City Lands

The City Lands Redevelopment Strategy provides guidance for disposition of City redevelopment lands. This strategy provides a clear, actionable approach for leveraging City-owned properties to meet near- and long-term community goals and balances strategic planning with implementation urgency. It is rooted in an objective framework that evaluates each property’s readiness, community impact, alignment with City goals, and development feasibility.  

City “redevelopment lands” are City-owned properties that are not necessary for exclusive future municipal use. These properties should be considered, and periodically reconsidered, for their potential to provide other public benefits or meet near- or long-term community goals through sale, lease, donation, or redevelopment. 

The City Lands Redevelopment Strategy aligns with the City’s Strategic Principles. It also falls under the strategic pillars of Community Design and Livability and Economic Health. With these principles and pillars in mind, the Redevelopment Strategy will follow these priorities:  

1) Properties must be evaluated as a portfolio with an eye toward how the sale, development, or retention of one parcel can enable collective outcomes or opportunities on, or via, other redevelopment lands. 

2) City Redevelopment Lands should be utilized to deliver public benefits, whether those benefits are realized on site or elsewhere. 

3) Missoula faces urgent needs, and the City should move swiftly to advance high-readiness sites. 

City properties that are not obviously in use or needed by the municipality should be evaluated periodically to determine whether the City should dispose of the individual properties and, if so, what type of disposition and to what purpose. The Evaluation Framework (Appendix C) will consider properties based on the following criteria:  

• Long-term public value
• Public benefits
• Portfolio approach
• Right use, right place
• Time limitations
• Financial tools
• Expressed interest
• Appropriate preparation
• Market demand
• Resources

These criteria are further explained in Appendix B. Staff will develop a document or documents for concisely summarizing and memorializing updated results of evaluation against this framework.  

Redevelopment efforts are guided by the City's many planning documents. Here is an example of some of the plans that influence the City Lands Redevelopment Strategy: 

• Missoula Downtown Master Plan
• Midtown Missoula Master Plan
• Envision West Broadway Community Master Plan
• NRSS Master Plan
• A Place to Call Home: Meeting Missoula's Housing Needs

The Mayor’s Office will work with the Missoula Economic Partnership and other partners to share information about the City’s redevelopment properties with the broader public and with the development community. Such public information might include prospectuses or other basic information about the City’s redevelopment properties.  

The Mayor’s Office, the City’s Department of Community Planning, Development & Innovation, and the Missoula Redevelopment Agency will collaborate to share preliminary results of the use of this framework with stakeholders and to identify potential partners. In particular, the City will engage with affordable housing providers and with the development community to help them understand the City’s redevelopment properties, resources, constraints, and goals.  

The disposition of City redevelopment lands is potentially a powerful tool for advancing City goals. By applying a structured and proactive strategy, the City will maximize the value of its land assets—not only in economic terms but in the lasting benefits delivered to its residents and neighborhoods.