and Republican Tim Sheehy have hurled nonstop insults and accusations at one another on housing affordability in a matchup in which the victor could be the chamber’s majority maker.
Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and Montana business owner, blamed housing prices on “the four Is”: inflation, interest rates, inventory, and illegal immigration. And, of course, Tester, for supporting “disastrous policies” of the Biden administration. “His attempt to cast it on me and people who have moved here from out of state is just wrong,” he told theIn reality, housing industry experts say Montana’s affordability “crisis” extends far beyond one senator’s power or one wealthy businessman.
“We need more housing, and there needs to be an easier path to provide more housing,” said John Barkow, CFO of Bozeman-based OSM Construction. “That’s the only way you’re going to really make an impact on lowering housing costs.”Barkow credited Bozeman city officials with providing higher-density zoning and simplifying the building permit process.
“Public lands belong to you, the public,” Sheehy told supporters at his rally. “In the last 30 years … radical environmental legal groups and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., have taken those public lands, and they said, ‘They’re ours.’”of a property rights and environmental research nonprofit group that, decades ago, advocated the privatization of public lands, a position it said it no longer supports.