The apartment election: This Idaho mayoral race shows peril of growth | Opinion
The state’s largest city outside the Treasure Valley has its first new mayor in 12 years after a heated and somewhat surprising runoff election that highlights the promise and peril of growth.
When I moved to Idaho Falls in 2014, shortly after Mayor Rebecca Casper took office, the lingering effects of the Great Recession were still clearly visible. The small downtown had plenty of vacant storefronts, and the bars were a little divey. My share of rent in a large but dilapidated three-bedroom downtown penthouse was $250 — well worth it if you didn’t mind stepping around the big hole in the floor.
But during Casper’s term, the city saw a boom in economic growth and construction comparable in relative terms to the recent growth in Boise and other Treasure Valley cities.
Downtown is packed and vibrant nearly every night, and very few storefronts there are vacant for long. There are several cocktail bars where you’ll be hard-pressed to find a drink for under $15. And a one-bedroom apartment will likely run you $1,000 to $1,400 per month.
As elsewhere in Idaho, growth is a double-edged sword. Young people struggle to make rent. Traffic has gotten much worse as infrastructure struggles to keep pace. Expansion at the airport has upset some neighbors, who now deal with much more frequent plane noise. The most visible change has been a surge in the construction of apartment buildings — avatars of rapid change.
Those issues took center stage in the election that pitted Council Member Lisa Burtenshaw against Jeff Alldridge, seeking to replace the retiring Casper.
Burtenshaw, who was first appointed by Casper in 2021, represented a continuation of the city’s current path. Alldridge, who was name-dropped favorably by far-right Idaho GOP Chair Dorothy Moon when making the case for turning municipal elections into partisan races, came in promising change.
“I don’t want it to just be another dense, urban-sprawled area that is indistinguishable from Boise and other areas. There’s something special about Idaho Falls. I love the character, I love the community. So much of what the city does is they have their agenda, and they just do it,” Alldridge told East Idaho News.
Idaho Falls has always been home to a significant faction of the far right, including major funders and board members of the Idaho Freedom Foundation — and they lined up behind Alldridge. But there has always been a fairly consistent rule when it came to local elections: They lose.
That made the outcome of the November general election surprising: Alldridge was the top vote-getter by a razor-thin 62-vote margin. But he failed to gain a majority, triggering a December runoff.
Burtenshaw’s campaign kicked into panic mode. She posted a wave of endorsements: Gov. Brad Little, Lt. Gov. Scott Bedke, U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, longtime Bonneville County Commission Chairman Roger Christensen, city council members and local state senators and representatives all came out backing her. Fundraising ramped up, and election ads and social media messaging were everywhere.
And it worked.
As a general rule, runoffs have much lower turnout than even regular municipal elections, where turnout is abysmal. But Burtenshaw’s media blitz drove enough turnout that there were more votes cast in the runoff than the general election, and she won with a safe 6-percentage-point margin.
Which certainly left a bitter taste in Alldridge’s mouth.
“They went out and got endorsements they didn’t have the first time. They were doing an appeal to authority from other politicians, most of which besides Rep. Mike Simpson didn’t even vote in this race. He’s the only one that could actually vote in this race,” Alldridge told the Post Register. (Here Alldridge forgets some campaign missteps, like responding “I don’t know” when a debate moderator asked if Mormons were Christians — in a city where a majority of residents are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Yes” was standing right there.)
There’s a lesson here for those who take Idaho’s housing affordability crisis seriously.
What happens if you stop building apartments? You restrict supply, prices rise, as conservatives seem to know in every topic other than housing. Emerging cities like Idaho Falls need more apartments, not fewer, if there’s any hope of restoring affordability for working families.
The Idaho Falls runoff election was ultimately a success, but it was also a warning shot. A faction that has long been far from any kind of success in municipal elections nearly leveraged anger about growth into a win — and it took a Herculean effort to pull things back from the brink.
The governing test will be: Can affordable housing advocates find ways to make growth and increasing density visibly and palpably beneficial to existing residents? Because if they can’t, things could easily swing the other way four years from now.
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.