A couple weeks ago, I was at a Urban Land Institute conference on housing trends in the Treasure Valley.  While there, it was interesting to listen to a group, Local Construct, who has recently purchased two deals in downtown Boise (the city block at 15th & Bannock, and the Owyhee Plaza in partnership with longtime Boise downtown owner Clay Carley) with plans to do residential.  They had a great presentation full of statistics on why there is an unmet demand for housing in our downtown.  

In this presentation it discusses several different aspects on why there is an unmet demand, and my favorite is on page 8 where it shows the employee to resident population.  Let's just say Boise has lots of employees downtown compared to residents when compared to other cities around the nation!  I pulled out my calculator and began running some numbers to see how many units may be needed in downtown to bring our employee/resident ratio to the average of the 7 other cities on the slide (3.7 employees for every 1 resident).  I was quickly surprised to see an unmet demand of housing units in excess of 2500 units for downtown Boise!!!


Later in the presentation it shows 5 studies that have been performed in the past on this very same topic, and they show an average unmet demand of 940 units.  Right now in the works, there are approximately 100-200 units in the planning stage for downtown Boise...I think there is room for lots more!