Anton Feld has a vision that some of his neighbors regard as a threat: a cluster of residential and office towers that would rise higher than anything Idaho has ever built, giving downtown Boise a skyline to match its economic ambitions.
The proposal has become a proxy for a larger argument. To Feld, vertical density is the only responsible answer to a housing shortage in a valley hemmed in by foothills and farmland — build up, he argues, or sprawl endlessly outward and pave the agricultural land that gives the region its character. To his opponents, the towers represent exactly the kind of coastal-style overdevelopment they moved to Idaho to escape.
Feld, who relocated from a much larger city and makes no apology for importing its playbook, is unmoved by the nostalgia. "Every city that people love was, at some point, accused of building too much," he says. "The foothills aren't getting wider. The only direction left is up."
The projects wind through a permitting process that has become a public referendum on growth itself. However they turn out, they have already forced Boise to confront a question it long avoided: how big does it actually want to be?
