‘Have to be given the chance.’ Neighbors say Boise development threatens older buildings, character
On the southern side of Victory Road, just barely outside Boise’s city limits, sit two atypical houses.
When they were built, they were the dream homes of twin sisters Elaine Allen and Eileen Schrier. The first, Allen’s heptagonal home, was built in 1964, according to property records. The second, Schrier’s octagonal home right next door, was built in 1973.
According to an October 1975 Statesman story on the houses, they were labors of love. They were built by another set of siblings — the Cook brothers, Art, Noel and Lyle — with stones the sisters gathered from Rocky Canyon, Idaho City and the Duck Valley Indian Reservation. Allen and Schrier did the landscaping, built the patios and created the rock walls outside the houses. They even built a man-made pond on the property.
Now, those houses could be torn down to make way for denser housing neighbors say affect the character of the area they love.
The parcel the houses sit on at 9933 W. Victory Road, as well as the one next to it, is in the works to be developed into a new neighborhood called the Music Subdivision. The project would bring 67 single-family homes spread across 18.5 acres, a density higher than many surrounding neighborhoods in the Southwest Ada County Alliance, or SWACA, neighborhood association.
Marisa Keith, president of the neighborhood association, said that neighbors had hoped developers would incorporate the houses in some way into the development.
“Our area has absolutely no protections for historical anything,” Keith told the Statesman. “We get these huge housing tracts that come in and just completely reshape the entire landscape, and they really aren’t using all of the characteristics that made Southwest Boise why people want to live out here in the first place.”
Keith said she hoped the houses would be saved in some way, much like when in 2018, the Boise City Council put an emergency ordinance in place to protect a house in Boise’s East End from demolition.
But T. Hethe Clark, a Boise attorney representing the developers at a Boise Planning and Zoning Commission meeting on June 8, said saving the older homes wasn’t possible. A third home on the property — owned by the Dunkley family — will stay as part of the new subdivision, but the other houses have structural deficiencies that would make it too difficult to bring them up to code, Clark said.
“They are unique, but they’re not historic,” Clark told the commission. “We’re unable to retain them for sale to third parties.”
In a phone interview with the Statesman, Clark said that the houses are not built to current electrical codes or energy standards, making it nearly impossible to save the buildings. The developer has agreed to a request from the neighborhood and recommendations from Boise’s Planning and Development department to allow the Idaho State Historical Society to document the homes and their history.
The process, while atypical, would likely involve taking photos and documenting the houses, Dan Everhart, outreach historian for the Idaho Historic Preservation Office, told the Statesman. While it wouldn’t save the houses, it would allow them to be remembered in a way that the public could later use. Clark noted that when the subdivision is developed, it would also feature a small plaque near the pond the commemorate the original polygonal houses.
Density in a city needing housing
Neighbors have concerns, however, about swapping historic structures for denser housing. Boise has a goal of 1,000 new living units per year, spanning from compact housing downtown to new houses in other parts of the city, which can mean more density in some areas.
Clark said he felt the subdivision played perfectly into the city’s goal, providing the necessary infill the city needs while still maintaining some of the original features of the land.
The new homes are right off Victory Road, a transportation corridor, but the pond will stay on the property as a common area for those in the neighborhood.
The lots will be smaller than those in nearby neighborhoods, but the subdivision is specifically designed to have larger lots near the back of the subdivision to more closely match the larger lots neighbors have. Closer to Victory Road, lots get smaller, a move Clark said allowed the subdivision to more closely match the suburban densities on the other side of the street.
Clark said that he understood neighbors often have concerns over new projects near them, but said the Music Subdivision “really works in this location” by efficiently using city services while still attempting to match the surrounding housing.
Some neighbors disagree. Several who testified before the Planning and Zoning Commission expressed concern over the density of the new houses even with the plan to slowly segue into larger lot sizes as the subdivision moved away from the road.
One of those neighbors was Todd Merritt, who lives in a nearby neighborhood and said he and his wife bought a house in the subdivision they did was because they liked the space between homes.
“We were very happy to find a neighborhood that wasn’t jam packed with houses so close together you can almost jump from one to the other,” he said. The new subdivision, he said, couldn’t offer that and would change the character of the area.
The Planning and Zoning Commission’s ultimately voted 7 to 1 to recommend approval the project, approving the conditional use permit and moving the annexation and preliminary plat for the subdivision to go before the Boise City Council, which has final approval.
‘We have to be given the chance’
To Keith, the decision felt like growing just for the sake of growing. She said that the SWACA neighborhood association largely hasn’t seen the benefits of that growth, including new parks and more schools.
“Instead, it’s just parcel after parcel of houses,” she said, which slowly chips away at what makes the area unique. “It feels like we’re in this fight between what the city wants and what we want our community to look like.”
Those who testified before the Planning and Zoning Commission also expressed concern over traffic from the new subdivision and whether the mature trees on the property would be saved, but several returned to the historic houses, which Keith said some consider emblematic of a bigger problem in the southwestern part of the city.
“Just like it’s important for the people in the Foothills to want to preserve their area, this is a place that I live in and love,” she said. “We all know that change is coming, but how we approach that matters.”
SWACA doesn’t get the leeway other neighborhoods do, Keith said, because many people — including city officials who overwhelmingly live in the North and East ends — aren’t willing to make the drive to see what the area looks like and what is worth protecting. Hers is still a semi-rural community, she said, and the speed of development is changing the very nature of the neighborhood.
Keith said the neighborhood association is working to appeal the decision made by the Planning and Zoning Commission, which would put it before the Boise City Council. Neighbors want the chance to advocate for themselves, she said, rather than just putting in denser housing to hit a goal for a city they can’t even vote in, as much of the neighborhood association falls outside Boise city limits.
Much of the land in the area was built on later than the North End or in downtown Boise. As a result, buildings aren’t as old as other parts of the city, but Keith said the older ones, while sometimes in need of rehabilitation, are part of what makes the area special.
It may be too late to save the many-sided dream homes of twin sisters 50 years ago, but Keith said she hopes the city does something to protect more recent history before it is gone.
“If we keep tearing down our historical properties, SWACA is never going to have 100-year-old houses,” Keith said. “They’ll be gone, because people will think they’re not worth saving because they never had the chance to get old. That bothers me. We have to be given the chance.”