2-bedroom apartments may come to this Southwest Idaho downtown for as little as $800
Some longtime Treasure Valley residents still think of Caldwell as a small agricultural city of a bygone era, when the landscape of Canyon County was covered with more farmland than concrete.
But over the last few years, the city has grown — and its long-suffering downtown has gradually grown with it. Now downtown may get its biggest boost yet in its drive toward hipsterdom: more than 180 apartments — some of them for less than market rents — and a boutique hotel.
You can still see many of the long-neglected buildings where people shopped until Nampa’s Karcher Mall opened in 1965. Civic and business leaders planted seeds for revival with the uncovering, or “daylighting,” of 1,550 feet of Indian Creek in 2015. Ontario-based Treasure Valley Community College opened an three-story instructional building along the creek in 2010.
The Indian Creek Plaza, a $7.3 million public project, opened in July 2018, providing a space for performances and public events. The Caldwell Luxe Real Theater opened that year too. So did the Flying M Coffee Shop. 2019 brought a satellite of Boise’s Rediscovered Books.
Entrepreneurs are filling the vacant, brick-framed 20th century bank buildings and storefronts with midcentury-inspired furniture and millennial-approved succulents.
One thing is still missing: housing.
Now, the city’s urban renewal agency is in talks with deChase Miksis, a developer with offices in Boise and Eugene, to redevelop a 1.5-acre vacant lot adjacent to the Indian Creek Plaza with two four- and five-story buildings with ground-floor retail and apartments above, plus the hotel.
The project, called Creekside, would bring Caldwell nearly 200 apartments to downtown at urban densities akin to Boise’s.
“The Creekside development is literally right at the center of our downtown,” said Caldwell Economic Development Director Steve Fultz. “We are trying to find that right mix of housing, office and retail. We really have just one shot at it.”
Bringing housing closer to jobs
The city put out an request-for-proposals to develop the site in late 2019, with proposals due by January 2020. The only firm to step up was deChase Miksis, which partnered with the Caldwell Housing Authority and Phoenix Commercial Construction on its proposal.
“The project is focused on addressing market demands, placemaking, and community vision, through creative design that adds to the historic nature of downtown and with innovative financing with our development partners,” wrote Dean Papé, partner at deChase Miksis, an an email to the Statesman.
Mike Dittenber, executive director of the Caldwell Housing Authority, said that it’s time Caldwell, a city of 58,830 — the fourth largest in the Treasure Valley, the sixth largest in Idaho — start acting its size.
“Caldwell is one of the fastest growing cities,” he said by phone. “We should be acting like it. We need modern housing and modern retail in our downtown.”
As part of deChase Miksis’ partnership with the Caldwell Housing Authority, the project aims to provide an affordable, urban housing option to Caldwell workers, within walking distance of the city’s best amenity. The apartments would rent at 80% of fair market rate — about $800 a month for a two-bedroom apartment — but only for people working in Caldwell, Dittenber said.
Those working outside of Caldwell, as verified through an employment check, would be subject to market rate rents, which would be about $1,400 a month for a two-bedroom. The apartments would not be subsidized — rather, Dittenber said the market-rate renters would help balance out those paying lower rates.
“We want teachers, firefighters, city employees who work right in the city of Caldwell to live in the city of Caldwell,” he said. He hopes that by keeping their rent affordable, they will have disposable income to spend downtown.
“Retail follows rooftops,” he said.
Most apartments that rent below market-rate are subsidized by federal low-income tax credits. DeChase Miksis has built other projects with so-called “workforce housing” — with rents targeted toward those making 80% to 120% of median income. The company’s most recent workforce-housing project, the Ash and River townhouses near downtown Boise, was built in partnership with Boise’s urban renewal district, the Capital City Development Corp., which reimbursed deChase Miksis the townhouse property’s appraised value of $679,000, the Statesman previously reported.
Urban renewal could finance development, if Caldwell gives the OK
The Creekside project would be built in three phases, with construction estimated to begin in late 2021.
The first phase would include apartments in one building with ground-floor retail surrounding a parking garage. The building and garage are estimated to cost $31.7 million.
The second phase would be a second building, which could include a boutique hotel in addition to apartments and cost about $11.9 million. The ground-floor retail across both buildings is slated to cost $3.2 million.
The third phase would extend the Indian Creek Plaza northwest along Arthur Street, toward the Creekside development. Renderings imagine the park-like open space covered in shady trees and, benches and seating along the creek.
In total, the project would add to $46.8 million, with the city pitching in about $2.1 million in urban-renewal funds to build the plaza extension, in addition to providing the land to the developer at no cost.
The question of whether to use private or public dollars to fund certain aspects of the project remains unsettled, Fultz said.
The parking garage is one major hurdle. Dittenber is pushing for the city to fund and manage it. In that case, the urban renewal agency would own the garage. Right now, urban renewal agencies in Nampa and Boise own and operate garages, but Caldwell’s agency does not.
Urban renewal is a contentious subject in conservative Canyon County. Some city leaders in Caldwell worry the city will end up subsidizing the parking garage if it does not generate enough revenue — a problem that has plagued Nampa’s downtown parking garage and the Ford Idaho Center.
There’s also the question of paying to extend the Indian Creek Plaza along the creek toward the development. It’s the type of public project that would typically be paid for by the urban renewal district. But Caldwell’s downtown urban renewal district was created in 2002 and is set to expire in 2022 — too soon for the development team to act.
Urban renewal agencies are funded with tax increment financing. When a city authorizes an urban renewal district, property taxes collected by the city itself and other taxing entities are frozen within the district for 20 years. As property values rise and new buildings go up, the additional taxes that would have gone to those jurisdictions go instead to the urban renewal agency, which may use the money to finance public projects or provide development incentives.
Given the district’s short remaining lifespan, the development team asked that Caldwell remove the site from its current urban renewal district and incorporate it into a new district. That would allow the developers to use the tax dollars they pay on the apartment buildings to finance public improvements like the plaza and sidewalk landscaping.
The plan is similar to what a Boise-based developer, the Galena Opportunity Fund, has proposed in downtown Meridian as part of a project to build a privately owned apartment building with ground-floor retail and use the tax dollars it generates to fund a new downtown community center. That plan has passed through Meridian’s urban renewal district board, but has yet to receive final approval from the Meridian City Council.
Creating a new urban renewal district is complicated, so Caldwell is considering other ways to fund the public plaza, Fultz said. He said he hopes to bring a proposal before Caldwell’s urban renewal agency by May.
‘The 50-yard line of the city of Caldwell’
DeChase Miksis’s Caldwell proposal echoes some of its urban projects in downtown Boise. The firm, headed by Dean Papé of Boise and Mark Miksis of Eugene, Oregon, completed the Gibson, a five-story, 81-unit apartment building on 5th and Idaho Streets that opened in 2019, and is now working on a seven-story mixed-use building on Sixth and Grove Streets with some units reserved for low-income renters.
Dittenber worries people may look at the proposal and consider it too bold for Caldwell, especially given all the financing that has to come together to make it a reality.
“The project may have been over-dreamt — but Caldwell is worth that,” he said. “This is the 50-yard line of our city. If you’re sitting at the 50-yard line of the city of Caldwell, don’t build something small. Build something grand.”
This story was originally published April 21, 2020 at 4:00 AM.
