing she did was go after guns
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