Luxury builder revives plan for 700 homes in fast-growing Northwest Meridian
After hitting the brakes in 2022, a luxury-home builder is moving forward on a proposal to build hundreds of homes in fast-growing northwest Meridian despite neighbors’ trepidation.
Toll Southwest LLC, a subsidiary of Toll Brothers, has applied to build a 517-home subdivision, called Dayspring, on 143 acres at the southeast corner of Ustick and McDermott roads. The proposal also includes 14 lots for retail and offices, application materials filed with the city show.
The developer plans to turn six parcels of rural residential and agricultural land, now owned by a Utah mink farming company, into the residential and commercial development. Together, the parcels were valued at over $1.7 million last year, according to the Ada County Assessor’s Office. Four homes and “accessory structures” now on the site would be removed, the application’s narrative letter said.
And Toll Brothers plans an additional 172 homes just northeast, at the corner of Ustick and Black Cat roads, in a subdivision that would be called Springday. The two proposals total 689 homes.
500+ homes, two plazas off Ustick
In 2022, Toll Brothers was days away from submitting an application for Dayspring with the city when the developer “walked away” from an option to buy the land, according to Becky McKay, owner of Engineering Solutions, who helped design the development.
McKay told the Idaho Statesman by phone that at the time, Toll Brothers, a national builder, wasn’t “sure about the timing,” perhaps related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Last year, the company picked up the plans again, she said.
Plans for Dayspring filed with the city in April include 446 single-family homes, 71 town homes and 7.4 acres of commercial space. The town homes would be arranged in buildings with four, five and six units. The single-family homes would offer “diversity” in terms of lots sizes and styles: A few homes adjoining alleys would have roughly 3,800-square-foot lots, while the traditional homes’ lots would vary from about 3,800 to 17,000 square feet.
There would be “transitional lot sizing” — larger lots would sit on the southeast side of the development, adjacent to neighboring subdivisions, said McKay. She said the “mixture of styles, sizes” aligns with the city’s goals for the area, and the larger homes on the southern tip of the development would be luxury homes like those typically associated with Toll Brothers.
Amenities envisioned for Dayspring’s residents include two club houses and two swimming pools, McKay said. “We’ve got pocket parks and pathways ... So it’ll be a real nice, walkable neighborhood.”
Application materials said a northern common area would also include two pickleball courts.
Dayspring’s commercial component would sit on the north side of the development adjacent to Ustick, with access from a local east-west road the developer plans to build south of Ustick. Plans include two plazas with 60,000 square feet of commercial space, plus open space, which would create “a gathering place for residents and others with an inviting feel.”
Retail and offices in the area would have to be “residential-compatible” and would be geared toward supporting existing and future development and providing “convenient services for residents, workers and visitors,” plans said. These buildings are expected to have “excellent visibility” from Ustick and the McDermott bypass — the section of McDermott that snakes east before intersecting with Ustick and continuing north. They would not, however, be accessible from either of those major roads, McKay said.
A park-and-ride lot for Valley Regional Transit is also proposed, which McKay said was a nod to transit goals in the city’s comprehensive plan.
Nearby residents raise concerns over density, traffic
When Toll Brothers initially proposed its subdivision in 2022, neighbors submitted public comments to the city detailing concerns over the development’s density, traffic impacts and water use.
In an email to the city clerk’s office in September 2022, Don LaFever, who lives just east of the proposed subdivision near Seasons Park, said Dayspring would “greatly impact the lives of residents” in the adjacent Autumn Faire and Turnberry subdivisions. LaFever said the “potential for significant traffic congestion ... could make access to and from our homes much more difficult” and could “endanger children at Seasons Park with an increased chance of traffic incidents.”
LaFever told the Statesman by phone on Thursday that now that plans had resumed, he was particularly concerned about congestion on a two-lane road Toll Brothers would build running north-south and connecting to Ustick.
“They’re still going to be cramming 700 or some homes into that subdivision, and ... they have one access route up to Ustick, and they won’t make it a two-lane each way,” LaFever said. “They’re going to be pouring a lot of homes there, and it’s going to be very difficult to get up there.”
LaFever anticipates that when traffic backs up on that road, called Dayspring Way, drivers would try to cut through the neighboring subdivisions.
“I did a lot of proposed subdivisions,” said LaFever, who previously worked as an appraiser. “None of them I saw were this bad.”
Developer banks on Ustick widening to ease traffic
McKay told the Statesman that though a formal application was never submitted in 2022, the developer met with neighbors at that time and that those meetings informed the plans now awaiting city consideration.
“We made revisions based on their input back in 2022,” said McKay, who believed the changes were well-received at a neighborhood meeting presenting the new proposal last year.
For example, McKay said roads within the subdivision are arranged in a “circuitous connection” — designed to direct travel onto Dayspring Way and out to Ustick and discourage drivers from cutting through the subdivisions to the east. That design “minimizes” cut-through traffic, because Dayspring Way becomes “the most convenient route” as opposed to having to “zig and zag” through smaller roads, she said.
Toll Brothers hired Boise engineering consultants Kittelson and Associates to conduct a traffic study, which found that the subdivision would generate nearly 8,300 vehicle trips a day, including 525 during the weekday morning peak hour and 621 during the afternoon. An intersection at Ustick and the proposed Dayspring Way would operate at an Ada County Highway District level of service “F” for northbound drivers turning left, the study found. That is ACHD’s lowest “acceptable” level of service.
But McKay noted that ACHD plans to widen Ustick from McDermott to Black Cat Road in 2027, a 0.8-mile stretch that includes the Ustick-Dayspring Way intersection. Before that, ACHD seeks to widen Ustick further east, from Black Cat to Ten Mile Road, expected to be complete by 2026. Some improvements to Ustick, including work at Ustick and McDermott, have been bumped up because of the Idaho 16 extension.
More development coming to NW Meridian
As denser areas of Meridian, like the Ten Mile interchange area, have become more built-out in years past, growth is anticipated to pick up in the city’s northwest outskirts.
The Idaho 16 extension is also expected to open up north-south travel through the Treasure Valley and encourage growth in the northern stretches of Ada County. In Meridian, developers have in recent months filed preliminary applications to build on hundreds of acres in the Fields subarea, a 4-square-mile area bounded by Ustick, McDermott, Chinden Boulevard and Can Ada Road. Dayspring sits just beyond this master-planned area.
Dayspring, and its 172-home counterpart to the north are scheduled to go before the Planning and Zoning Commission in a public hearing at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 5, at Meridian City Hall.
