Buying Land in Park County, Montana

A growth policy that voters just fought to keep

Park County's land-use planning framework has been through real political turbulence recently, and buyers should understand it wasn't a quiet bureaucratic update. A citizen-initiated ballot measure, Referendum 1, asked Park County voters in the unincorporated area whether to repeal the county's existing Growth Policy (adopted in 2017). On the June 4, 2024 ballot, voters rejected the repeal by roughly 2,035 to 1,365 -- about a 60% majority -- in an election with 43% turnout and 3,400 total ballots cast. A second measure on the same ballot passed by a wider margin, requiring that any future growth policy be ratified directly by the electorate rather than adopted by commissioners alone. The practical effect: the 2017 Growth Policy stayed in force, but future changes to it now face a higher, voter-approval bar than in most Montana counties.

That doesn't mean the policy is settled and final, though. Commissioners have continued discussing whether and how to fund a full rewrite -- the county could apply for a Montana Department of Commerce Community Development Block Grant to help offset an estimated $130,000 consultant cost, but a motion to pursue that grant (with an application deadline of December 29, 2025) died for lack of a second at the November 18, 2025 commission meeting. As of this writing, no new growth policy has been adopted, and the process of updating the 2017 policy under the new voter-ratification requirement remains in progress. If a parcel's future use depends on how the county's growth policy evolves, this is a genuinely live process to track, not a settled backdrop.

Zoning by named district, not by the whole county

Rather than a single county-wide zoning code, Park County zoning consists of 7 separate districts: 6 citizen-initiated and 1 county-initiated, covering specific named areas -- Cokedale; Cooke City-Silver Gate-Colter Pass; East Yellowstone; O-Rea Creek; Paradise Valley; Suce Creek; and a corridor along US Highway 89 South, East River Road, and Old Yellowstone Trail. Several of these names point directly at the county's highest-demand recreational geography: Paradise Valley (between Livingston and Gardiner) and East Yellowstone, Cooke City, and Silver Gate all sit close to Yellowstone National Park's north and northeast entrances. A parcel outside these specific district boundaries is not county-zoned at all, so the presence of zoning here genuinely depends on exactly which few thousand acres a parcel sits in -- get the specific district determination from Planning before assuming either that "Park County has zoning" or "Park County doesn't."

A real, high-value gateway market -- with signs of cooling

Park County's proximity to Yellowstone's north entrance at Gardiner has produced what regional reporting calls a "Yellowstone Effect" shared with other gateway towns (Bozeman, West Yellowstone, Cooke City). Tracked Livingston home-price data shows the median sale price rising from around $237,200 in the first quarter of 2016 to roughly $538,000 by early 2024 and touching the low-to-mid $500,000s to $590,000 range through 2024-2025 -- more than double in under a decade. Reported land prices in the Livingston market have followed a similar upward path since 2020. At the same time, more recent 2025 figures suggest some flattening (a reported dip toward $530,000 by year-end 2025) after the earlier run-up, and Park County has not seen the same subdivision boom as neighboring Gallatin County, in part because existing large-lot parcels (20-acre lots created under earlier rules) haven't all sold and redivided yet. Treat this as a real but potentially moderating market rather than one still accelerating at its earlier pace.