These millennials say key to solving Boise-area housing crisis is to build, build, build
Patrick Spoutz sits through a lot of meetings like this one.
Traffic. That will be the neighbors’ first complaint. Next will be the scale of the building. Then the lack of parking. Then something about the safety of children being threatened.
It’s Monday night, March 2, and Spoutz, a 32-year-old Boise pharmacist, is one of six people testifying before the city Planning and Zoning Commission about a 235-unit apartment building at the intersection of Fairview Avenue and Cole Road.
At this meeting, as at many others, Spoutz is the lone voice aside from the developers testifying in support. He approaches the podium to deliver his one-minute comment.
“This project has 235 homes for 300 or 400 or perhaps even a few more people,” he says. “And though probably most of those people aren’t here today, they all have a stake in this project existing and allowing them a place to live in Boise.”
Spoutz looks down, then leans toward the microphone. “It’s really just a fantastic project.... I wish it were slightly larger. Thanks!”
Young Boise adults join YIMBY movement
Boise’s growth has caused plenty of pain — longer commutes, rising housing costs rise, more people without homes living on the streets. The rapid pace of change has triggered a backlash, with some calling for the city to simply stop building.
But a small group of Boise residents, including Spoutz, is calling to build even more.
They call themselves YIMBYs, which stands for Yes in My Back Yard — a counter to the Not in My Back Yard homeowners whose attitudes largely dominate the discussion around growth in Boise, as they have for years in most communities.
The movement has risen in popularity among young people around the country, as many face rising rents and homeownership becomes increasingly unattainable.
But in contrast to the socialist leanings of some young urban millennials, YIMBYs take a pro-market stance: If there’s not enough housing, build more. Build more market-rate housing, build more public housing, build more luxury housing — and build it near jobs and transportation.
“Part of welcoming people to Boise is building and setting up a city such that there’s places for them to live,” Spoutz said in an interview. “And that involves finding ways to allow and fit more homes of all types — from single-family homes to middle-density duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings, and certainly larger projects in appropriate areas.”
Activists side with developers, seek bigger buildings
Spoutz and other YIMBYs often find themselves on the side of developers, arguing for zoning deregulation and taller buildings. Their opponents are frequently an unlikely alliance of older progressives who view developers as greedy profit-extractors and whatever longtime Boiseans happen to live next to the project du jour.
“People have a strong reluctance for most kinds of change. And that’s understandable,” Spoutz said. “But not changing is a lot more dangerous, especially from an affordability standpoint.”
If Boise doesn’t build enough housing, Spoutz argues, demand will keep pushing up prices. Between January 2015 and January 2020, Boise’s median monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment increased 32%, to $1,263 from $950, according to Zillow. Ada County’s median house prices increased 62%, to $363,000 from $223,900, according to the Intermountain Multiple Listing Service.
Still, Boise isn’t where you’d expect the generation of a pro-housing movement. Despite rising prices, coastal migrants still praise the city for its relative affordability (that $363,000 median house compares with $650,000 in Los Angeles County). Idaho’s housing crisis is nowhere near California’s, where job growth has far outpaced building permits.
But it could get there.
Voice for people who don’t live in Boise yet
For YIMBY Joe Jaszewski, Boise today is reminiscent of the Sacramento he grew up in — a small city surrounded by farmland that rapidly transformed into low-density subdivisions as people searched farther and farther beyond city limits to find affordable places to live.
“It turned Sacramento into this sort of sprawling, traffic-congested place, but it also got really expensive to live there, because they weren’t building anything close in,” he said. “I saw Boise going down the same direction. It felt like the political direction was so heavily favored toward people who are already here.”
But Jaszewski, a photographer and former Statesman employee, wanted to change that. He started a Facebook group called “Afford Boise,” where he and fellow YIMBYs commiserate about prevailing anti-development attitudes and encourage one another to show up at meetings in support of the types of projects that usually get little love.
Inherently, the development process is biased toward people who already live in Boise, YIMBYs say. Those who testify at hearings typically talk about the ways a new development will harm them (several people at the March 2 meeting testified that children would drown in an uncovered canal near the building site, in addition to the excess traffic the project would bring.)
What’s missing are the voices of those whom a development would help.
“There’s not a voice for the city at large and the people that want to live here, and the people that will eventually live in these units,” Spoutz said.
Spoutz, like Jaszewski, moved here from somewhere else. He came to Boise from Kansas City in 2015, rented for a year, then bought a house with his wife in the North End just as prices began their breathtaking ascent.
Spoutz presents as non-combative, but his brand of confrontation is more subtle. In February, he spoke at a different planning and zoning meeting in support of a proposed development with smaller lot sizes than surrounding neighborhoods. He got booed — a moment he describes as “striking” and “not wholesome” but also “a little bit exciting.”
When opponents call him a shill for developers, he politely reminds them that he is, in fact, a pharmacist who has no financial stake in the developments he supports.
And while he could easily recite the findings from the dozens of research articles he’s read that demonstrate the correlation between increasing the housing supply and affordability, he prefers to anchor his arguments in morality rather than economics. People are moving to Boise, he says, and they should have a place to live.
Increase housing supply, affordability
Some housing advocates, like Vanishing Boise founder Lori DiCaire, say Boise’s focus should be on building new subsidized affordable housing.
“You’re going back to this elementary supply-and-demand issue when there are so many complex forces at work,” she previously told the Statesman. “You actually have to do something to build affordable housing.”
The best solutions to encouraging more cheaply priced, market-rate dwellings, advocates like her say, involve regulation, like passing rent control, or requiring all new developments to include a minimum amount of affordable housing — solutions that other cities have adopted in the face of their own housing crises.
As Jaszewski, who lives in a Garden City townhouse, puts it: There are calls for all types of action — except to build more housing.
YIMBYs don’t deny the need for more subsidized housing, but they say it cannot alone solve Boise’s housing needs. Funds for subsidized housing mostly come from the federal government, and as construction costs rise, those limited dollars mean less each year. A single unit of affordable housing in Boise can cost between $150,000 and $215,000 to build, depending on the land cost.
Backyard cottages, zoning-law reform
Boise has made some strides in increasing the supply of housing in other ways.
In June 2019, the City Council voted to relax regulations on backyard cottages, allowing more density on existing lots. For years, the city has discussed plans to rewrite its zoning code to allow for higher-density development in more neighborhoods.
And Mayor Lauren McLean is exploring the option of a community land trust, which would allow private developers to build dwellings on land leased at low rates from the city.
Meanwhile, prices climb. The National Association of Realtors reported in January 2020 that Boise’s worsening affordability was starting to stunt the region’s job-growth. And while the coronavirus pandemic briefly stalled the housing market, home sales in Boise are back up again, as of June.
Cameron Cochems, a 26-year-old former Idaho House legislative aid, fears his generation of Boiseans will never be able to save up enough to buy a house here.
“Every dollar we save, housing prices go up by $2,” he said in a phone interview. “It doesn’t seem sustainable.”
Cochems, who grew up in Nampa, isn’t interested in buying a house in the suburbs like his parents. He rents a house on the Boise Bench, because he’d rather live within biking distance to his job and grocery stores than a larger home.
But the prevailing anti-development attitudes “from retirees with too much time on their hands” are preventing denser, more affordable housing types from going in, he said.
“A lot of the NIMBYs come from a place of privilege,” Cochems said. “They have the time to go to city council meetings. People who work at McDonalds, people who are refugees — they may not have the ability to go and advocate for themselves.”
Homeowner joins fight, sees moral imperative
Some home-owning YIMBYs, like Jordan Morales, say they have a moral imperative to improve the conditions in Boise for the people who didn’t have the luck to buy a house back when prices were lower.
“Once you get into a home, you’re set,” Morales said by phone. “But it’s important for homeowners to put themselves in the shoes of non-homeowners. YIMBYs understand where we are, and where renters are, and we want to make sure they have the opportunity to live here.”
Morales, a 31-year-old office manager for Boise State who lives in Southeast Boise, hopes that by raising his voice in favor of development, he can help to alleviate some of the pressure on city leaders to deny projects just because of neighborhood resentment.
“They can’t always be making decisions in front of an angry mob,” Morales said.
But often, that’s exactly what public hearings turn into.
Support of projects rare at Boise meetings
“Certainly the people that tend to be the most engaged at meetings are those who are concerned about growth,” said Meredith Stead, chairwoman of the Planning and Zoning Commission. “It’s hard to say whether they are actually the majority in Boise.”
Chris Danley, a transportation planner who served on the Planning and Zoning Commission from 2014 to 2016, says it can help to have folks articulate what they want to see in Boise, rather than just blasting a project entirely.
“Rarely do you have folks coming out in support of a project, and that’s really unfortunate, because a lot of times there are good things proposed, and you’d like to see that support,” Danley said.
Opposition to development — and the ensuing negotiations with the city, neighbors, and sometimes eventual lawsuits — can add time and money onto the approval process. That makes developers more reluctant to pursue infill development, Danley said, and ultimately provides a compelling case for developing further outside of city limits, where the cost to the developer may be less, but the cost to the public ultimately increases as a city is forced to extend its infrastructure farther out.
“We have enough suburban single-family housing,” Jaszewski said. “We need to build housing of other types for people who want a different lifestyle at a different price point.”
The suburbs accounted for 82.7% of the Treasure Valley’s residential growth in 2019, with over a quarter of the region’s growth coming from Meridian alone. Boise, while the largest city in the Treasure Valley, accounted for 17.3% of the area’s growth.
Boise accounts for most of the region’s growth in multifamily apartments. Last year, the city added 1,120 new multifamily units, versus 583 single-family houses.
Nina Schaeffer, a 24-year-old lifelong Boisean who works for the Boise Bicycle Project, wants to see that trend continue.
“A lot of people forget that Boise is a capital city,” she said by phone. “People seem to think it shouldn’t be developed like a city — but I think that’s inevitable.”
The right to a home in fast-growing valley
Pushing for more housing is an uphill battle in a region where 75% of residents feel growth has occurred too fast. People move to Boise to get away from the headaches of life in many larger cities: rising homelessness and inequality, crime, backed-up traffic and ever-increasing prices.
Those problems may only be exacerbated if Boise doesn’t add more housing — and that will mean changes for today’s homeowners.
“Who said anybody has a right to live in a neighborhood that stays the same for decades?” he said. “Who said your right to live in an unchanging neighborhood overrides someone else’s right to have a home there?”
City officials have shown a willingness to get on board. At the March meeting where Spoutz endorsed the 235 apartments, the Planning and Zoning Commission unanimously recommended approval.
“If we don’t add housing in places like this along Fairview, then that new housing is just going to get built way out west in Kuna or Star or Meridian or unincorporated Ada County,” said Commissioner Milt Gillespie.
“I am particularly appreciative of the fact that the housing unit sizes serve a demographic that has been long underserved in this area with the studio apartments and the smaller sizes,” said Commissioner Jim Bratnober.
“Can you believe this?” one West Boise woman grumbled in the elevator on the way down. “We don’t need any more apartments in this city.”
In the City Council chambers, the development team J.B. Earl Co. celebrated the commission’s decision and the surprise support offered by Spoutz. One of the project managers turned to the other as he shuffled papers into a messenger bag.
“I don’t think I’ve seen someone do that before,” he said.
This story was originally published July 12, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
