Heads Up: A quick-response series from Build the Dream—unfiltered takes on developing stories.
The Head’s Up this week is in my backyard — Bozeman, Montana — and the right just embarrassed itself on a housing story that I gotta highlight. What played out here over the weekend is a microcosm of a much larger problem. And if we don’t solve it, we will lose our future in every sense of the word.
What just happened in Bozeman
On Friday, Gallatin County and the City of Bozeman broke ground on a project called Hidden Creek. 182 apartments. Five buildings. Set aside, in perpetuity, for renters earning 30, 60, and 70 percent of the area median income. It’s funded through the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program and propped up by money from roughly twelve different public and private sources — including about $4.5 million from the county and the city.
Why this isn’t the Build the Dream answer
I want to be clear about my point of view on government-subsidized housing. I believe it is immoral, doesn’t solve the problem, and creates more problems. Let me say plainly why.
Hidden Creek is the local government picking winners. It uses your tax dollars and federal tax credits to build a small number of units that are walled off from the rest of the housing market forever. The rent isn’t set by what regular people are willing to pay or what builders are willing to risk. It’s set by Washington’s AMI calculation and a deed restriction that lasts until the heat death of the universe.
It’s redistribution. It’s money out of taxpayers’ pockets, handed to whoever can fill out the application, with minimal federal oversight and repeated cases of fraud across the country.
And it won’t even work.
We’ve known this for decades. In a 2005 study published in the Journal of Public Economics, Wharton’s Todd Sinai and Joel Waldfogel found that government housing subsidies don’t actually increase the housing stock — they merely substitute it for private construction. Follow-up research on the LIHTC program estimated crowd-out as high as 70 percent. HUD’s own literature review admits it: “the long run net effect on housing supply is less than the number of subsidized units.”
Translating that: when the government drops a subsidy into a housing market, private builders mostly stop building the units they would have built anyway. Total supply barely moves; it may even be less than it otherwise would have been. The overall price level — what your neighbor pays for a one-bedroom — does not come down.
So who benefits? A small number of lottery winners who land a unit in the subsidized project. A handful of developers and tax-credit syndicators get to collect fees from the federal tax expenditure. Banks that buy the credits to lower their own tax bills. Local politicians who get to take credit, create a constituency, graft, and pull.
That’s why they spend our property tax dollars on this rather than cutting property taxes by spending less.
Who pays? Everyone else.
Federal taxpayers bear the cost of the tax credit and the COVID-era stimulus dollars. Yes, they are still just sitting around like a ticking inflation bomb of newly created money. Cash from the same printing press that caused housing inflation in the first place and continues to create problems in the economy.
And the renters competing for market-rate apartments get no relief at all. They keep paying inflated rent on a price-inflated supply that the subsidy program promised to fix and didn’t.
This is: Tax everyone. Inflate everyone. Help a few.
The right lit up — and shot the wrong target
Over the weekend, several right-leaning accounts on X went after this story hard. Some were very reasonable in expressing concerns about inter and extrastate migration to Montana and Montana losing its character as a result. But some began using it as an example of why the work of the Frontier Institute —Montana’s leader in property-rights-based housing reform — and that somehow, this is all a result of the Montana Miracle.1
They didn’t train their fire on the actual policy problems of the subsidized project. They fired instead at the entire agenda of a market-based, property rights-based housing reform approach. This is a solution that we’ve seen grow in popularity in many states. From first movers in Montana to more recently in Texas, Idaho, and Florida, all are heading in that direction with others.
But this approach to housing reform and the Frontier Institute had nothing to do with Hidden Creek; all of the statutory authority and government policy that allows for subsidized housing precedes the housing reform packages of 2023 and ‘25. In fact, part of the Montana Miracle reforms included banning inclusionary zoning – a specific kind of subsidized housing– and ending rent control.
Principle & Progressivism
You cannot win a policy fight if you cannot tell friend from foe.
That’s what you’re watching with this story and the circular firing squad afterward. Accounts with hundreds of thousands of impressions can’t distinguish between a government tax-credit project and a property rights organization. They sound similar. Both contain the word “housing”. Both involve buildings. Case closed, fire away.
They are opposites.
One uses your tax dollars to build a permanently price-controlled island. The other says: Get out of the way and let your neighbor build an ADU if he wants to.
One is the government deciding what your community looks like. The other is your community deciding for itself, one decision made in a state of personal liberty, at a time.
If the right cannot make that distinction, the right will lose every housing fight in America, and soon thereafter every election in America. And it will deserve it because it has lost the plot on what principles we are attempting to conserve, and it will lose any political ability to solve actual social problems.
The Lesson
The Montana Miracle is a revival of the Western tradition’s basic tenets. It is so ironic that some influencer “conservatives” would oppose them because lowering prices in Bozeman, thanks to market processes, might allow - not just native Montanans - to live here comfortably but also newcomers.
Don’t get me wrong, in many ways, I wish Montana had stayed my family’s secret spot, too. I’m very concerned about the growth of cartel activity in my town. About the sudden spike of non-English speakers and the politics that come with a bunch of people from the coasts moving here. Although we’ve been talking about that problem in Montana since before 2012, it appears to have made us more partisan and more consistently team Republican, which has its own dangers for conservatives.
Sure. We can take steps to address some of those problems, but we can’t bar Coloradans or Washingtonians from moving to Montana; the Constitution doesn’t allow it. The best localities can do about illegal immigration is work with ICE, which, unfortunately, Bozeman’s city government refuses to do.
Should we not leverage conservativism to serve the people of Montana? Can we not take on additional efforts that will enable the everyday citizens to solve the many challenges this new era has given us? What if we could do this by leaning into our philosophy rather than away from it? The solution from the critics appears to be to do nothing and allow Montanans to just suffer with reduced economic opportunity as rents skyrocket and mortgages become absurd.
Well, I’m from here, my children are here, and I refuse to do nothing.
I hope to see a future where the right fires its criticism at planning boards, mandates on free enterprise, and the decade-long permitting fights that created the problem. Not at the property rights organizations doing the actual work of unblocking American housing from the disaster of scientific progressivism.
The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s being blocked.
And we are never going to unblock it if we can’t distinguish between redistribution welfarism and Western tradition property rights.
The “Montana Miracle” was a wave of reforms enacted by the 2023 and 2025 Montana legislatures that shifted the state from one of the most restrictive land-use environments in the country to one grounded in property rights and the freedom to build.
