By Alida Tinch, Bigfork REALTOR® with Glacier Sotheby's International Realty
Say you are touring a house on the edge of Columbia Falls this month. The listing agent points out the open field behind the property line and calls it a selling point: room to breathe, a buffer from the next roofline, maybe a future garden. Six months ago, if a developer wanted to turn that field into forty townhomes, you would have had a seat at a public hearing to say so. Today you would have fifteen business days to file a written appeal, and the burden of proving the city got it wrong would sit on you.
That is not a hypothetical. Columbia Falls adopted its new Future Land Use Plan on June 8, 2026, and gave final approval to the zoning and subdivision code that implements it a week later, on June 15, under the state's Montana Land Use Planning Act. Anyone comparing Columbia Falls to Whitefish or Kalispell on price alone is looking at the wrong variable. The real story this year is that the mechanism behind Columbia Falls' affordability, room to grow, looser rules, a smaller bureaucracy, is the same mechanism that just removed most of the public's ability to weigh in on what gets built around them.
What actually changed
Montana's Legislature adopted Senate Bill 382 in May 2023, creating the Montana Land Use Planning Act. Ten cities across the state, Columbia Falls among them, were required to rewrite their growth policies and zoning codes to comply. Columbia Falls spent from early 2026 through mid-June finishing that work with the consulting firm Cushing Terrell, and the city council adopted the final plan and regulations at a special meeting.
City planner Eric Mulcahy summed up the scope of it plainly to the council:
"As part of MLUPA, we were required for subdivision rights and zoning regulations to comply with these policies that essentially changed the whole way we address subdivisions and zoning in the past."
Three changes matter most if you are buying here:
Public hearings are mostly gone for standard subdivisions. If a proposed project complies with the new zoning, it goes through administrative review instead of a hearing. Neighbors who object have fifteen business days to file a written appeal to the city administrator, and if that fails, to the planning board, and after that to the city council or district court.
Duplexes are now allowed anywhere a single-family home is allowed. The state law does away with single-family-only subdivisions as a standalone category.
Accessory dwelling units are permitted on lots that already have a single-family home. A second, smaller structure can go up without the kind of case-by-case approval that used to be required.
Here is the shift in plain terms:
| Before MLUPA | After June 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Standard subdivision review | Public hearing before planning board and council | Administrative review, no hearing required |
| Neighbor objection window | Testify at hearing | 15 business days to file written appeal |
| Single-family lot next door | Single-family only | Duplex allowed by right |
| Existing single-family lot | ADU required separate approval | ADU permitted |
The goal of the law, as reporting on the council meeting noted, is to front-load public input into the broad planning phase Columbia Falls just finished, rather than litigating each project as it comes up. That is a defensible policy goal for a state trying to speed up housing production. It is also a real change in what "buying near open land" means here starting this summer.
The test case: Teakettle Heights
You do not have to imagine how this plays out. The city already approved its answer.
On June 1, 2026, the council approved developer Mick Ruis's Teakettle Heights subdivision, the largest single subdivision in Columbia Falls history: 421 units on 78 acres south of Aluminum Drive, on land that once belonged to the Columbia Falls Aluminum Company. The parcel sits on a federal Superfund site. The EPA confirmed in May that the area is suitable for residential use, though no water wells can be drilled there, and the subdivision will instead connect to city sewer and water. The planning commission added conditions before signing off: the developer must preserve access to existing test wells, disclose the Superfund history in the subdivision's covenants, and plant a buffer of trees to partially offset the logging already done on the site.
The project includes 125 detached single-family homes, 56 single-family townhouse lots, and 240 multi-family apartment units, plus roughly 26 acres of open space including a planned baseball field and soccer field. Ruis has also offered qualified buyers a financing package with 2 percent down and a reduced mortgage rate.
This matters for two reasons beyond the numbers. First, it shows the new process working exactly as designed: a project of this scale moved from planning commission recommendation to council approval in about six weeks, with the fiercest debate centered on water testing and tree cover rather than the up-or-down question a public hearing used to allow. Second, it establishes what "growth" looks like in Columbia Falls going forward. The new land use plan directs future development north onto the old CFAC land, west and southwest along Highway 2, and into roughly 24 acres around Cedar Palace Medical Center. If you are shopping in those corridors, you are shopping inside the growth zone the city just drew on purpose.
What this means for the price gap
The reason buyers look at Columbia Falls in the first place is the gap. As of April 2026, Zillow put Whitefish's typical home value at $872,060 against Columbia Falls at $604,818, a difference of roughly 44 percent. Columbia Falls' own median sale price rose from $577,500 in 2024 to $600,000 in 2025, a modest, unremarkable climb.
But a Daily Inter Lake report from January 2026 found something the median hides: local agent David Fetveit described the back half of 2025 as an inflection point where homes under $1 million actually dropped about 4 percent in price while homes over $1 million rose about 10 percent. The valley's median looked flat because two different markets were moving in opposite directions underneath it.
That split is the context for everything happening in Columbia Falls right now. The town's affordability has depended on staying below that $1 million luxury line, on land that was cheaper to develop, and on a permitting process that historically moved slower and asked more questions. Two of those three conditions just changed. The city now has a faster, by-right approval path and a 421-unit project already using it. Whether that pushes prices down further as new supply lands, or up as the town's profile rises alongside a marquee development on old industrial land, is the open question for the next two years. Either way, the price gap you see on a portal today is a snapshot of a market mid-rewrite, not a fixed feature of the town.
What to check before you write an offer
If you are comparing Columbia Falls against Whitefish or Bigfork right now, price per square foot is the least useful number you can pull. A few things are worth more of your attention:
- Whether the parcel next to a home you like sits inside city limits, where the new administrative review applies, or in the county, where different rules govern.
- Whether the lot you are buying could itself support a duplex or an ADU, which can be an upside for a buyer thinking about rental income or a guest space rather than a downside.
- Whether the listing sits inside one of the growth corridors the new Future Land Use Map designates, north of the old CFAC land, along Highway 2, or near Cedar Palace Medical Center.
- What the appeal window actually requires if you do want to weigh in on a future project. Fifteen business days from a posted decision, in writing, to the city administrator, is a much shorter runway than the old hearing process gave residents.
The city has posted the underlying documents, including a side-by-side comparison of the old and new zoning code, on its Montana Land Use Planning Act page. It is worth a read before you assume the quiet lot next door will stay quiet.
A few straight answers
Does this change apply outside Columbia Falls city limits? No. The new zoning and subdivision rules apply within city limits. County land nearby follows different, separate rules, which is part of why boundary lines matter more here than they used to.
Does the new law mean every empty lot will be developed? No. It means the process for reviewing a compliant proposal moved from a public hearing to an administrative review with a short appeal window. Land still has to be annexed, zoned, and served by infrastructure before anything gets built.
Is Teakettle Heights the only project moving through the new process? It is the largest and the one with the clearest paper trail so far, but the whole point of the new system is that future subdivisions of this kind will move through administrative review rather than a headline vote, which means fewer of them will make the news at all.
Does this affect resale value? It is too early to say with certainty. What can be said is that a buyer's due diligence in Columbia Falls now includes a step it did not a year ago: understanding what is allowed by right on the parcels around a home, not just what is currently built there.
If you are weighing Columbia Falls against Whitefish, Bigfork, or another Flathead Valley town, the honest starting point is not the median price, it is understanding how each town's rules are shaping what gets built next. I'd be glad to walk through what that looks like for a specific street or subdivision you're considering. Let's Connect.
