BOISE, ID – A newly formed nonprofit advocacy group is hoping to help tackle housing issues in Idaho.

The Gem State Housing Alliance is being led by state Sen. Ali Rabe, a Boise Democrat who ran a nonprofit called Jesse Tree that focuses on preventing eviction and homelessness. She says the Gem State Housing Alliance is Idaho’s first housing organization focused on creating statewide opportunities to build affordable housing.

Rabe said she’s seen the Treasure Valley change a lot while growing up.

“While that has been happening, obviously, housing prices have increased by 40%. So a lot of my friends, family members who are trying to enter the home market for the first time are unable to do so,” Rabe told reporters Tuesday.

In its first year, she said the group is focused on city-level policies. The group hopes to tackle a range of local policies — including simplifying housing development and ending bans on smaller homes.

Panhandle Affordable Housing Alliance Executive Director Maggie Lyons sits on the board of directors for the Gem State Housing Alliance.

“The policy piece of this is so critical, and it has been something that I faced and other other like minded developers who want to build smaller starter homes for our local workers. They want to do it, but they can’t because of the prohibitive cost of particularly land, infrastructure and red tape,” Lyons said.

Another board member, Caleb Roope, CEO of Eagle-based The Pacific Companies, said there’s no shortage of ideas for local governments to tackle to simplify the building process.

“The longer a project takes to get off the ground, the more unaffordable to the users it becomes,” Roope said.

Pocatello Mayor-elect Mark Dahlquist said local zoning codes often make it harder for developers to build smaller family homes. He said he ran into that in Pocatello, when he was developing a community called the Bonneville Commons. He is the executive director at NeighborWorks Pocatello, a community development nonprofit organization.

“What was stopping us from doing that were some outdated zoning codes. And I think Pocatello, like a lot of other cities in Idaho, they had really old codes, and they were probably put together during the post World War II era,” Dahlquist said.

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