A full-time worker in Idaho needs to earn $27.83 an hour to afford a fair market two-bedroom rental. At minimum wage, that same rental requires 126 hours of work per week, or the equivalent of more than three full-time jobs. These are not hypothetical numbers. They are the math of housing in Idaho right now, and they help explain why the conversation about affordability has moved from community concern to something approaching a crisis.
On the latest Ever Onward Podcast, host Tommy Ahlquist sat down with Ali Rabe, a former state legislator, former executive director of Jesse Tree, and the founding executive director of the Gem State Housing Alliance, Idaho’s first statewide pro-housing coalition. What followed was one of the most candid and practically useful conversations about Idaho’s housing problem that the podcast has produced, covering everything from why infill development is so difficult to what happens to families when the system fails them.
The Human Cost of Getting Housing Wrong
Rabe came to housing advocacy through direct service. Her years at Jesse Tree, an organization that provides homelessness prevention and rapid rehousing services in the Treasure Valley, gave her a granular understanding of how people end up without stable housing and what it costs the community when they do.
The picture is more complicated than the political caricature. In Idaho, homelessness is overwhelmingly a housing cost problem, not a substance use problem. Rents have increased 40% in recent years. A medical emergency, a divorce, a reduction in hours, these are the events that push working people from housed to homeless when their housing costs already consume most of their income. When that happens, the cost to rehouse them is ten to twenty times higher than the cost of preventing the loss in the first place.
Ahlquist drew on his own experience as an emergency physician to make the point visceral. Over a career seeing tens of thousands of patients, he would end every visit by writing the word “home” in the disposition field of the chart. He knew, on many of those nights, that what he was actually writing was a fiction. A mother with two kids, discharged home, with nowhere to go.
Both Ahlquist and Rabe were clear that Idaho has done a lot right on homelessness prevention compared to peer cities. Organizations like the Boise Rescue Mission, WCA, Jesse Tree, and Catch have done genuinely excellent work. The city of Boise has managed public spaces and services in ways that cities like Reno and Portland have not. The comparison to what has happened in San Francisco or Portland is not a fair comparison, and anyone making it without having walked Boise’s streets recently is working from an outdated picture.
The problem is that the demand for those services has roughly doubled in recent years precisely because housing costs have risen so fast. You cannot solve homelessness downstream without addressing the supply problem upstream.
Why Building Homes in Idaho Is So Hard
This is where the conversation became most valuable for anyone trying to understand why housing affordability is so difficult to fix even when everyone in the room claims to want to.
Ahlquist, as a developer, knows the process intimately. Rabe, after spending time at Jesse Tree and in the legislature, has spent the first months of her new role listening to small and mid-size developers describe the same frustrations from every direction across the state.
The short version: building the types of homes Idaho most needs, smaller, more affordable, infill projects like duplexes, fourplexes, cottage courts, and townhomes, is dramatically harder than building large-lot single-family subdivisions on the urban fringe. The codes that govern Idaho’s cities were largely written in the 1970s and 1980s with single-family suburban development as the default. Everything else requires additional process, additional approvals, and additional uncertainty.
Ahlquist walked through what it actually looks like to try to build two fourplexes on an infill lot in Boise. First, check the comprehensive plan. If the use doesn’t match, start a comp plan amendment process, a months-long undertaking that most developers will simply walk away from. If the use matches, check the zone. If the zone allows duplexes or fourplexes, they typically require conditional use permits or planned unit development applications rather than administrative approval, adding months and public hearings to the process. Then design review, which in Boise operates as an essentially discretionary body with the ability to require changes based on aesthetic judgments that are not grounded in code. Then building permit review, which has grown longer. Then inspections, which have become a significant source of delay. Somewhere in the middle, ACHD and the city often disagree on requirements like crosswalk placement, and the developer waits while they work it out.
“We’re doing a project right now,” Ahlquist said, “where ACHD wants a crosswalk and the city of Boise doesn’t. We got stuck for six months between the two of them. It has nothing to do with us.”
Rabe’s point was simple and important: these are not random individual failures. They are the predictable output of codes and processes that were never designed to accommodate the types of housing the market needs to build right now. And the developers who face this reality are not building the infill projects, they’re building what’s easier to get approved, which is large-lot development on the fringe, which creates more sprawl, which is exactly what the critics of housing growth say they want to prevent.
The most expensive input in housing right now is not materials, which are at a four-year low. It’s not labor, which in the Treasure Valley is currently available. It’s regulatory time and uncertainty. Every month a project sits in approvals is a month of carrying costs, a month of risk, and a month when the economics that made the project viable can shift. Small and mid-size developers who would build the missing middle housing Idaho needs most are simply choosing not to do infill because the process makes it unworkable.
The Anti-Growth Trap
The other major structural problem Rabe identified is political: a significant number of elected officials across Idaho’s cities and counties ran on explicitly anti-growth platforms or have been pressured in that direction by constituents who don’t want new development near them.
The people who show up to a city council hearing at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday to testify about a housing project are, almost without exception, people who oppose it. The people who would benefit from more housing supply, younger residents, working families, people who would move into the units being proposed, are not organized, are not mobilized, and are not in the room.
Rabe’s argument is that the math on anti-growth positions is straightforward and bad. If a city restricts housing supply, costs go up. When costs go up, fewer people can afford to live there. When fewer people can afford to live there, the people who leave first are the young workers, the service workers, the teachers, the nurses, the people every community says it wants to keep. The second order effects of anti-growth housing policy are more homelessness, more sprawl in neighboring jurisdictions, and a workforce that cannot afford to live where it works.
“If you’re waiting for housing prices to stop growth,” Rabe said, “who are you really affecting?”
What Gem State Housing Alliance Is Trying to Do
Rabe launched Gem State Housing Alliance in late 2024 with a board that includes Caleb Roop, one of the most respected housing development and financing experts in Idaho, and a policy advisory board of around 30 people across the development, architecture, and finance world.
The organization’s focus is supply. Not subsidies as the primary solution, not the complicated government programs that have consumed billions of dollars in other cities without solving the underlying problem, but the basic, unglamorous work of making it easier to build more homes of more types in more places.
That means working directly with cities to review and update their codes, helping newly elected officials understand what best practices actually look like, building a legislative agenda for the 2027 session, and organizing pro-housing Idahoans into a political constituency that shows up at hearings, contacts elected officials, and counterbalances the voices that currently dominate those conversations.
Idaho has 39 new mayors after recent elections. Most of them have not worked in housing. They are open to education and looking for guidance. Gem State Housing Alliance is trying to be the organization that provides it.
“We need to let the free market respond,” Rabe said. “If we don’t loosen up the supply side, you can throw government money at this all day long and it won’t help the problem.”
Ahlquist seconded that framing from the developer’s seat: “If they just let what happens happen, and you can have duplexes and fourplexes and townhomes and starter homes and multifamily and infill, this will take care of itself.”
The housing conversation in Idaho is moving. It’s more serious, more informed, and more action-oriented than it was five years ago. What it needs now is the organized political will to translate that seriousness into zoning changes, streamlined processes, and a legislative agenda that actually moves the needle on supply. That’s what Gem State Housing Alliance is trying to build.
For anyone who wants to get involved, learn more, or support the work, visit gemstatehousing.org.
Ali Rabe serves as Executive Director of Gem State Housing Alliance, Idaho’s first statewide pro-housing coalition. Learn more at gemstatehousing.org.
