RiverView Apartments to take first occupants for summer 

Two Big Sky Community Housing Trust buildings will open first, five Lone Mountain Land Company buildings plan to open in fall

By Jack Reaney ASSOCIATE EDITOR 

Since various partners broke ground in May 2023, seven buildings have sprung up along the south side of Montana Highway 64 (Lone Mountain Trail), called the RiverView Apartments. The first pair of buildings will house local workers this summer.  

Five green-wrapped buildings are now being covered with dark gray siding. That’s the portion of RiverView being constructed by Lone Mountain Land Company, a $65 million investment totaling 24 units of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, and 36 units of four- and eight-bedroom shared suites. LMLC’s buildings are expected to be complete in the fall.   

To the west, the other two buildings are tan, a $10.5 million project led by the nonprofit Big Sky Community Housing Trust and funded largely by the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program. The housing trust’s buildings are ready to welcome the first RiverView occupants in June.  

All seven buildings will be powered by solar energy. The two housing trust buildings are solarized with funding and guidance from Big Sky Sustainability Network Organization (SNO). Renewable energy will help minimize utility costs for renters—equity is an important sustainability goal, according to Lizzie Peyton, director of community sustainability for SNO.  

“You could tell everybody to transfer to solar and put a new heat pump in, but not everybody could necessarily afford it,” Peyton said. For housing trust renters, the solar panels will offset roughly eight months of annual electrical costs based on average power consumption. Each individual apartment will have its own solar electricity meter and panel source—a complicated loophole in Montana renewable energy law, which does not allow communal sources of solar power, Peyton explained. 

Big Sky SNO funded solar for two buildings through local grants: $210,000 from Resort Tax, roughly $40,000 from private donors, $20,000 from Big Sky Thrift and $15,000 from the Moonlight Community Foundation.  

Lone Mountain Land Company will fund its own solar fixtures on the remaining five buildings.  

For the tan housing trust buildings, eligible renters must meet strict, federal income qualifications. Households must earn between 30% and 80% of the area median income—for example, one Big Sky worker in 2024 would need to earn between $22,890 and $61,040. 

The housing trust buildings include one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, leased on one-year terms by the housing trust according to federal guidelines and oversight. Rent and utilities will not exceed 30% of each household’s income. 

The project is “on budget, on time,” and well ahead of the federal LIHTC deadline to welcome occupants by December 2024, according to David O’Connor, executive director of the Big Sky Community Housing Trust.  

“It is absolutely, 100% targeting year-round residents,” O’Connor said. “This is definitely not designed for seasonal [workforce].” 

He said there’s about a dozen funding sources behind the tan buildings. The largest is federal LIHTC tax credits, which contributed $6.49 million. The Big Sky Resort Area District funded the land acquisition by the housing trust and made a “substantial” investment in pre-construction expenses, O’Connor said, totaling about $2.5 million. The housing trust also won a federal ARPA grant through Gallatin County.  

“For any affordable housing project… there has to be a multiple-layered stack of revenue sources to bring to a project in order to get to the affordability targets we need to get to,” O’Connor said.   

Without public subsidy, O’Connor said the most affordable project the housing trust could construct would result in rent rates considered affordable at about 150% area median income—for one Big Sky worker, that’s over $114,450 based on 2024 data.  

A home for families 

O’Connor and his housing trust staff, Stewardship Coordinator Jennifer Boutsianis and Program Manager Becky Brockie, took a walk through the site with Explore Big Sky in early April. They peeked through a door left ajar, stepping into a nearly finished apartment.  

“Couple hours with a broom, carpet, wood trim and cabinets. Less than a week, and really, this is finished. All the electric’s done—this goes fast,” O’Connor said. It’s a three-bedroom apartment. Most of RiverView’s three-bedroom units are built on the ground floor for the safety of those with children.  

“We’d love to see families move in,” Brockie said.  

Under income rules, combined earnings from a household of three would need to fall between $29,430 and $78,480, based on the 2024 data, so it’s unlikely that three ski-bumming young adults would qualify.  

“A single mom with two kids—that’s a household of three on one income,” O’Connor said. It’s very likely that kind of family would qualify.  

The housing trust has been keeping a preliminary, self-qualified waitlist for RiverView units. Although potential renters have not been qualified according to federal rules, most appear eligible. 

RiverView applications will open on May 1 through the housing trust website. 

While some community members may take issue with the location, directly beside the highway, or the appearance and style of housing projects like RiverView, Brockie challenges that view. 

“Where else should we put it?” 

O’Connor added that land with access to utilities and community amenities is scarce in Big Sky.  

“It’s a piece of land that was difficult to develop under other conditions… I would make the case that it’s not a great use for anything else,” O’Connor said.   

RiverView is being built for function and purpose, like the nearby Powder Light apartments. Like many mountain towns, Big Sky is hungry for solutions to its workforce housing crisis. 

“We feel we have an obligation to the community to fulfill this mission. So this project is dead-square fulfilling the mission,” O’Connor said. 

Brockie said the LIHTC income range includes critical community members—teachers, nurses, sheriff’s deputies; the list goes on.  

“Without those people, we have no community,” Brockie said.  

The housing trust looks forward to seeing how RiverView may ease pressure on Big Sky’s overall rental market, in which rent rates have followed high demand for apartments and short-term rentals.  

But even this project won’t meet Big Sky’s demand. Boustanis said the community still needs another 1,354 homes for workers by 2028, according to BSCHT’s housing needs assessment. 

The housing trust is continually evaluating land opportunities for similar projects, with an internal motto of “no stone unturned,” O’Connor said. The Cold Smoke project, announced by Lone Mountain Land Company on April 2, looks to be an upcoming opportunity on undeveloped land adjacent to RiverView. 

The housing trust is collaborating with LMLC on plans to acquire a portion of the Cold Smoke development, for further affordable workforce housing development by the housing trust, O’Connor explained in a follow up. For RiverView, sharing site development costs with LMLC has allowed the housing trust to preserve affordability. 

From ‘unbuildable’ to 97 apartments in four years 

On the RiverView campus, buildings west of the Big Sky Thrift store are all apartments. Buildings east of the thrift are shared-living suites, otherwise known single-occupancy dorms, Brockie said. 

The housing trust will have leasing agent access to 20% of Lone Mountain Land Company’s units, and they are figuring out which units those will be.  

“LMLC has 60 doors total. So we’ll get 12 of them,” Brockie said. That’s on top of the 24 apartments in the housing trust’s tan buildings. 

The housing trust has been advocating for apartments to be rented to individuals, as opposed to master-leased through businesses to their employees. This is an effort to break the connection between residents and their employment.  

“We think of that in the realm of stability,” O’Connor said. “Employer-attached housing erodes housing stability.” 

All seven RiverView buildings must house Big Sky workers. Short-term rentals are prohibited, and rent must be affordable, although at varying degrees. 

Brockie said when she joined the housing trust in July of 2020, RiverView was only a whisper. It was formally announced in January of 2021.  

“For me, it’s four years of the housing trust that’s finally coming to fruition,” Brockie said. 

For the tan buildings, O’Connor said BlueLine Development—a Missoula-based company with regional experience building tax-credit-funded, low-income housing—has been a great partner.  

“They’re extremely competent at building projects like this. They’ve really gotten to know the Big Sky community and the various challenges of building at this elevation, and this distance from town… and they have kept every promise they’ve made,” O’Connor said.  

He credits the Big Sky Chamber of Commerce for creating the housing trust in March 2016. 

Eight years later, seven buildings occupy land that O’Connor said was considered unbuildable due to setbacks from the road and the river—both were granted variances before the land was annexed by the Big Sky County Water and Sewer District. 

“Between what was necessary to get the land buildable, and what was necessary to assemble the funding stack, it took so many partners to make this project a reality,” O’Connor said. “And that’s going to be the case for affordable housing moving forward.  

It really does need to be a community effort, because we can’t build it unless it is.”