Missoula is the third least affordable city in Montana for teachers who are trying to pay for housing, Montana lawmakers heard during a presentation on Thursday.
“One industry that’s particularly impacted by housing costs is teachers,” explained Molly DelCurto, a fiscal analyst with the Legislative Fiscal Division. She was giving a presentation on Montana’s increasingly unaffordable housing market to the Modernization and Risk Analysis Committee.
In Missoula, the median income for a two-teacher household is about $100,000. DelCurto said the average home value in the county is about $559,000, so a two-teacher household making median income would be paying about 42.3% of their monthly gross income to the mortgage on a typical home.
That’s only better than two places in Montana. In Bozeman, a two-teacher household would pay around 56.1% of their income on a mortgage and in Belgrade the household would pay around 39.1%.
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Most lenders won’t give out a loan if a household is paying more than around a third of their income to the mortgage, DelCurto added.
She said that in 2014, there was no county in Montana where a two-teacher household making median income was paying more than 28% of their income toward a mortgage on a median-priced home. In 2024, there are nearly a dozen counties, all in western or southwestern Montana, where teachers can’t afford homes.
Missoula Public Schools Superintendent Micah Hill was unavailable for comment on Friday. Amanda Curtis, president of the Montana Federation for Public Employees, which represents K-12 educators and support staff, said that it’s long been clear that Montana teachers can’t afford to live where they work in many places in the state.
“It’s very common for teachers to have two or three jobs,” Curtis said. She recently got an email from one teacher in Helena who has to have three jobs, including her full-time teaching job, in order to pay increased insurance costs.
Curtis said she’s been encouraged to see some efforts to address the issue at the state level, but she’d like to see more creative ideas, especially with the state’s budget surplus.
“I’m not seeing very impressive plans yet (from state lawmakers),” Curtis said.
State Rep. Jane Gillette, a Republican from Bozeman, asked DelCurto if teachers are more susceptible to increasing home prices than other professionals. DelCurto responded that many workers in many industries are increasingly unable to afford homes in Montana, but teacher wages are public so it’s easier to get that information. That’s why she chose to use teachers as an example to highlight how homes have gotten more unaffordable in the state.
DelCurto…
