Fixing the Red State Housing Blues

The cost of a typical home in Idaho has more than doubled over the last decade, and — if you ask some state lawmakers — excessive local regulations are largely to blame. State Sen. Ben Toews has seen the problem play out first-hand.

A few years ago, Toews, a Republican representing Coeur d’Alene, bought a 1.5-acre plot in a nearby town and proposed building 20 small homes as part of a planned urban development. The homes would be an average of 900 square feet — a typical size for starter homes a century ago and common in the oldest parts of Idaho cities, but tiny compared to the average new-build in Idaho, which has hovered around 2,100 square feet in recent years.

But the local government wouldn’t go for it because of the small lot sizes, Toews says. He may end up using the property to build storage units instead. That experience is part of what inspired a series of bills that Toews and other Idaho lawmakers pushed through the Legislature this year aimed at limiting local regulations on housing construction.

“We were trying to create a product for the next generation to buy a home,” says Toews, noting that the average age of a first-time homebuyer is now over 40. “I’m a free-market guy, so I believe that it’s more of a regulatory issue. There’s a lot of people like me that would love to do something but they’re stuck because the cities are stopping them.”

Three bills made it through the Legislature and were signed by Idaho Gov. Brad Little, also a Republican. One is meant to limit cities’ ability to impose minimum lot sizes for housing and allow for “starter home subdivisions” on lots at least four acres in size. Another would bar cities and homeowners associations from banning accessory dwelling units. A third would allow some multifamily apartment buildings to be built with a single stairway, part of a trend of reforms around the country meant to reduce construction costs.

The bills grew out of research done by an interim housing committee that launched last year, with legislators, developers, planners and architects studying potential solutions to the state’s housing challenges. Idaho’s state government is deep red, with a Republican trifecta for the last 30 years and only a handful of Democrats in the state Legislature. The committee studied housing-related actions taken by other states, including the so-called “Montana miracle,” a suite of affordable housing measures passed by the equally conservative Legislature to Idaho’s east.

While Idaho Republicans run the show, the committee was intentionally bipartisan. The bills that passed had supporters — and opponents — on both sides of the aisle. Some proposals, including a bill to allow duplexes in single-family areas, didn’t make it through the legislative committees because of opposition from local governments. Other bills were amended a few times at cities’ requests. Toews said his goal was to prevent cities from blocking the type of housing development that first-time homebuyers have a chance to afford.

“I think we all have the same goal, and I’m able to direct it toward de-regulation, supply-side, free-market solutions because of the compositions of our Legislature. Those are values that tend to be Republican,” Toews says. “But I still ended up with a lot of pushback because the cities are coming out talking about local control. There’s a place for that, but there’s no more local control than a property owner solving a very real problem with their own property.”

More state lawmakers of both parties have taken an interest in housing regulations as affordability challenges have spread from high-cost coastal cities to even some of the most rural parts of the country. Republican state legislators in places like Florida, New Hampshire and Texas have led efforts to reform local zoning regulations in the last few years. But the package of measures that Montana passed in 2023 set the stage for Idaho’s bills.

“We really just used Montana’s playbook,” says Hollie Conde, a fellow with the pro-development Sightline Institute who works as a lobbyist in Idaho. “There’s already a lot of trust in Montana.”

Conde became interested in Idaho’s housing issues while studying the loss of farmland around the state, a problem partly attributable to suburban sprawl. A huge portion of Idaho’s land is also publicly owned and federally managed. As the state has grown, inviting wealthier residents from places like the Bay Area, housing costs have risen and there’s been more development pressure on limited land. Local regulations have added to that pressure.

“What one city or municipality does is impacting everybody,” says state Rep. Megan Egbert, a Democrat. “If [cities] set these unrealistic lot sizes, trying to curb growth in that area, all that does is displace people further away from resources.”

Egbert grew up in a rural part of northern Idaho, where housing prices are now spiking. She now represents parts of Boise, which has adopted a series of changes to its own zoning rules in recent years to promote more housing growth. It was the discriminatory origins of zoning codes that sparked Egbert’s interest in the issue and drove her work in the interim housing committee. Her values might differ from the Republicans who vastly outnumber Democrats in the Legislature. But on this issue, they were pushing in the same direction.

“It was very different from people who believe this is a personal property rights issue,” Egbert says, “but both of them were important in the conversation.”