Idaho, one of the most sparsely populated states, is known for its vast stretches of open land. And yet a new Idaho law has imposed the country’s smallest minimum lot size requirements for houses.
The law requires that cities approve housing on lots starting at 1,500 square feet, if certain conditions are met. That’s just a bit more than half the playing area of a doubles tennis court.
Smaller lots exist in parts of the country. Some D.C. rowhouses can be found on land as tight as 900 square feet. But no other state has mandated lots anywhere near as small as Idaho’s.
“We love our wide open spaces,” said Sen. Ben Toews, a Republican who led the bipartisan legislation. “Having smaller communities actually allows more wide open spaces, because suburban sprawl is a real issue. You’re seeing our farmlands get eaten up by houses.”
Plus, Toews said, he doesn’t think cities should be allowed to prevent developers from building small houses if buyers want them: “I know there’s demand, and I know that regulations have stopped the supply for that demand. I’m a free market guy. I’m just counting on the free market to supply the demand.”
One of those potential buyers is Nicklaus Jones, a welder who moved from Utah to Idaho three years ago.
“I’m 42, and I just eventually want to get myself a house,” he said.
A home within his budget would have to cost less than $300,000. That matched the median home price in Idaho in 2018 and came close in 2019. But prices shot up in Idaho starting in 2020, when Westerners newly allowed to work from home amid the covid pandemic started moving into the state. Today, the median home for sale costs $585,000.
Jones said he wants something small — nothing like the mini-mansions he sees under construction. But the small house he envisions is a rarity in Idaho, as it is in most parts of the country, where “starter homes” have been disappearing.
According to the most recent numbers from the Census Bureau, 6 in 10 new homes in 2024 were built on more than 7,000 square feet of land.
As communities nationwide confront a shortage of affordable housing, development advocates in several states have considered forcing cities to accept development on smaller lots, even if local zoning boards (or neighboring homeowners) object.
Last year, housing supply advocates celebrated when Maine blocked cities from imposing lot-size minimums above 5,000 square feet, and Texas banned large cities from imposing minimums over 3,000 square feet.
Idaho, meanwhile, has gone on the offensive.
The law’s proponents have several goals, including attempting to check home prices and preventing residential sprawl from eating into the state’s vast agricultural lands.
Opponents say the state shouldn’t block cities from making the rules they want about lot sizes. “The question comes down to: What do we want our town to look like?” said Ben Adams, a state senator who voted against the law. “I was very frustrated that it was called ‘starter-home subdivisions.’ Because the American Dream itself of homeownership? Nobody is dreaming of an 800-square-foot home.”
The law is written to allow new developments full of small homes, not infill housing in existing neighborhoods. The lot-size requirement applies only to parcels of at least four acres. And, after towns lobbied against it, lawmakers agreed to draft the rule so it applies only to cities of at least 10,000 residents.
The bill’s writers said they aren’t certain how many urban lots as large as four acres are available for development, though they anecdotally knew of potential sites for starter-home neighborhoods in several fast-growing cities.
“If you’ve got a four-acre parcel and you want to still build four mini-mansions on that, you absolutely can do that. But this is now an option,” said Hollie Conde, a fellow at the Sightline Institute who lives in Idaho and advocated for the law. “We wanted to open up the options and let the free market solve some of these things. Right now, there’s just a lot of barriers.”
Idaho’s population has boomed since the pandemic, and home prices have soared. “We’ve had this huge influx of people,” Conde said. “People in California, Washington [state], Oregon are leaving those more expensive metro areas, coming to Idaho because of the lifestyle and sometimes because of the politics. Our housing supply has not kept up …. The cost of living has gotten so high that you have teachers who can’t afford to live in the community where they teach.”
Deborah Flagan, vice president of Hayden Homes, said almost every house her company built before the pandemic in Idaho was affordable for a median-income family; now, that’s true in only five of the 13 Idaho cities in which it builds.
“In most cities where they only allow one size of lot, it doesn’t allow for … smaller or different housing types. So you end up getting a very small swath of buyers, because the houses that are being built all come within one price range and one size,” Flagan said.
She said her company is unlikely to choose to build on lots smaller than 5,000 square feet, out of concern that buyers would be uninterested in super-small lots. But the ability to go down to 5,000 in some towns, instead of a 7,000 or 8,500 minimum, will open up options.
“Many of the cities are concerned about having this bill imposed upon them,” Flagan said. “The way we look at it is, it really just allows flexibility for developers to be creative at being able to put different types of housing in the same community.”
Toews, the Republican state senator, has firsthand experience as a would-be developer. He owns a 1.5-acre site in Post Falls, where he wanted to build small homes on 1,520-square-foot lots. But he said he couldn’t get the plan approved by the city. He’s now planning to build storage units instead of houses.
Maggie Lyons, executive director of Panhandle Affordable Housing Alliance in northern Idaho, said she was “stunned” that the legislature approved a statewide mandate for such small lots. She said she is glad the law will, in effect, prevent Idaho cities from forcing large lots, which she views as the preference of recent rich newcomers to the state, not lifelong residents who want their children to be able to afford starter homes.
“We’ve had a lot of people leave their overpopulated cities, from their perspective, and come to the great outdoors. And they are very adamant … that no development be allowed,” Lyons said. “We have builders here in Kootenai County and across the state who would love to do starter homes, but they can’t. Two of our cities in Kootenai County have 8,500-minimum-square-foot lots. You can’t do it on 8,500 square feet.”
When Lyons’s nonprofit recently offered homes at a subsidized price to middle-income buyers, she received 350 applications for 28 homes.
The new law, Lyons said, is in the best interest of longtime residents, even if it removes power from their towns. “I’m passionate about private property rights and local control, but I don’t think these cities are under local control. They’re influenced by these outsiders, most of whom have relocated here in the last five years.”
Rep. Megan Egbert, a Democrat who supported the lot-size law, said the new neighborhoods of starter homes that she envisions will blend well into cities — because dense urban dots in the farmland echo Idaho’s past. Sprawling suburbs, on the other hand, threaten to eat up agricultural lands.
“Cities is where the growth needs to go. Idaho’s going to grow, whether we want it to or not. So how do we do that in a smart way, where we concentrate the growth?” she said. “There are already historic districts in many parts of Idaho that have even greater density than this. Any prewar area in Idaho already has this. We know it can and does work here.”
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