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In January, as the project moved to the full city council for a final vote, Whitefish’s billionaires turned up the heat.
Lawyers for the group declined to speak with Forbes for this article. They also led a petition drive on that garnered nearly 3,900 signatures. That’s despite a number of concessions offered by the developer, including land for a new fire station and a roundabout, to alleviate those concerns.Īt an October 21 planning board meeting-four weeks before the board rejected the project in a 3-1 vote-two representatives from Bill Foley’s ski resort and his Glacier Restaurant Group spoke up against it, citing increased traffic and concerns that it would “not match the character of surrounding neighborhoods.” That same month, several Whitefish residents formed a group named Flathead Families For Responsible Growth and hired two law firms to organize against the project. The land’s location amid a forest on either side of a busy road-and its proximity to wealthy neighborhoods near Whitefish Lake such as the Iron Horse Golf Club-led to a backlash from residents worried about traffic congestion and potential fire safety issues in a county at very high risk of wildfires. "It's no secret that Whitefish is in dire need of housing, especially rentals affordable," said James Barnett, managing partner of American Residential Investment Management, the developer behind the Mountain Gateway project.īut the project, which had been in the works since 2020 but was first announced in August, also generated intense opposition at packed council meetings and in online forums, and not just from the billionaires.
Its proponents argue it would have created desperately needed affordable housing units while also providing more apartments for workers who are being priced out of a skyrocketing real estate market, where the median home price has doubled from pre-pandemic levels to $1.1 million. At a time of rising wealth inequality and surging real estate prices across the U.S., the uproar in Whitefish illustrates the difficulties of reconciling the needs of cash-strapped workers and renters with the concerns of their wealthier neighbors.Ĭalled Arim Mountain Gateway, most of the development would have consisted of 270 long-term rental apartments and a small grocery store built on 32 acres of land on either side of Big Mountain Road, which leads to the ski resort.
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