Heart of the Flathead

21. Keeping Homeownership Within Reach

• David Wigginton • Episode 21

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Owning a home in the Flathead Valley has become increasingly out of reach for many working families, but there are practical solutions. This episode features Kim Morisaki, Executive Director of the Northwest Montana Community Land Trust, explaining how community land trusts make homeownership more affordable by separating the cost of the home from the land. Kim breaks down who qualifies, how shared-equity homeownership works, and how homeowners can still build wealth while ensuring homes remain affordable for future generations.

The conversation also explores the broader housing challenges facing the Flathead Valley, from the shortage of workforce housing to the rising cost of land and the need for smarter growth. Kim shares how the land trust is preserving affordable homes across Kalispell, Whitefish, and Columbia Falls, while offering thoughtful insight into the choices communities will need to make to keep the valley livable for the people who call it home.

Link - Northwest Montana Community Land Trust

If you care about affordable housing, first-time homebuyer options, and real solutions that can scale, listen now, share this with a neighbor, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What’s one housing idea you want the Flathead Valley to try next?

Heart of the Flathead is brought to you by:

Heart of the Flathead, is produced by David Wigginton, in partnership with LeftBrainRightBrain Marketing. Listeners can find the podcast online at HeartoftheFlathead.com and LeftBrainRightBrain Marketing at lbrbm.com. The content for Heart of the Flathead podcasts and any show notes and transcripts are copyrighted by David Wigginton. All rights are reserved. Reproduction and rebroadcasting, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited without written permission. Contact David Wigginton by clicking the Send Us a Text link at the top of the episode description. 

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host or production team. Appearance on the show does not constitute an endorsement of any goods, services, or opinions discussed. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered professional, legal, medical, or financial advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making decisions based on the content of this show.

SPEAKER_01

Welcome to the Heart of the Flathead, where we sit down with the change makers, the unsung heroes, and everyday folks who give this place its pulse. If you live here, love here, or just want to know what makes Kalispell and the Valley tick, you're in the right place. And now here's your host, Dave Wigginton.

SPEAKER_02

Welcome everyone to another episode of Heart of the Flathead. I'm pleased to introduce our guest this week, Kim Morisaki, the executive director of the Northwest Community Land Trust here in Northwest Montana. Kim, welcome to the Heart of the Flathead.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you so much for having me. I love your concept on this show.

SPEAKER_02

Awesome. And I did make a mistake. It's the Northwest Montana Community Land Trust. So I haven't forbiddle Montana out. But Kim, we're grateful to have you here today. Super interesting organization you're a part of that I don't think a lot of people in the community know about. But we always like to start off getting to know our guests a little bit, who they are, where they're from, and some of their life's adventures and things that they've learned along the way and how they ended up where they are. So

A Flathead Valley Life Story

SPEAKER_02

can you spend a few minutes sharing a little bit about you and some of the highlights of your life's journey?

SPEAKER_00

Oh. Well, yeah, that sounds like a fun ride down memory lane. I am fifth, sixth generation Flathead Valley, which lots of people say that means nobody else can be a Montanan. And that's not how I mean it at all. I think if you want to be a Montanan, you can be a Montanan. But for me, being having so much history and so much family, relatives, friends in this valley over such a long period of time is really been an important part of my concept of who I am and what it means to be a Montanan. And so I grew up here, went to high school at Plathead High School, had lots of friends. My grandparents were really involved in the community. My grandfather was one of the first guys to be involved with backcountry horsemen. So spent a lot of time riding in the bob with my grandparents. And by the time I was a junior in high school, I could not wait to leave this place. I was ready to go. And ended up going to California for a couple of years or four years to go to college and came back every summer.

SPEAKER_02

Where'd you go to school?

SPEAKER_00

At Claremont, McKenna, outside of Los Angeles, and loved it. Studied politics, philosophy, and economics. Came home every summer, worked for a gal named Carol Daly doing economic development, which made my mom really happy because my mom could not figure out what I was going to do with my degree. And the fact that there was a job with the word economics in it really helped her feel okay about what I was studying. So she couldn't quite figure out if it wasn't a nurse or a teacher what I was going to do. So Carol Daly was a huge, huge influence on the trajectory of my life. One summer, she had me take a group of Japanese people who were visiting from Kumamoto, which is Montana's sister state, which was set up by Mike Mansfield when he was the ambassador to Japan. And my job was to take them around, show them schools and businesses and whatever in the valley. And at the end of that, they said, gee, when you graduate from college, you should come to Japan and teach English. And I don't know anything about teaching English. And they're like, it doesn't matter. You speak English, that's fine. So I ended up going to Japan and teaching high school English for three years, made so many friends, learned so much about Japan while I was there, met my husband the second year I was there. And eventually, after starting a couple businesses there and importing building materials and traveling around the country on my bicycle, ended up coming convincing him that we really, as much as he loved being a high school rugby coach and as good as he was at it, that we really should come back to Montana and raise our kids here. So we came back and we brought his mom with us, and that was fun. And I don't think I could get him to leave Montana now. And that took some convincing to get him to get here, but once he got here, he really fell in love with it.

SPEAKER_02

How long have you been back in Montana with your husband and mother-in-law?

SPEAKER_00

We came back 23 years ago.

SPEAKER_02

And so how many years in total were you in Japan?

SPEAKER_00

11. We were there for 11 years.

Living in Japan and Montana

SPEAKER_02

So what would you say is the biggest difference between your time in Japan and your time in Montana? Because obviously Japan's a totally different culture, different way of life. And where did you live in Japan? And what were the takeaways from your time there?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, we lived in Kumamoto the whole time, which is a very rural farming community. The prefecture is about the size of Flathead County. It has over a million people living in it. And the people are compactly living within the city limits, and there's still a ton of agricultural land. So that felt like home. I could see why Mike Mansfield thought we would be a good sister state for them. Love the people, loved living there, missed my mountains, missed my freshwater lakes. It's very hot and humid there. So totally different kind of lifestyle. The other big difference, and my husband and I laugh about this, is Montana culture is so pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality and independent, and you had to be homesteaders, had to be independent. So it makes sense that Montana would be that way. But Japan's culture is definitely more of it takes a village to do anything. And so from the day you're born, those different philosophies are imbued into the children of those two places and trying to mix those two made for some interesting children. So their dad was a rugby coach, a really good high school rugby coach, and he raised them with a coach mentality of be part of the team. You always got to be looking out for your whole team. So that is definitely part of the mentality. I would say my younger son is also pretty fiercely independent as well. So they're a nice, interesting mixture. The interesting thing about raising kids between two cultures and with two different languages is that there seems to be no barriers in their brain. They always think, well, there's more than one way to do something, or there's more than one word for whatever the thing is. And that's been interesting to watch sort of develop in them over the years.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that sounds very interesting. Do they both speak Japanese then?

SPEAKER_00

When Yuji's mom lived with us when they were little, she only spoke Japanese to them and they understood her, but their spoken Japanese wasn't great. And then my older son went back and taught English, did the same teaching program that I did, went back. And the year that he was there, I was amazed how quickly the Japanese came back to him. So it was in there in the back of his brain somewhere.

SPEAKER_02

Great to have two languages under your belt.

Kim's path to The Land Trust

SPEAKER_02

So you've been back in Montana for 23 years. You are now with the land trust. And did you come back directly from Japan into your role with the land trust now? Or how did you end up becoming the executive director?

SPEAKER_00

My family's been in construction, my grandfather, my dad. So when we moved back, I ended up working for a custom door company for a while because the business that I had in Japan was importing building materials. And so it had always been construction, construction materials, building houses. My husband actually worked for Denman construction for a while before he started his own building business. And so we did that for a while. And then there was an opportunity to go back into economic development, which was really what I loved. And at that point, I owned a business and run a business and done a few things. And so I worked for Montana West economic development for about a decade, helping people start businesses and grow businesses and doing a little marketing and promotion and loved that. But then the pandemic came along and made a hash of things. And I ended up seeing the advertisement for this executive director's position for the Northwest Montana Community Land Trust, which I didn't even really know what it was, which is sad because my good friend Catherine King actually was instrumental in starting it. But I had just like probably 99% of the people listening to this podcast, I didn't know what it was. And I started looking into it and I was like, wow, this is a really fabulous idea. And I think that I would love to try to grow it more than it's already been grown, which was pretty significant at the time.

SPEAKER_02

So

What A Community Land Trust Does

SPEAKER_02

what does the land trust do and what does it do for our community?

SPEAKER_00

So community land trusts have been around for about 50 years. They're all over the country. They basically buy the land under houses or could be farms as well or apartment buildings, and they hold the land as a community asset forever. So basically, a community land trust here in Calisbell, Montana will buy a house and the land underneath it, split the title for the land from the title for the house, hold the land in the land trust, and sell just the house to a first-time home buyer who is below what they call 140% area median income. 140% area median income for a household of four is like $120,000, $130,000. So it is basically everybody who's working for a wage in this valley is eligible if they're a first-time home buyer to buy one of these houses. The houses themselves, because you're taking the cost of the land out of it, the houses themselves are being sold for somewhere between $165,000 and $350,000, depending on the age of the house and the size of the house.

SPEAKER_02

That's amazing. So are we talking like standard, like three-bedroom, two-bath, or are these kind of more like tiny homes, or what are we looking at with these types of homes?

SPEAKER_00

We have the whole gamut. So where my friend Catherine King got involved is when she worked for the city of Kalisville back in 2009, all those houses that were in the foreclosure market after the real estate crash, there was a program put out by the Obama administration called the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. And communities could get grant money. And in the case of Kalisville, they took that grant money, they bought all these houses off the foreclosure market, cleaned them up, put them into the land trust, and sold them. And back then they were selling those houses for $80,000, $90,000, $120,000. That was 10, 12 years ago. And people who buy those homes agree that they're buying them below market rate and that when they sell them, they will also sell them below market rate to the next first-time home buyer who qualifies. And the land trust smooths that process along. And so those people who buy that home agree to buy the house. And then when they sell it, they get 100% of what they paid for the house, plus they get 25% of what the increase in the value of the home while they owned the home. So they're making money, but they're not making as much as they would if there was a if they were buying it just off the open market. But it's always way better than renting because they're always getting their money back. And so those houses that are have flipped now once or twice since then, those houses are really inexpensive. We're also buying new houses in Calispell and Whitefish in Columbia Falls. And those houses are a little more expensive, but they're all two-bedroom, one bath, three-bedroom, two-bath, that size of house of you know 900 to 1,500 square feet, nice yards usually. And we're also partnering, we bought some land in Calispel, and Habitat built townhouses there, and which is great because you've taken the cost of the house or cost of the land out of it. And Habitat sells the houses with a 2% interest rate. And so there are really great ways to make the house more affordable.

SPEAKER_02

So are the land trust and habitat, are they partners or are are their models different? Because I know that they're both focused on housing, but what's what's the relationship though or the difference?

SPEAKER_00

The models are different, but we've Mary Beth Moranda at Habitat and I sat down a few years ago and we're like, how could we partner and make the houses that are built on community land trust land even better? And we just figured out the land trust will go get the land and habitat will figure out how to build the houses. Those habitat houses will get that really great 2% interest that the habitat home buyers always get. They'll get the benefit of volunteer labor, and those houses will become community land trust houses. So they will always be affordable. They will never just go back out into the market.

SPEAKER_02

So does the land trust only develop ground up, or do you buy existing homes as well?

SPEAKER_00

We also buy existing homes. We've got two different kinds of models to do that. One is we've been buying deed restricted homes up in Whitefish. We partnered with the developer of the Trailview neighborhood. There's a great story. You should definitely interview Jerry Dunker sometime because that's an awesome story. Those houses were deed restricted. We partnered with Jerry and also the city of Whitefish, buy those deed restricted homes when they come available, take the land out of the out of the equation and turn around and sell those houses. I think the cheapest one I sold was 185,000, but most of them are more in the 300 to $350,000. And those are three, four-year-old houses. Nicely, very nicely built. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And whitefish, too. In whitefish.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And then the other model is sometimes people maybe they bought their house back in the 70s and maybe their mother was living it and their mother passed away. And they're like, we just want this house to be affordable. We want some young family to come live in it. So they're willing to sell it below market to the land trust. And we just work with to figure that out. And I fundraise the money to buy the land. And somebody on my wait list comes in and they have the money to buy the house. And we put our money together and buy the house from somebody who's willing to maybe sell to us a little below market. So another model is the city of Columbia Falls actually gave us land to build six houses on. That land went into the land trust, and Habitat is building houses on it right now. So there's all different ways to solve the problem.

unknown

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

You definitely hear one of the, I know our Chamber of Commerce here locally talks about workforce, workforce

The demand for affordable housing

SPEAKER_02

housing, lack of affordable housing for the workforce. And you had mentioned like pretty much everybody who works for a wage here basically falls under that 140% of median household income for our geography. So do you have a sense of what the demand is for affordable housing and what the shortage is on the supply side to meet that demand?

SPEAKER_00

All the cities have had different studies done. And the shortage for what they call cost houses or first-time homebuyer houses is in the thousands in each community. So we're short thousands of houses in this valley when you compare demand to what's actually being built. And that's probably the result of a couple of different things. One is the Flathead Valley has always built houses one at a time, custom homes one at a time on land. And I was having a conversation with my dad the other day, and he was talking about how he and my mom built four houses in less than eight years when I was a little girl. And my dad was a builder, and he paid $1,000 for a lot out at Panoramic Heights, which he and my mom just happened to have in the bank. He went to the bank, borrowed $14,000 to build the house. The bank was like, sure, we'll lend you the money. Do you want us to put it in the savings account or your checking account? So that was pretty easy. He built a house that cost him about three years of his wages. And my mom was an x-ray tech at the time. She actually worked at the old hospital here in Calspan, Fifth Avenue East. And they could totally afford it. They paid cash for the land and they were good to go. And then that worked so well. And they were young, they were in their 20s. My dad would work full-time and then he'd build another house on the weekends. And they did that four times in a row. And by the time the fourth one was done, I think I was nine years old. And my mom had had two more kids at that point. And she was like, That's it, I'm done. We're not doing, I'm not moving anymore. But you know, they were building houses and selling them for what was three or four or five years worth of the average wage, which people were making $5,000 a year in the valley in the early 70s. Now, if you look at it, houses sell for $450,000, $550,000, $650,000 is a starter home. And that is eight to ten times what the average wage in the valley is. But the crazy thing to me is that lots, and this is why the land trust is a good solution for the Flathead Valley. Lots in the Flathead Valley sell for $120, $150,000, $180,000 for city lots, you know, a hundred times what they were selling for in the 70s, 150 times what they were selling for in the 70s. And that's what has made all the difference. Young families just trying to get started, they don't have $150,000 in their savings account to just go buy a lot. So the world's changed a little bit.

SPEAKER_02

So those are stunning numbers, though. You think about just inflation, like how much the cost has gone up, but how much incomes have not gone up relative to the cost of housing. That's pretty remarkable. So how many homes are in the land trust in the Flathead Valley now?

SPEAKER_00

We're just getting ready to buy number 72 and number 73. Columbia Falls Habitat is building six more in Columbia Falls right now. So we're hoping by the end of the year we'll be right around 80. And I've got a few other possibilities for next year. So I'm hoping we're gonna hit 100 here pretty soon.

SPEAKER_02

And are all the homes sold and occupied by homeowners?

SPEAKER_00

Yes. Yep. And once in a while somebody calls and says, you know, I'm gonna move to Lake County, or I got a job somewhere else, or I got married and I'm gonna move into my new husband's house, and they're ready to sell their house. And then we have a wait list of about 50 people and we just work our way down the wait list and say, Hey, we got a house in Kalispel with two bedrooms and a bath. Are you interested in looking at it?

SPEAKER_02

So that was actually one of my questions is do people ever graduate from the land trust to traditional home ownership? Is that a common thing

Do people "graduate" from Trust homes?

SPEAKER_02

or an anomaly?

SPEAKER_00

It is pretty common. Life happens. So some people might change houses within a couple of years. Some other people stay much longer, but kind of the typical average is about seven years. And then people need a bigger house or they need a different location or something.

SPEAKER_02

And there's no time limit, though. They can own it for their whole life if they wanted to.

SPEAKER_00

They can, and their children can inherit the house. Or if the children don't want to live there, they can go to their estate when they pass away, and then the land trust will buy it from the estate. And so their children still benefit from that financial gain, and the land trust just turns around and sells it to somebody else.

SPEAKER_02

So, how does somebody get on a wait list and get into the queue to be able to buy an affordable home through the land trust?

How do people get on the waiting list?

SPEAKER_00

It's actually pretty simple. We have a website which it's www.nw for northwest, mt for Montana, and CLT for community landtrust.org. And there's plenty of information there. You there's an application you can download. It's two and a half pages. It is pretty darn simple. You send that in your latest tax return and give me a call, and I can answer any questions you have. And the other thing you have to do is you do need to be able to qualify for a small mortgage with a local. And so you do need to have fairly good credit to do that. But I encourage people to get on the wait list because it takes a couple years. Even if your credit isn't great, go ahead, get on the wait list, and then start working. Find a banker you like, start working with them, figure out how to get your credit score fixed. And by the time your credit score is fixed, I might have a house for you to buy.

SPEAKER_02

Great. So no realtor required then, right?

SPEAKER_00

We actually have a contract with a realtor, Mandy Heinle. She's fabulous. Another girl who's been in the valley for a long time. And she and I actually have been friends since kindergarten. And she manages all of it for a flat $3,000 fee, which is way better than five or six percent. And she just walks people through the process, makes sure that all the paperwork gets done correctly and people get all their questions answered.

SPEAKER_02

So, Kim, as you think about our community now, and you think about what the land trust is doing,

Kim's vision for affordable housing

SPEAKER_02

what's your vision for housing and affordable housing in particular for the Flathead Valley, say over the next five to 10 to 20 years?

SPEAKER_00

I love the land trust as a tool. I don't think it's the only tool in the toolbox. I think they're for us as a community to really tackle this affordability challenge, we're going to need to do all the things. And some of those things might be unusual. They might be out-of-the-box solutions. And we need to kind of, as a community, come to grips with the fact that if we want young people and new families and young professionals to come here and work, they need to be able to buy houses. They need to be able to afford housing. And I don't want my children or anybody else's children to leave this valley if they really want to live here because they can't afford housing. So I don't think anybody wants that. But we need to come to the reality of this is a fabulous place to live. People are going to want to live here. Our young people want to live here. We want them to live here because it's good for the economy. So we're going to have to do things a little differently. That might mean we need to think about density. We need to think about building more within the city limits, going up instead of just single-level houses on city lots or building on all of our farmland. So my hope is that by having conversations like this with people who are good people and really want young people to be able to afford a home here, we need to have conversations about just the facts on the ground and the economic reality of it. And if we don't want to just become a community of retired people or people my age, we have to do things a little differently.

SPEAKER_02

Well said. So, Kim, thank you for all that you and the Land Trust do for our community. This is a great organization that I was not familiar with until I met you a few weeks ago. So thank you for coming on Heart of the Flathead today. We're gonna we're gonna wrap up today with our Flathead 5, which are the five questions we ask all of our

Flathead Five Rapid Fire

SPEAKER_02

guests. And they're rapid fire, quick response. And I'm sure you're gonna have some pretty, pretty good responses being a fifth or sixth generation Montanan. So we'll go ahead and move on to that. What is your favorite hidden gem in the community?

SPEAKER_00

I think that we're very fortunate to have all of these public access areas and two lakes. That's the reason I couldn't wait to get back from Japan was all these lakes. They're all over the valley, they're easy to get into, and Wayfarers is my favorite. I also think that the Bob Marshall is a pretty amazing place. And I also like the Conrad Mansion. I think that's a pretty special historical thing. My grandfather was really into local history, so I grew up on that. So I really appreciate what the Conrad Mansion has kept for us.

SPEAKER_02

Riz or Bobcats?

SPEAKER_00

Oh, I don't care.

SPEAKER_02

Wow, I'm surprised to hear that.

SPEAKER_00

Sorry. Sorry to all my friends and nieces and nephews that go to all the both schools, but you know, we're not a football family, we're a rugby, hockey, baseball family, and none of us went to school at either of those schools. So I don't know. Go Montana.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you're you're kind of Switzerland for uh for the the Grizz Bobcats right about that. That's great. So what's your what's your favorite outdoor activity in the valley?

SPEAKER_00

I really love going to the lake in the summer. My husband bought me a really nice paddleboard last year. So we've been paddleboarding in the evenings when the weather gets good, and I love working in my flower garden.

SPEAKER_02

What do you know today that you wish you knew when you started out?

SPEAKER_00

That's such a good question. I wish that somebody would have told me earlier that I probably didn't need to care very much about what other people thought. It took me until my 20s to figure out that people really weren't paying that much attention to me. They were more worried about what they were doing, and I didn't need to worry about what they thought about what I was doing. I should just do what fills my cup and makes me happy and do what I thought was right and not worry so much about what other people thought.

SPEAKER_02

When your story's over, what do you want the one or two sentence review on your book to be?

SPEAKER_00

I would like for it to say she didn't always think there was a lot of wisdom to be found in conventional wisdom. And she wasn't afraid to try the thing that everybody said couldn't be done. And she never met an out-of-the-box solution. She wouldn't at least give a little bit of consideration. I definitely think there's some benefit to taking the path less traveled.

SPEAKER_02

Kim, thank you so much for coming on Heart of the Flathead. Really appreciate getting to know you and uh learning a little bit more about your personal story and what you guys do over at the uh the the cumulative. So thank you for all that you do, and thank you again for coming on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00

Thanks for doing this podcast. It's really great. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01

Thanks for listening to this episode of Heart of the Flathead. We'd love to hear your thoughts about today's episode and the podcast in general. You can listen at heart of the flathead.com or wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can reach David via the contact page at heart of theflathead.com or by clicking on the send us feedback link at the top of the episode description and your favorite podcast app. Heart of the Flathead is produced by David Wigginton in partnership with Left Brain Right Brain Studios. Listeners can find the podcast online at Heart of the Flathead.com and LeftBrain Right Brain Studios at LBRBstudios.com. The content for Heart of the Flathead Podcasts and any show notes and transcripts are copyrighted by David Wiginton. All rights reserved. Reproduction and rebroadcasting in whole or in part is strictly prohibited without written permission. Contact David Wiginton at Heart of the Flathead.com with your request. The views and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host or the production team. Appearance on the show does not constitute an endorsement of any goods, services, or opinions discussed. The podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered professional, legal, medical, or financial advice. Always consult a qualified professional before making decisions based on the content of this show.