Planning and Zoning Manager City of Boise Boise, Idaho
Achieving success with any sort of zoning reform is challenging. Now imagine completely rewriting a city’s zoning code for the first time in 50 years while experiencing record setting population and housing cost increases.
In the Summer of 2023, the Boise City Council voted unanimously to adopt the first rewrite of the City’s zoning code since 1966. The adopted code includes regulations that direct development to areas with public investment, incentivizing affordable and sustainability housing, and manage growth at the city’s edges.
This case study describes the technical and community engagement efforts of the City of Boise and Clarion Associates to draft a modern zoning code that addresses housing affordability, climate change, and transportation choice. The three and a half year drafting process went through several iterations, transforming a proposal that had a one-size-fits all approach to “planning best practices” to a proposal that directly responded to community concerns and that presented Boise solutions to nationwide problems.
