Joey Morrison, a 28-year-old social worker, housing organizer and lifelong Montanan, recently toppled incumbent Cyndy Andrus to become the next mayor of Bozeman. He’ll serve for two years as deputy mayor and then step into the top role in January 2026. High Country News called to ask about his plans for the city.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
High Country News: What made you decide to run for mayor?
Joey Morrison: A growing feeling that the City Commission of Bozeman has been out of touch with the lived experience and the struggles of regular everyday people.
HCN: You’re a social worker and organizer, not a politician. Do you feel prepared to preside over Montana’s fourth-largest city?
JM: I have spent my career working with some of the most vulnerable people in our community. That gave me professional expertise in understanding how systems work, where systems fail, and what we need to be doing differently. I am not going to spin around and become a career politician. The goal I have is to make real impacts because these issues affect me personally.
HCN: Can you talk a little bit about how you grew up and how that has influenced you?
JM: I was raised primarily by my mom while my father was incarcerated. It became very clear to me once I came to school that not everybody is a “broke college student” in the same way. I had to work sometimes 40 to 60 hours a week on top of my classes just to make ends meet — which at times involved living out of my car or not being able to really feed myself. That started to make me feel some frustration with the systems that were around me. And then I saw a lot of other people were feeling the crunch in the same way.
HCN: You ran a very grassroots campaign, with 130 volunteers who knocked on 16,000 doors and delivered 7,000 handwritten postcards. Why do you think your campaign resonated with all those people?
JM: I think they trust me because I feel the struggles that they feel. I’m not running to save anybody; I’m running because things have to change — both for the people that I’m around and for myself.
HCN: Andrea Davis, another affordable housing advocate, was recently elected mayor of Missoula. What do you think your victories say about Montana?
JM: It’s clear that the status quo is not working anymore; the winds are changing and folks want to see things go in a new direction. That, in some ways, gives us a mandate to be pretty bold and innovative.
HCN: Let’s talk housing. You’ve said Bozeman needs a public housing authority — what’s one initiative you’d like this agency to oversee?
JM: Social housing. It’s the idea of bakers living next to doctors, next to the mechanic who’s living next to a teacher. The folks that are paying the most, like market rate, are actually subsidizing the cost of those that are paying less. (There is) a housing project here in town called Bridger View, where there are subsidized units right next to market-rate units and they’re built identically. So there’s not, like, dilapidated subsidized housing next to really beautiful market-rate housing.
HCN: What are your other short- and medium-term housing goals?
JM: Making sure we get a unified development code that makes it easier to build the housing we need and harder to build the housing we don’t need. When values and resource costs go up, it becomes much more appealing for a developer to build luxury units rather than market-rate or affordable units. Whether deregulation or more regulation creates the housing we need is, I think, a piece we need to explore.
I really hope that by the end of my four years that homelessness is very rare and very brief. And that we have all the services we need to make sure that is the reality — things like rapid rehousing and transitional housing infrastructure.
HCN: There are many high-amenity towns in the West facing similar struggles as Bozeman. What have you learned from them?
JM: There are cautionary tales all around us: the Boulders, the Jacksons, places where it’s become very unaffordable, there’s a lot of sprawl, and most of the working class commutes from bedroom communities. We know we don’t want to go in that direction. But at the moment, there’s not a lot of salient examples of cities that have been able to address (these issues) in a comprehensive way. And so, in some ways, we’re moving into new leadership territory where we get to maybe set trends and be experimental.
“I really hope that by the end of my four years that homelessness is very rare and very brief.”
HCN: What’s your top priority after you get into office?
JM: Revitalizing the city’s community engagement efforts. What I have watched over the last several years of sitting on city boards — and yelling at the city about things — is that a lot of the elected officials do not go out and engage with the community. That has sowed a ton of distrust between the public and City Hall. I’m really excited to start working to bridge the gap, (through) town halls and newsletter efforts and getting into the community more.
HCN: As a lifelong resident of the West, what do you think the region’s leaders should be paying more attention to?
JM: The only way that we can move forward as a state and as a region is recognizing that the finger-pointing and national-level dogma in partisan politics holds all of us back from being able to get practical, get ambitious and work together — because we’re being forced to “other” one another along lines that we didn’t get to determine ourselves.
HCN: Last one! You’ve got a prominent tattoo on your left arm. What is depicted, and what does it mean to you?
JM: It’s a sleeve I worked on over a few years with a local artist, just full of beautiful things: ferns, fireweed, a sunflower, some forget-me-nots, a whitebark pine, a fox, a river otter. One side does feature Rimrock Lake, a well-loved lake on The Beaten Path in the Beartooth Mountains. But I didn’t get it done for any particular meaning beyond beautiful work from someone I really respected.
Susan Shain reports for High Country News through The New York Times’ Headway Initiative, which is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as fiscal sponsor. All editorial decisions are made independently. She was a member of the 2022-’23 New York Times Fellowship class and reports from Montana. We welcome reader letters. Email her at susan.shain@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
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