He admits parking may become an issue, but, he says, “I try not to bitch about it because I have a bad habit of collecting cars.”Įven Northside residents who have been there the longest point to positive changes, like more young families and new homebuyers who care for formerly-neglected properties.īachman, the crane business owner, doesn’t know how much longer Otto’s will be around. He plumbed some of the townhome projects and sees the growth as inevitable. “Some of them, it’s high time to mow them down and start over,” he said.Īster’s house was passed down from his great-grandfather, who worked for the Northern Pacific Railroad when it was the Northside’s main employer. He runs a plumbing company, and says he’s seen the disrepair in some of the old Northside houses. “They’re just too cool and the lines are too smooth,” he said.Īster’s more equanimous about the neighborhood changing. He pointed to a rosewater-pink 1957 Cadillac. He grew up with older cars, and said he just doesn’t like to see them rusted up and discarded. Smith doesn’t blame his new neighbors in the townhomes, but he misses the old feel of the neighborhood.ĭown the alley, Smith’s friend Tide Aster works on classic cars in his backyard. “That’s partly because, you know, they put up four of these where there used to be two houses and a bunch of garden space,” he said, pointing across the alley at a lot filled with the square townhomes. His property taxes have tripled to $2900 a year since 2011, and keep going up. He said there’s no place to park on the street, and congestion is getting worse. ![]() Smith runs a boiler service and auto repair shop on his property and has noticed an uptick in theft and vandalism in his alley over the last 10 years. ![]() “If we had a place to go that we could afford, we would leave in a quarter of a second, and I’ve been here for 58 years, and I love the place,” Smith said. But changes to the neighborhood have him thinking about moving. Val Smith attended Whittier School, which is now the site of Head Start, and lives with his partner in a Northside house his parents bought in the 1970s. “The former $100,000 fixer-upper house is now the $300,000 fixer-upper house,” Oaks said. On the Northside, the median price of a home in September was up 48% from 10 years ago, at over $292,000, according to MOR. In September, the median price of a townhome unit in Missoula was over $389,000, compared to $478,000 for a single-family home. Missoula has ramped up townhome construction in the last decade, building 146 last year compared to just 20 in 2011, according to the Missoula Organization of Realtors.īut townhomes today are hardly more affordable than single-family homes. Instead, the city’s residential market keeps supporting more and more expensive homes. The ordinance was meant to prompt high-density development in order to stave off suburban sprawl and overdevelopment of surrounding green space, and to increase supply to make housing more affordable in Missoula.īut that’s not what’s happening, said Bob Oaks, executive director of the North Missoula Community Development Corporation. That year, the state Legislature passed a law allowing lot owners to put up multi-unit residences without having to pass onerous subdivision reviews through an ordinance called the Townhome Exemption Development Option. Since 2011, a lot of new building projects in Missoula, and on the Northside in particular, are compact townhomes on single-home parcels. They once used the big cranes to maintain large industrial sites like the Smurfit-Stone Container mill in Frenchtown and the ASARCO smelter in East Helena. Bachman’s dad expanded into crane work later. ![]() “I think they want more people just working in their homes, on computers,” he said.īachman’s grandfather, Otto, started the business as a towing service in the 1930s. Bachman nodded toward the townhomes across the street. A roundabout on Orange Street has blocked quick access to the interstate, and a new weight limit on a neighborhood street forces a long detour to reach his other equipment yard just a few blocks away.Īll of that adds up to lost business, he said, but the city doesn’t seem to care. Aside from the parking, he feels like it’s harder than it used to be to run a business on the Northside, and in Missoula in general.
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