Boise leaders say they want affordable housing. They enforce zoning that impedes it
In 2018, Nirmala Sandhu and her husband bought a quaint, 750-square-foot house on Bannock Street in West Downtown that they had no intention of living in.
Sandhu wanted not the house, but the land — a 6,000-square-foot parcel less than a mile from her husband’s work, zoned R-3D for multifamily housing. That would allow her to move the house and build up to six units, although she wanted to build just a four-plex.
“We believe in high-density living in proximity to the center of town,” Sandhu, 52, said in an interview. She looked forward to downsizing from her home in East Boise: “When you get to by my age, you don’t want a yard anymore!”
She figured she and her husband would take one unit, her in-laws would take another, and two would either be available for her kids when they came back from school, or she could rent them. But when Sandhu dug into Boise’s zoning code, she realized that with all of its requirements for setbacks from the sidewalk, height and parking spaces, she had space to build only a duplex.
As Boise grows, its elected officials have outlined goals to preserve affordability and reduce urban sprawl by increasing the housing supply along transit routes and other areas with easy access to jobs and opportunity. But often the city’s own zoning code undermines those very goals.
In some places, populated with restaurants and services where the city says dense development should go, the code restricts how much housing can be built. Under current zoning, it is illegal to build anything other than a single-family home or duplex on 80% of Boise’s residential land.
When Boise was smaller, building mostly single-family homes worked. But this car-centric, land-consuming model of housing is insufficient to keep up with a growing city. The reliance on single-family homes has prevented the density of development needed to sustain a public transportation system. It has placed a stranglehold on the city’s ability to provide more housing to more people in areas with the most employment and educational opportunities.
Over the years, it has become harder to find places to rent or buy in desirable neighborhoods. New condos and apartments in downtown and the West End have helped. But planners say that to keep up with the demand for places to live without forcing people to drive to Kuna or Star in search of affordability, more housing must be built throughout the city, including in established neighborhoods.
That’s why last year, former Mayor David Bieter began the process of rewriting the city’s zoning code to align with those goals. Lauren McLean, who succeeded Bieter this year, has been slow to take up that charge, and has not yet scheduled a meeting of the committee chosen last year to look at the zoning changes. Her transition team’s report lists zoning reform among its goals for the mayor’s administration.
“We are in an active process of developing a strategic plan to rewrite the zoning ordinance,” wrote Karen Boe, the mayor’s spokeswoman, in an email to the Statesman. “We need to ensure that our zoning ordinance is in alignment with Boise’s Comprehensive Plan, Blueprint Boise, and it is imperative that we have the right tools in place and the ability to quickly respond to changing economic conditions and fundamental community needs.”
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Rewriting a zoning code
A zoning code is one of the most unsavory sausages that a local government is charged with making. Any change forces a discussion about the realities of growth. It pits the idealistic goals of city planners against the protectiveness of long-time residents defending the value of the single biggest investment most of them have made in their lives: their homes.
It is messy and technocratic, and most people would rather look away.
But without rewriting the zoning code to allow more types of housing, prices in Boise will keep surging upwards, says Boise City Councilwoman Elaine Clegg.
“If you put all these restrictions in, the housing that does exist gets more and more expensive,” she said. “So the more units you make available there, that over time drives prices down.”
Clegg is talking about the idea that as new housing is added to the market, higher-income people will trade up, leaving their vacant older properties free for lower-income people.
Many cities face rising housing costs, but the Treasure Valley’s price increases are stark. In the last five years, Ada County’s median home price has increased 64%, to $364,900 in the first quarter of 2020 from $222,700 in the same quarter of 2015.
As home prices rise, more young people rent, which has driven rents up. The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Boise rose to $1,004 in 2019 from $893 in 2018, according to Colliers Idaho. New rentals cost even more.
Eroding affordability could hurt Boise’s job market, according to the National Association of Realtors, as employers look for other cities that can offer lower costs of living, and thus lower the salaries paid to workers.
Other cities have begun to let their streets get denser through “upzoning” to combat spiking rents and home prices. In 2018, Minneapolis ended single-family zoning, allowing up to three units to be built on any city lot. In 2019, the Oregon Legislature passed a law that will end single-family zoning in most cities throughout the state.
So far, Boise isn’t considering a citywide upzone. But that forces the question: Where will new housing units go, if nobody wants them nearby?
In Northwest Boise, a debate about density
The battle against density will likely be fought hardest in Boise’s enclaves of single-family houses that are well-positioned near transportation corridors.
What happened with the property at 9000 W. State St. may be a sign of the zoning debate to come.
For decades, the 4-acre farm avoided development. But development was only a matter of time: The parcel is just east of Duncan Lane along one of the Treasure Valley’s busiest streets. Boise plans to build a bus rapid-transit system on State in the next decade, which will run buses every 15 minutes or less in their own dedicated lanes.
Kelly Kitchens saw the farm’s potential. This year, the Boise real estate agent proposed to build 60 apartments there.
But there was a problem. The area was zoned for single-family homes. Under current code, Kitchens would be allowed to build just 30 houses.
He asked for a rezone from single-family to R-3, or multifamily. Boise’s planning staff recommended the rezoning to the City Council. The staff even asked Kitchens: Why not build 180 apartments, the maximum density allowed under the R-3 code?
But the plans set off a backlash from neighbors in the Northwest Boise area between State Street and Hill Road.
Armed with language from the city’s own comprehensive plan, residents rallied and said housing shouldn’t be built until proper sidewalks could be installed. At a planning and zoning meeting in February, former Mayor Brent Coles said that adding more traffic would be a “disaster waiting to happen.”
Jennifer Szwec, a nurse, voiced concern that new apartment residents would be at heightened risk of respiratory illnesses living in such proximity to the busy state highway (though she said nothing about the existing single-family homeowners living just west along State Street.)
Richard Llewellyn, a leader in the Northwest Neighborhood Association, called to stop any development until the bus rapid transit system is built and extended to the area.
“Let’s declare a moratorium on growth in West Boise until we can get things right,” he told the City Council on June 9.
Llewellyn, 51, grew up in Boise and has been living in the same house on Hill Road since the late ‘90s. For years, he has listened to city officials’ plans for better public transit on State Street and watched as the fields along Hill Road and State Street have been turned into rooftops.
He wants to see the infrastructure to support these new houses go in first, but city leaders say greater population density must come first to sustain a transit system.
“We’re having this radical, radical change from a semi-rural area to something like 95% of new housing either being apartments or townhouses,” Llewellyn said in an interview. “We’re not seeing the transit to actually have transit-oriented development.”
A blanket zoning change around State Street, he said, would take away what little say neighbors have through the rezoning process to negotiate standards like density and open space for individual projects.
In the end, the City Council approved the project unanimously.
“It’s the density we want along the transportation corridor,” said City Councilman Patrick Bageant.
Addressing affordability concerns
At its heart, the rezoning debate is about far more than just additional traffic and farmland loss; it is about how cities are built, and who they are built for.
For Llewellyn, the high-density housing that has replaced nearby farmland symbolizes greed by developers, whose goal is profit rather than neighborhood preservation; and by the city, whose leaders seek to expand their tax revenue base.
“It’s an adolescent attitude that we just have to do everything to attract people to come here and give the developers what they want, so that they’ll come and they’ll build more,” Llewellyn said.
The problem is that cities rely almost exclusively on private capital to turn their planning policies into reality. Building the neighborhoods people want depends upon a whether a developer can turn a profit.
Lori Dicaire, a housing justice advocate, sees that system as inherently unfair. The market, she says, often ends up buying low-income people out of their homes and building new housing that caters to those at the higher end. Progressives like her don’t buy into the trickle-down economics behind the idea that increasing the housing supply will lead to increased affordability.
“We can just keep building more and more expensive housing, but it’s not really for the people that live here,” she said in an interview. “And you continue to displace the people that are living on Idaho salaries.”
Boise’s real need is not more market-rate apartments, Dicaire says, but subsidized housing for low-income renters. In 2018, nearly one in three Ada County households paid more than 30% of their incomes toward rent or mortgage expenses, according to Federal Reserve economic data.
“The problem is, we don’t have enough affordable housing being built,” she said. “But we talk about, ‘oh, we just need to do upzoning so we can allow developers to build, baby, build.’”
High-density, low cost?
Those pushing to increase the housing supply through zoning, like Boise resident Patrick Spoutz, agree that building more subsidized housing is vital.
“But the truth is, it’s unlikely we’re ever going to have a large enough segment of affordable housing to meet the real housing needs of people in our city and our region,” Spoutz, 32, said by phone.
The apartments at 9000 State St. certainly won’t be targeted at low-income renters — renters there will pay $1,300 a month for a two-bedroom, Kitchens said.
But Kitchens’s development does illustrate how higher-density housing can create lower-cost living than single-family housing offers. In Northwest Boise, the median cost of a new single-family home — which Kitchens would have been entitled to build before his rezone request — is $484,000.
Building more types of housing across the city will allow for a greater diversity of people to live in Boise, says Clay Carley, another advocate of zoning reform. He is building a 60-unit apartment building with 45 federally subsidized, low-income units at the corner of 6th and Grove streets in downtown Boise.
“Multifamily apartment projects allow people to live in a neighborhood where they can’t afford to buy a single-family home,” he said. “You have to have that healthy mix for things to be sustainable.”
More infill in existing neighborhoods
Much higher densities used to be allowed in Boise, before the zoning code, implemented in the 1950s, began to require minimum parking and maximum height requirements.
Under the current code, some residences in Boise’s most charming neighborhoods could not have been be built.
Take, for example, the bungalows at 1311 N. 10th Street, which lack onsite parking and were built in 1935 at a density of 16 units an acre, instead of the current maximum of 8 units an acre. Or the Wellman Apartments, built in 1929 at the corner of 5th and Franklin streets, which has 21 apartments and six parking spaces, while current zoning would allow just 12 units and require 13 parking spots.
Clegg says that in rewriting the zoning code, the city might look to its past as a guide. Some neighborhoods might remain zoned for single-family, while others would see modest increases in density through small code changes.
“How can we actually take advantage of the places that are most walkable and most accessible to destinations?” Clegg asked.
Currently, Boise’s zoning forces developers to ask for rezones to build more densely than the code allows, even where it makes sense.
One landowner on the corner of Overland and Maple Grove roads had to ask for a rezone in 2013 so he could build a duplex and fourplex, rather than single-family homes along the busy intersection.
And the developer of the Cartee, an apartment complex now under construction at 200 Myrtle Street in downtown, had to request a rezone in 2018 to allow 160 units, rather than the previous maximum of 122.
Sometimes the current code makes even small infill projects untenable, like Sandhu’s.
In the end, Sandhu’s ambitions were constrained by the zoning code: Building a fourplex would have required her to include room for eight parking spots, which she didn’t have the room for, with all the required setbacks and other regulations.
Instead, she just built a two-story duplex. She’ll live on the top floor with her husband. Her in-laws will live in the unit below. The house includes two bedrooms with separate entrances that won’t count as living units since they lack kitchens, but can be used by her kids when they come home from school. Meanwhile, Sandhu plans to rent them on Airbnb.
Sandhu could have built more housing with just small changes to the code, like lowering the amount of parking required and allowing taller buildings. She and her husband didn’t want all the cars the code requires spaces for; they want to walk downtown.
“I’m not a big developer, but I am trying to contribute to urban density,” Sandhu said.
Modest changes in density could enable people like Sandhu to help the city to better meet its density and housing goals.
But even those changes could test the limits of Boiseans’ comfort levels with density, in a region that has long avoided that dilemma by growing ever outward.
Advocates say upzoning isn’t a panacea. It won’t stop Boise, or its suburbs, from consuming farmland to the west and south. It won’t stop property values from increasing. It won’t build housing at the low end of the market.
But it might reduce some of the barriers that single-family zoning has created to providing more affordable housing and alternative modes of transportation.
“We have to take care of our community long term to create an equitable society,” Carley said. “That means you have to make new rules to make that happen. Individual property owners don’t want to share the benefits with those that don’t have them.”
This story was originally published June 19, 2020 at 4:00 AM.
