HOUSING SOLUTIONS PARTNERSHIP

ATLAS ATTAINABLE HOUSING

The Currents neighborhood at the Atlas Mill Waterfront in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, will provide attainable homeownership for local workers. More than 100 homes are planned to provide housing for local workers.

For more than 100 years, this area was a working sawmill. After Stimson Lumber closed it in 2005, the riverfront sat stalled for over a decade, passed over by private buyers because of high land costs, unstable and unusable soils, difficult grading, and an old rail corridor splitting the site. In 2018 the City of Coeur d’Alene bought the site and partnered with ignite cda, its urban renewal agency, so that land-sale revenue and tax-increment funding, not new taxes, could clean up the land, build streets and utilities, and keep all of the shoreline public.

The Currents project is an attainable homeownership project steered by an Ad Hoc Committee of ignite cda Board members and staff, a City Council member, and City staff, with hands-on experience in attainable housing, architecture, private development, and land use planning.

The private market readily builds market-rate homes, but it does not routinely produce attainable, deed-restricted homeownership for households earning 80–120% of the area median income. That is the gap this project fills: ignite cda provides the cleaned-up land and framework, and private developers build and sell the homes.