There’s only one way to fix Idaho’s sky-high housing costs | Opinion
A young family in Meridian who saved for years now watches the same starter home they toured in 2019 sell for a number their paychecks cannot reach. They are not unusual.
Idaho was the second-fastest-growing state of the past decade, expanding 17.3% from 2010 to 2020 by Census reckoning, and the Treasure Valley absorbed much of that wave. Ada County alone climbed from roughly 392,000 residents to nearly 495,000, according to U.S. Census counts. Homes and rents have run far ahead of what local families earn.
I study regional housing markets for a living, and I want to be direct about the fix. Idaho’s affordability squeeze is a supply shortage. Property-tax rebates and similar relief will not solve it, because they do not produce a single new home.
That is not a slogan. It is basic market arithmetic. A rebate hands buyers more money to spend on a fixed number of houses. When the number of homes cannot rise to meet that new spending, the extra dollars get bid into the price. Relief aimed at demand, in a market starved of supply, tends to raise the very prices it was meant to ease. Sellers capture the help.
The gap is stark. The Idaho Statewide Housing Analysis from Boise State University found that housing values across Idaho climbed 74.8% between 2015 and 2020, while median household income grew just 17.9%. In Ada County, the median single-family home sold for $229,000 in 2015; that figure is a memory now.
More than 42% of Idaho renters spend at least 30% of their income on housing, according to that same Boise State analysis, and the owner-occupied vacancy rate sat near 0.8%, a sign of a market with almost nothing left on the shelf.
Idaho is not lazy about building. The state has led the nation in homebuilding and still cannot keep up with the people arriving. National researchers at Up for Growth rank Idaho among the most severe housing shortages in the country, roughly 42,000 homes short. When demand grows for a decade and supply lags, prices do exactly what they have done here.
I understand why many homeowners resist the obvious answer. They worry that more homes mean heavier traffic on roads already crowded, apartments where they expected single houses, and a change to the neighborhood character they bought into.
Those concerns are legitimate, and dismissing them is how good policy dies in a council meeting. A family that stretched to buy in Eagle or Nampa has a real stake in how their block evolves.
The honest response is that scarcity is its own kind of change, and a harsher one. It is the change that pushes a nurse or a teacher out of the county that employs them. The way to protect a community is to let it add homes at the pace its growth demands, and to do it in forms that fit: an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) in a backyard, a duplex on a corner lot, a townhome where a rule once required a mansion’s worth of land.
Boise has started. Its 2023 zoning overhaul cut the minimum lot size from 5,000 square feet to 3,500, raised the allowed size of backyard cottages from 700 to 900 square feet, legalized triplexes and fourplexes that had been banned, and halved parking mandates that quietly made small projects impossible. That is the lever: zoning that permits gentle density, faster approvals, and smaller lots.
The Legislature and every Treasure Valley city council hold that lever. Rebates spend money and move nothing. Letting Idahoans build the homes Idaho already needs is the policy that actually lowers the price.
Thomas Young holds a Ph.D. in business economics and is a partner at Econowest, where he analyzes regional housing and public-policy markets.