Plans to annex nearly 381 acres in southwest Boise to build more than 3,500 homes nearly collapsed at the Boise City Council after the Planning and Zoning Commission and city staff recommended the refusal for financial reasons.
But council members chose to oppose those recommendations after hours of debate, asking staff and the developer to rework their numbers and see if there was a chance of making the large planned community a reality.
The influential Murgoitio family’s development, dubbed Murio Farms, would have more than 1,800 single-family homes and more than 1,700 apartments built over 20 years, according to a summary from the Boise Department of Planning and Development Services.
It would include five residential areas, three mixed-use areas and a seven-acre site for a future elementary school. Plans call for nearly 95,000 square feet of commercial space.
The Murgoitios were looking to convert their farmland into a community offering housing, community spaces and neighborhood businesses, according to Deborah Nelson, a partner at the Givens Pursley law firm in Boise representing The Land Group and the Murgoitios. The Land Group is an Eagle engineering and architecture firm working with the Murgoitios on Murio Farms.
“Their dairy farm is no longer viable, but the land can serve another valuable purpose for the city by providing much-needed housing near employment centers,” Nelson said during a meeting of the Planning Commission and Boise zoning in March.
The family, Basque-American, hoped to create a planned community reflecting that ancestry and planned for the centerpiece of Murio Farms to be a community park called Village Greens and a civic space called the Txoko Community Center.
The community center would be adjacent to the school and modeled after a traditional Basque gathering place with an emphasis on shared meals and socializing, according to Nelson.
The designs also called for “abstract Basque flags and benches, tree grates, light fixtures and old-world European-style pavers,” Nelson said.
Boise’s housing need
A recurring theme at Tuesday’s City Council meeting and March’s Planning and Zoning Commission was the need for more housing in Boise.
The population of the Boise metro area is about 813,000, Nelson said, and is expected to surpass 1 million in the next decade.
To meet demand, the city needed to add more than 2,700 new housing units each year and more than 27,000 new housing units by 2030, according to a report. Study 2021 ordered by the city. Boise missed that mark by more than 4,000 households between 2018 and 2020.
In March, Nelson said the city’s Southwest Boise planning area, which is bordered by Interstate 84 to the north and the New York Canal to…
