After years of fever-pitch building, talk of Bozeman’s desirability has been quieted by a loud reality: rental concessions in Bozeman are now leading the nation. Rental Beast’s Q1 2026 report identified an astonishing highest-in-the-nation 86.6% renter concession rate with incentives ranging from two weeks to two months free rent, a clear sign of multifamily oversupply. Compare that to Raleigh at 66.6%, Charleston at 64.0%, and Dallas–Fort Worth at 57.9%.

Bozeman’s own data paints a similar picture. According to the city’s annual EPS Market Report, newly constructed multifamily units built between 2024 and 2025 are sitting at a staggering 44.2% vacancy rate, compared to just 9.2% for units built before 2024. After years of championing large-scale apartment construction, the city is now facing a market increasingly unable and unwilling to absorb the supply coming online.

What is more striking is that despite significant oversupply, rents have fallen only modestly. If the EPS assessment is correct, effective rents are down just 3.9% from their 2022 peak despite the largest building boom in modern Bozeman history. Even after adding 4,632 multifamily units from 2020 through 2025 Q3, rents still remain 10.02% above 2019 levels.

Which raises a far larger question: what exactly did the Bozeman community trade for such marginal relief in housing costs? Did the results justify the strain placed on public safety and infrastructure, the erosion of historic neighborhoods and community cohesion, the growing congestion, or the increasingly visible fraying of civic trust?

Looking back, it appears the city not only negotiated poorly, failing to extract the maximum community benefit it had every right to demand, but also warped some of its own rules and rewrote others to accommodate the development community while sidelining the prudent guidance of its own advisory boards and active community members.

Much of what drives our communal desire to preserve neighborhoods is a deep sense of place that develops slowly over time: topophilia. This sentiment is intrinsic to civic engagement and should be conserved carefully. Belonging is one of the strongest indicators of community wellbeing. When communities are stripped of that sense of place, they hollow out, and systemic strain turns city planning into a game of whack-a-mole.

Take, for instance, the increase in traffic accidents across Bozeman. These are symptoms of growth outpacing sound planning and meaningful investment into the systems meant to protect the community.

The city has a duty to direct the market and make it serve the greater needs of its residents. Letting the market determine what the community becomes leads to a race to the bottom, where what is essential is lost and what gives a place its value is gradually sold off.

In addition to shaping market outcomes, it is the city’s responsibility to protect the integral institutions that serve its residents. The loss of Mountain View Care Center and Bridger Rehab in downtown Bozeman, together representing nearly 190 elderly care beds, was a profound blow to the wellbeing of our community. Subsequently, elderly and sick residents were relocated across the state because Bozeman now had no room left for them. Couples were separated. Families now drive hours just to spend time together. This happened twice in five years without a single meaningful protection in place to stop it. One is becoming a hotel, while the other is slated for demolition to make way for workforce housing intended to staff it.

It signals a broader pattern of city-sanctioned redevelopment that favors tourism, gentrification, and speculative growth over the long-term wellbeing of the existing Bozeman community.

More tax revenue will not help our city if we do not know how to spend it, and spending it well requires strong community engagement. Community engagement grows from belonging, and belonging grows from the social capital created by preserving communal assets: traditions, culture, history, and place. We coalesce around what we commonly share.

When what we share is sacrificed to the golden calf, we are left with nothing to gather around, nothing that stands in memory of our collective identity. We become orphans of place, islands in a sea of anonymity.

Under the banner of economic development, the city commission has been cajoled into a consumer-goods mentality where homes are reduced to “units,” and supply and demand are treated as the path to salvation. Vacancy rates may be a key economic indicator, but it remains unclear, and perhaps impossible to measure, the extent to which Bozeman’s rapid growth is now triggering disinvestment in the very fabric of the community.

Filtering, the theory that building large amounts of new market-rate housing will naturally lower costs across the broader housing market over time, appears far less seamless in practice than housing evangelicals have long proselytized. Building large quantities of the wrong thing does not meaningfully reduce the cost of the things people actually need. More often, it erases what stood in its place while narrowing, rather than expanding, real choice.

As a community, we must become more granular, more targeted, and more thoughtful in our housing investments, making room for the kinds of homes that cultivate long-term ownership, deeper roots, and active participation in community and civic life.    

Noah ten Broek is a neighbor, a community member, and a longtime Bozeman resident, who cares deeply about the people and places that make this city feel like home.

Emily Talago is a horticulture professional with a background in research science, a master’s in biotechnology, and a serious civic duty streak.