‘Thank you, Lord, that I live in Kuna.’ But her kids can’t afford it. Boise bedroom booms

In the 1970s, Joe Stear said people parked their cars in the middle of Main Street in downtown Kuna to have a conversation.

“Life was slower back then,” said Stear, Kuna’s mayor since 2016. “It didn’t really bother anybody, because nobody was in a hurry back then.”

Nowadays, if you parked your car in the middle of downtown Kuna, you would likely get honked at.

When Stear graduated from Kuna High School in 1977, the graduating class had 42 students. Most came from farm families in and around the city. Stear said the city did not extend much further than the strip of what is today downtown Kuna.

In 1990, Kuna’s population was just under 2,000. In 2021 the city’s population was 27,570, according to Compass, the Community Planning Association of Southwest Idaho. In three years, Compass estimates Kuna’s population will be 34,269. By 2035, it will be 44,328.

Over the last decade, Kuna has grown by 57%, according to the 2020 Census. That rapid growth has brought a big change to the lifestyle residents once knew. It has also brought challenges with property taxes and road congestion.

In the last four months of 2021, the City Council heard requests for nearly 600 homes. In September came a 50-acre subdivision with 177 houses on Ten Mile Road. In November, 123 homes on 38 acres. In December, 294 homes on 80 acres.

Source: Compass

Kuna struggles as a ‘bedroom community’

The city today is made up mostly of subdivisions extending from Meridian to Southwest Boise.

“We have been a bedroom community for a long time,” said Stear, who was reelected in 2019, in an interview with the Idaho Statesman. “We are trying to work out of that. We have been fairly consistently at 90% residential and 10% commercial.”

Shortly after Stear took office, he created the city’s first economic development position, to try to combat the rising property tax burden homeowners face. He wanted to try to attract more businesses to the city.

“It has been helpful, but that is a slow-coming thing,” he said. “We will see some benefits from that soon.”

Source: Compass

Despite its small-town feel, Kuna hasn’t escaped the rise in housing prices in the Treasure Valley. In 2017, the median home price for existing homes in Kuna was $195,000, according to Intermountain Multiple Listing Service. In 2021, the median was $425,000. In 2017, the median home price for new homes in Kuna was $257,763. In 2021, it was $459,995.

Source: IMLS

Prices like those make even Kuna, long a less-costly alternative to Boise, unreachable for median-income local workers entering the market for houses.

Harvest Millard, a Kuna resident for 3½ years and a Treasure Valley resident since birth, said her children can’t afford to live in the Valley. This is because of rising rents and property taxes, she said by phone. One of Millard’s daughters lives with Millard and her husband in Kuna.

“My kids cannot afford to live on their own; they have to have roommates,” she said. “It is not a realistic housing scenario.”

As a bedroom community, Kuna sees most of its residents leaving the city everyday for work in Boise, Nampa and Meridian, where there are more jobs in technology, health care, education and other fields.

Stear wants to change that, for at least some Kuna workers. He plans to put more industrial development on the city’s east side, where Kuna abuts Southwest Boise. He hopes to bring some technology employers into the city.

Another problem with people commuting from Kuna is the strain they put on the city’s roads.

Rapid growth destroys balance, Stear said. When residents move in gradually, the city and the state and county highway departments have time to add police or firefighters or to complete road-widening projects. When people move to a city all at once, agencies fall behind.

“Fast growth impacts the Ada County Highway District’s ability to keep up with the traffic flow,” Stear said. “The roads are congested here.”

When residential subdivisions are going up all over the city, all of the roads need improvement at the same time, he said.

“If development happens along a corridor — Ten Mile, for example, there is a lot of development on Ten Mile,” Stear said. “If we promote that development first, ACHD can improve those roadway sections and it is not as sporadic, and you don’t have to make all of the roads bigger all at once.”

Kuna residents lament disappearing farmland

With each 25-plus acre subdivision that is approved by the Kuna Planning and Zoning Commission likely comes the disappearance of a former family farm.

“I hate to see it go,” Stear said.

Many longtime area residents agree.

Millard said that even three years ago when she moved to Kuna, there was a lot more farmland than there is now.

“In the period of six months, 25-35 acres of subdivision went in around me,” Millard said. “It is just crazy to see the massive immediacy of growth that is happening.”

Stear said many of the children he grew up with decided not to take over their family farms.

“It is hard work, and most of the kids I went to school with did not want to work as hard as their dads did,” he said. “They went on to do other things. That kind of lifestyle isn’t the way it is anymore.”

“You can make a good, consistent living doing something else and not working as hard as that,” he said. “That is more attractive to most of the younger generation and people who are my age.”

Millard said she will still see people riding their horses through downtown Kuna or going through the coffee shop drive thru on horseback.

“I love that Kuna still has that rural environment,” she said.

She said she can leave her front door open for short periods of time without worrying that someone is going to come in.

“Thank you Lord that I live in Kuna,” she said.

Rachel Spacek

Idaho Statesman

Rachel Spacek is a former reporter covering Meridian, Eagle, Star and Canyon city and county governments for the Idaho Statesman.