ARTICLE 23

Helena, While We Still Have Choices

Growth is happening. The question is how we make room for what comes next without losing the things that make Helena worth loving.

When I moved to Montana almost 12 years ago, I remember pulling out a map and looking at Helena.

I didn’t know everything about the city yet, but geographically it made sense to me. Bozeman, Butte, Great Falls and Missoula were all within reach. Mountains surrounded the city. Lakes, trails and public land were right outside town.

There was something about Helena I liked immediately.

Almost 12 years later, I still feel that way.

And before anyone tells me to go back to New York, I should probably get this part out of the way.

I don’t want Helena to become New York.

I left New York.

If I wanted Long Island, I could have stayed there.

Helena is home now.

I like that it’s a little weird. I like that downtown doesn’t feel completely manufactured. I like the old buildings, the little houses, the mountains suddenly appearing at the ends of streets, the trails, the history and even some of the pieces of town that don’t quite make sense until you’ve lived here awhile.

I’m not interested in replacing any of that.

Quite the opposite.

I’m interested in how we keep it while Helena changes around us.

“Don’t Turn Helena Into Bozeman”

You hear some version of this around town all the time:

“Don’t turn Helena into Bozeman.”

I think I understand what people mean.

They’re worried about traffic.

Higher housing costs.

Crowded roads.

Development spreading farther outward.

Pressure on infrastructure.

Open land disappearing.

And eventually that strange feeling that the place you knew changed so much that parts of it don’t feel familiar anymore.

Those are legitimate concerns.

I don’t want those things either.

But growth is already happening.

So maybe the more useful question isn’t whether Helena should change.

It’s this:

How do we grow without creating all of the things people are worried about?

Helena doesn’t need to become Bozeman.

It doesn’t need to become Missoula.

And it definitely doesn’t need to become Long Island.

It already has an identity.

The challenge is allowing it to evolve without accidentally designing that identity out of it.

You Don’t Have to Be From Somewhere to Care About It

I think this is where conversations about growth sometimes go sideways.

Someone has lived here their entire life.

Someone else moved here five years ago.

Someone’s family has been in Montana for generations.

Someone else arrived last month.

Those experiences are different.

They matter.

But caring about a place doesn’t have to be a competition.

My own family history probably shapes how I think about this too.

My great-grandfather worked as a coal miner in Wyoming, and my grandfather lived there as well. Like so many families, they went where opportunity took them and were trying to build a better life for the people who came after them.

Maybe that’s part of why I’ve always felt drawn to both places.

One is where I grew up. The other feels tied to a deeper part of my family story. 

I don’t really see those things as competing identities.

People have always moved.

Sometimes for work.

Sometimes for family.

Sometimes because they saw a place where they thought they could build a life.

Being from somewhere else doesn’t prevent you from appreciating what makes another place special.

When I travel, I don’t go to Greece and wonder why it can’t be more like Montana.

That would be ridiculous.

Part of the reason you travel is precisely because a place isn’t where you came from.

You want the old streets.

The architecture.

The food.

The public squares.

The history.

The things that developed there over hundreds or thousands of years.

At the same time, appreciating a place doesn’t mean pretending everything about it is perfect.

You can walk through an incredible historic city and still think a dangerous intersection could be safer.

You can admire a centuries-old neighborhood and still appreciate better transit, accessibility, shade or public space.

Those thoughts don’t mean you want to erase the place.

Sometimes they mean you care enough to imagine how life there could work a little better.

I think the same thing can be true here.

You can be born in Helena and love it.

You can move here and love it.

You can want to preserve something and still believe it can improve.

You can support growth in one place and question it somewhere else.

Not every question has to become one side against another.

Most things aren’t that finite.

Ultimately, we’re all here for a relatively short amount of time trying to build lives, raise families, make a living and enjoy this place while we’re lucky enough to experience it.

Maybe we can start there.

Housing Isn’t the Same Thing as Neighborhood

We need housing.

We need apartments, starter homes, townhomes, duplexes, rentals and ownership opportunities.

Different people need different things.

But I think we sometimes confuse building housing with building neighborhoods.

They aren’t always the same thing.

One thing I notice in many newer developments is how little there is to actually walk to.

You can build hundreds of homes and still create a place where somebody has to get into a car for practically everything.

Coffee.

Groceries.

A playground.

A restaurant.

A small store.

A place to meet somebody.

Sometimes even leaving the development means winding through a maze of internal streets before finally reaching an arterial road that takes you somewhere useful.

That may be a perfectly functional subdivision.

I’m not always sure it’s a neighborhood.

Which Comes First: The Road or the Neighborhood?

I look at some of this through the lens of design and development.

And I promise I won’t spend the rest of this article doing my best George Costanza impression and reminding everyone that I’m an architect.

Something I’ve noticed working around development projects is how much the order of decisions affects the result.

Often the road system begins taking shape first.

The grades work.

The drainage works.

The utilities work.

Emergency access works.

Then the lots begin fitting themselves around that system.

Eventually you get a wedge here.

A leftover triangle there.

An awkward building pad.

A house facing a particular direction because that’s simply what fit after everything else was established.

I don’t think anyone is doing that intentionally.

The engineer is solving the problem they were asked to solve:

How do we make the infrastructure work?

That’s an important problem.

But it’s different from asking:

What should this place actually be?

Think about designing a house.

Imagine starting by drawing the hallway.

It’s a fantastic hallway.

Perfect width.

Great circulation.

Excellent code compliance.

Possibly the finest hallway in Montana.

Then we try to squeeze the kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms and living room into whatever shapes happen to be left.

Eventually somebody asks why their bedroom is shaped like a slice of pizza.

And our answer is:

“Yes, but have you seen the hallway?”

Obviously that’s an exaggeration.

But the principle matters.

When we design a house, we start by understanding the people and the spaces they need.

How do they live?

Where are the views?

Where is the sunlight?

What should feel private?

What should feel open?

Then the circulation, structure and systems begin responding to that larger idea.

A neighborhood shouldn’t be that different.

Where should people gather?

Where should homes face?

Where should a park be?

Can a kid walk somewhere?

Could a little neighborhood store survive?

What kinds of lots actually create useful homes and yards?

Then roads, drainage and utilities can support that larger vision.

Not the other way around.

Nobody has the whole picture by themselves.

Engineers matter.

Architects matter.

Planners matter.

Landscape architects matter.

Developers matter.

And the people who will actually live there matter.

A road shouldn’t create a neighborhood by accident. The neighborhood should help determine where the road belongs.

I Watched This Happen Once Before

I grew up on Long Island.

And before anyone pictures New York as nothing but skyscrapers and concrete, that isn’t the New York I grew up in.

New York is a big state.

Long Island has beaches, farms, wetlands, woods, small towns and some incredibly beautiful places. I still love a lot about where I grew up.

That’s actually part of why this matters to me.

When I was a kid, there were still peach farms, apple orchards and pieces of open land scattered around where I lived.

Then, little by little, some of them started disappearing.

A farm became a subdivision.

Another field became another subdivision.

Another road filled in.

Then another project appeared.

Then another.

None of those individual projects necessarily looked disastrous.

Most probably made complete sense on their own.

That’s the part I remember.

Places don’t usually change all at once.

They change one reasonable decision at a time.

Eventually you can look around and realize that a landscape you remember very clearly exists differently now.

That doesn’t mean Long Island was ruined.

It’s still beautiful.

The beaches are still there.

There are still incredible communities, parks, farms and natural areas.

But some things disappeared that aren’t coming back.

Having watched a place I love change substantially within my own lifetime probably makes me more sensitive to how those decisions accumulate.

It also makes me understand why people here are protective of Helena.

That isn’t something to dismiss.

It’s something worth listening to.

History Is Easy to Lose

Helena has already learned part of this lesson.

During the urban-renewal era, a significant amount of historic downtown fabric was demolished.

At the time, the intention was improvement.

Old buildings were viewed differently than many of us see them today.

Looking at historic photographs now, it’s difficult not to wonder what Helena might feel like if more of those buildings were still here.

Buildings can be replaced.

History can’t.

Think about the cities people love traveling to.

What do we photograph?

Usually not the newest strip mall.

It’s the old street.

The strange little storefront.

The warehouse that became a restaurant.

The old theater.

The building that has survived five completely different uses over 120 years.

Many of the places we love most are places we could never truly recreate from scratch.

I like new buildings.

New isn’t the enemy.

But new and historic don’t have to be enemies either.

Preservation doesn’t mean freezing Helena in time.

Cities have always changed.

Buildings change.

Uses change.

Families change.

Businesses change.

An old warehouse can become something new.

A historic house can get an addition.

An industrial building can become housing, shops or offices.

Good growth shouldn’t erase Helena’s previous chapters.

It should add another one.

Then There Is the Sixth Ward

This is one of the reasons I keep thinking about the Sixth Ward.

The Railroad District.

Midtown.

Whatever name you use, it is one of the most interesting parts of Helena.

It sits incredibly close to downtown but still feels disconnected from it.

And it already has many of the ingredients people spend enormous effort trying to create in new developments.

Small houses.

Old railroad and industrial buildings.

Schools.

Helena College.

Beattie Park.

Businesses.

The depot.

The railroad.

The Centennial Trail.

Vacant and underused properties.

History.

And people already living there.

I spend a lot of time walking through this area.

When you drive through somewhere, you see streets and buildings.

When you walk it, you start seeing spaces.

A little house you never noticed.

An old building with great proportions.

A vacant parcel.

A strange triangle of land.

A trail that almost connects to something.

A street that feels wider than it needs to.

I can’t help looking at some of those places and wondering what they could become.

Not necessarily something enormous.

That’s actually what I like about it.

Keep the Little Houses

Some of the small homes in this neighborhood are part of what gives it character.

They’re modest.

Some are quirky.

Some remind me of old workers’ cottages.

And many are exactly the kind of housing people say we need today.

Small.

Simple.

On smaller lots.

Near the center of town.

Those buildings shouldn’t automatically be viewed as standing in the way of something bigger.

They can be part of what comes next.

Restore some.

Add onto some.

Build around them carefully.

Add duplexes or smaller multifamily projects where appropriate.

Put housing over commercial space.

Reuse old industrial buildings.

Let new and old exist together.

If one of the biggest fears around growth is losing Helena’s character, keeping and adapting what already exists seems like a reasonable place to begin.

What If the Railroad Came Back?

Then there’s the railroad.

Montana has studied restoring passenger rail through southern Montana more than once, and that conversation is active again today.

Nothing is arriving tomorrow.

Nobody should head down to the depot Monday morning and wait for the 8:15 to Bozeman.

Bring coffee if you do.

You may be there awhile.

But the idea is worth thinking about.

If passenger rail eventually returns, imagine having another way to travel between Helena and communities like Bozeman, Livingston, Missoula or Billings.

It wouldn’t replace driving in Montana.

That isn’t really the point.

The value is having another option.

Montana is big.

We drive a lot.

And driving here means winter roads, mountain passes, deer, elk, darkness and long trips after exhausting days.

Imagine being able to work, read or simply look out the window instead of scanning both shoulders of the highway waiting for something with antlers to make a questionable life decision.

Rail wouldn’t eliminate Montana’s distances.

It would change what those distances mean.

And there’s something fitting about that idea leading us right back to the Sixth Ward.

A neighborhood originally shaped by the railroad could someday be connected through it again.

While We Still Have Choices

Maybe that’s really what all of this comes down to.

Not stopping growth.

Not fighting change.

Not blaming newcomers.

Not blaming developers.

Not blaming engineers.

Not blaming the city.

And not deciding that every idea has to belong to one side or another before we even talk about it.

Because underneath a lot of the arguments, I think most of us probably want similar things.

We want our kids to be able to afford to stay here if they choose.

We want businesses to succeed.

We want jobs and opportunities.

We don’t want to spend our lives sitting in traffic.

We want open land, trails and mountains to remain part of everyday life.

We want new homes.

We also don’t want every field surrounding Helena to slowly become another subdivision.

We want old buildings to survive.

We want neighborhoods to still feel like neighborhoods.

And twenty or thirty years from now, we’d probably all like to recognize the place we’re living in.

Those goals aren’t necessarily in conflict.

But they do require us to think beyond the next project.

Helena has already lost pieces of its history that can’t be brought back.

We’ve also inherited an incredible amount that previous generations did leave us.

Old buildings.

Small houses.

Historic streets.

Parks.

Trails.

Downtown.

Open land.

The railroad.

And a character that would be almost impossible to manufacture from scratch.

That doesn’t mean preserving everything exactly as it is today.

Cities aren’t museums.

They have to change.

But there is a difference between changing a place and losing a place.

I think Helena is still at a point where we have choices.

That’s what makes this conversation worth having now.

We can add housing while thinking about neighborhoods.

We can grow while also looking inward.

We can build new buildings beside old ones.

We can improve transportation without assuming every trip has to happen in a car.

We can make room for people who have lived here their entire lives and people who came from somewhere else and chose to make Helena home.

Neither has to diminish the other.

Nobody owns appreciation for a place.

We are all, in one way or another, temporary caretakers of the places we get to experience.

Eventually someone else inherits what we build, what we save and what we decide wasn’t important enough to keep.

We’re going to disagree about some of those decisions.

That’s okay.

Places that matter are worth having real conversations about.

I didn’t grow up in Helena.

But after almost 12 years here, it’s home.

I grew up somewhere else that I still care about deeply, and I watched parts of it change dramatically within my lifetime.

That experience doesn’t make me want Helena to become more like New York.

It makes me appreciate why people here want Helena to remain unmistakably Helena.

The answer isn’t to stop the city from evolving.

It’s to come together around the things worth carrying forward.

The old buildings.

The little houses.

The history.

The landscape.

The independence.

The weirdness.

The things that make someone arrive in Helena and know they aren’t somewhere else.

Growth is going to happen.

What happens next is still something we get to have a say in.

Maybe the goal isn’t to build a new Helena at all.

Maybe it’s to leave enough of Helena for the next generation to recognize it, while giving them something better to inherit too.

Michael Demetrios Frudakis, AIA, NCARB
Principal Architect