Facing a housing crisis, Boise focuses on incentives, not mandates
By Sarah Downey | June 12, 2026
The familiar adage of the carrot and the stick helps sum up what Boise is doing to manage a fast-growing population mixed with a housing crunch. Instead of employing a regulation-heavy stick approach, it is largely using a carrot strategy that promotes market-rate expansion where it’s needed the most.
Affordable housing requirements may sound good on paper, but in Los Angeles subsidized properties can cost $700,000 a unit.Developers can spend years having to sort through the red tape, and that means fewer houses get built. It’s a “deeply structural shortage,” according to a recent report by the National Association of Realtors.
Meanwhile, as Idaho cities keep drawing people fleeing pricey West Coast cities, single-family home prices have shot up. It’s caused social tension in Boise, as long-time residents compete for limited houses with equity-rich newcomers from Southern California and the Puget Sound. A Boise mayoral candidate even ran on an anti-California platform in 2019. He lost, but a similar smart-growth philosophy got his opponent, Lauren McLean, elected.
In 2022, Oxford Economics declared Boise the least affordable housing market in the United States and Canada, based on a city’s median income compared to median home prices. Last year, a Lending Tree study said Boise had the second-worst housing crisis in the nation. Boise’s population has increased about 12% in the last decade. But if you grow too fast, you end up with sprawl, which Boise officials don’t want, either.
But the city appears to be making progress. Recent U.S. Census figures show Idaho is now first in the nation for permitting new housing, at a rate double the national average. Boise passed a new zoning code in 2023, and in April added new incentives for affordable and sustainable development.
“Although we feel the growth, we are still small and manageable,” Professor Vanessa Fry, director of the Idaho Policy Institute at Boise State University, told me. She added that in the last decade there’s been a real effort to find developers who are building market-rate housing and are also interested in affordable options, but they don’t mandate it. And that’s important because mandating affordable housing can make it more expensive.
Looking around at homes with big backyards, the city began offering free ADU (accessory dwelling unit) plans on its website. Boise Housing Week in April presented opportunities for residents and businesses, plus bus tours of developing neighborhoods, like the West Bench, and building in new areas to accommodate Micron’s potential $50-billion expansion.
Fry on May 1 had a chance to speak about launching the Tiny Homes on Wheels program in Boise (to deal with its homelessness problems) as moderator for the Housing Supply & Densification Strategies panel at the International Conference on Urban Affairs in Chicago. The state of Idaho has also kicked into high gear, passing a slate of housing bills aimed at promoting affordability, including creating a “shot clock” to create faster permitting times.
It took about three years to go from permit to moving in at the Denton Apartments – Boise’s largest affordable-housing development. By contrast, California leaders say they have 40,000 affordable units stuck in the pipeline. Now they’re pushing voters for another $10 billion to pay for it. But they also needed massive funding in 2018, when voters approved $6 billion in bonds for affordable housing.
But all that public funding is still not making a sufficient dent in the problem. Los Angeles has become a risky investment, according to the Los Angeles Times, which in October 2025 headlined a story: “Almost no one is building new apartments in Los Angeles.” Part of that problem stems from the city’s “mansion tax,” which also applies to apartment construction.
The numbers clearly favor development in cities using the alternative carrot strategy. Boise’s 238,000 population is one-third of Portland, Ore.’s, population of 636,000. One recent Redfin analysis found that over 13 recent months Boise issued 9,846 housing permits, or 8% more than Portland’s 9,102.
Coincidence? Seattle’s Democratic Socialist mayor Katie Wilson took office in January, and new housing permits dropped 63% since December 2025. Seattle has nearly 800,000 people – three times more than Boise – but you wouldn’t know it from its permit numbers. San Jose has nearly 1 million people, but only 6,700 new permits, 33% fewer than Boise.
And then there’s Los Angeles, which at 3.9 million has roughly 16 times more residents than Boise. The Redfin data says Los Angeles OK’d only 24,000 permits, and other sources peg it at closer to 10,000 – basically even with Boise in raw numbers.
It took about three years to go from permit to moving in at the Denton Apartments – Boise’s largest affordable-housing development. By contrast, California leaders say they have 40,000 affordable units stuck in the pipeline. Now they’re pushing voters for another $10 billion to pay for it. But they also needed massive funding in 2018, when voters approved $6 billion in bonds for affordable housing.
But all that public funding is still not making a sufficient dent in the problem. Los Angeles has become a risky investment, according to the Los Angeles Times, which in October 2025 headlined a story: “Almost no one is building new apartments in Los Angeles.” Part of that problem stems from the city’s “mansion tax,” which also applies to apartment construction.
The numbers clearly favor development in cities using the alternative carrot strategy. Boise’s 238,000 population is one-third of Portland, Ore.’s, population of 636,000. One recent Redfin analysis found that over 13 recent months Boise issued 9,846 housing permits, or 8% more than Portland’s 9,102.
Coincidence? Seattle’s Democratic Socialist mayor Katie Wilson took office in January, and new housing permits dropped 63% since December 2025. Seattle has nearly 800,000 people – three times more than Boise – but you wouldn’t know it from its permit numbers. San Jose has nearly 1 million people, but only 6,700 new permits, 33% fewer than Boise.
And then there’s Los Angeles, which at 3.9 million has roughly 16 times more residents than Boise. The Redfin data says Los Angeles OK’d only 24,000 permits, and other sources peg it at closer to 10,000 – basically even with Boise in raw numbers.
January, the City Council passed a resolution banning additional development in the foothills. The area grew exponentially as millionaires put up big homes with views. Boise passed a $10 million open-space levy in 2001, which has led to protecting more than 10,000 acres from future development, Fry said.
Now the city’s emphasis is more housing for all income levels, within the existing city limits. Fry noted that the goal is not to have urban-growth boundaries — which have been controversial in Boulder, Colo., and elsewhere and are tied to growing regional home prices — but promoting growth where it is needed most. That, however, might be a distinction without a difference.
At the Free Cities Center, we advocate allowing more housing in all areas — and find that restrictions on outward growth drive up costs everywhere even as we support loosening restrictions in infill areas. So this open-space approach could work against Boise’s market-based goals. Still, the city’s overall philosophy is encouraging, despite the contradictions.
“Idaho is a carrot state — and not a stick state,” Fry added. “We like to see less government, not overburden people.” That means encouraging the market to provide the development the city desperately needs, which is a good strategy that other cities should follow.
Sarah Downey is a journalist who covers political and social policy. She’s reported for Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe in the United States and overseas.
Banner photo Micron at sunset © Charles Knowles