Housing, families and growth topics of focus at LMLC’s annual forum
By Mira Brody VP MEDIA
Lone Mountain Land Company President Matt Kidd opened the company’s annual open house community forum on June 9 with a posed question to the audience: who is recruiting full-time, Big Sky residents to strengthen our year-round community?
“Who’s recruiting full-time year-round residents? Other locals? Nobody,” Kidd said to a full room at The Wilson Hotel.
That question set the tone for a broad community update that touched on housing progress, stalled school enrollment, childcare capacity and the long-term vision for Town Center.
Resort tax collections are close to $25 million annually, Big Sky Resort was recently named No. 1 in the West by SKI Magazine and Expedia ranked Big Sky the top travel destination in the world. One number that has not moved, noted Kidd following these accolades, is Big Sky’s year-round population.
“We grew a little bit over a decade, and now we’re kind of shrinking again,” Kidd said about the local population. “It is really interesting to me that our year-round population hasn’t gown with as much as everything has grown around it.”
Cold Smoke: Largest community land trust in the country
Central to the forum’s housing discussion was Cold Smoke, a community land trust project that consists of 99 acres valued at an average of $46.4 million reserved for 389 permanently deed-restricted homes. In January of this year, the Big Sky Community Housing Trust purchased the 99 acres for $39.75 million after the parcel’s former owner, LMLC, reduced the price by 14%.
“It is the largest community land trust housing effort that we know of in the country to be able to be built,” Kidd said. “The community owns it. There’s nowhere else in the country doing this.”
Ground is expected to break on the project later this year with multifamily units offered as rentals depending on community need and financing conditions, and single-family homes will be for sale. Kidd outlined the symbolism of the project in his presentation.
“If you want to work in Big Sky, you should have the chance to live in Big Sky,” he said. “Cold Smoke actually takes that one step further to say, if you’re willing to dedicate your career to Big Sky, you should have the opportunity to own a home in Big Sky.”
LMLC has also delivered 667 units and 2,200 beds across other housing projects in recent years, including Riverview and the Powder Light campus, and expressed support for the independently developed Quarry project, which Kidd said fills a price point that currently doesn’t exist in the market.
Child care capacity remains a barrier
Kidd identified child care capacity—not the cost, and not a lack of variety—as a foundational barrier to creating a sustainable community for young families, the base that sustains enrollment, fills youth sports and fosters a year-round community. Without enough space for infants and toddlers, he explained, enrollment in Big Sky’s schools will continue to drop. The number of children enrolled in Big Sky schools has remained essentially flat for 10 years, a trend Kidd said is “really unfortunate.”
“If we can’t have more young children in Big Sky, they’re not going to have more in those schools … that’s the foundation, that’s where it starts,” Kidd said of early learning centers.
LMLC has been working on plans for a centralized early childhood facility near Firelight Meadows that could house Morningstar, Discovery and Gallatin River Child Care under a “world class facility,” with capacity for more than 150 children ages zero to five. While a construction timeline has not yet been announced, Kidd described the design as “essentially complete.”
To end on a note of encouragement, Kidd noted that when that year-round community does arrive, existing Big Sky schools currently have room to welcome more students with quality education programs.
“We have three awesome schools in Big Sky: the public school, Discovery and the Community School [and they] have no capacity issues,” Kidd said. “More people can come here, and we have room for them.”
Town Center continues growth, welcomes Hotel Free West
“The valuation of Big Sky is greater than Missoula, Bozeman and Billings combined,” Kidd emphasized. “We’re about the same size. So we are incredibly important to the state of Montana.”
That economic reality is reflected in the business development of Town Center, which serves not just as a gathering place for events such as the Big Sky Farmers Market or Music in the Mountains, but as infrastructure that locals depend on year-round.
To that note, LMLC announced that Hotel Free West, the blue-wrapped building that has become a noticeable development in Town Center, will open next summer with 81 rooms, a café, restaurant, bar and wellness space, managed by Columbia Hospitality. Two additional hotels are in planning stages, with a groundbreaking for one anticipated as soon as next year.
The emphasis on hotels reflects an effort to fill what Kidd described as a significant gap in Big Sky’s hospitality offerings: the middle ground between The Wilson and the Montage Big Sky.
“If you think about hotel segmentation, there’s a giant gap between what The Wilson is and what the Montage is,” he said. “Our work in Town Center is largely to fill that gap and create more options.”
Additionally, more hotel keys opens the door to additional retail and dining options that would benefit both visitors and locals.
“There’s no way we can justify any new restaurants or any new retail without more tourists and without more visitors,” Kidd said.
On the residential side, a new neighborhood called Ousel Meadows, located just south of the Copper John and Uplands units, will bring roughly 40 units to market later this year, including 11 single-family homes, 10 duplexes, six triplexes and 17 homesites. Notably, it will mark the first time individuals have ever had the opportunity to purchase a standalone residential lot within Town Center, a milestone Kidd highlighted as a meaningful shift in how the area can grow.
Beyond the announced projects, Kidd pointed to the undeveloped land between The Wilson Hotel and Hotel Free West as a critical parcel in Big Sky. Closing that gap in the plaza, he said, is central to LMLC’s vision of Town Center fulfilling its role as a community gathering place for both locals and visitors.
“It is where tourists and residents come together,” he said.
“We want to have these conversations as a community,” said Kidd in response to an audience question about Town Center development. “Nothing is off the table … everything is on the table, and we don’t have 10 years to figure it out either. We do need to figure it out like, pretty soon.”
Rooted in community
The open house meeting closed with archival footage of Taylor Middleton, former Big Sky Resort president and COO and a longtime Big Sky community leader whose vision helped shape the resort town for the decades he called it home. His words drew a clear line from the past to the present challenges Kidd outlined.
“Qualitatively, we’re not building just a ski resort, we’re not just a series of developments, but we’re also participating in developing community,” Middleton said in the posthumous video clip. “The thing that makes me most proud is we are in the process of building a community. It’s a community of great skiing, great recreation and a community that’s got legs for the future.”
As he wrapped up, Kidd echoed that sentiment, acknowledging the tension between what Big Sky is and what it is still working to become and what he calls two interdependent goals: “to be both a world-class resort destination and a thriving year-round community,” Kidd said.
“I think Taylor said it best,” Kidd concluded ahead of a Q&A session. “The future’s bright.”
Victoria Smith contributed to the reporting of this story.
