Idaho’s housing problem may come down to one step too many

Housing costs are too high. That’s not controversial—it’s reality for families across Idaho.

What’s less widely understood is how much of that problem comes down to small, outdated rules that quietly prevent the kinds of homes people can actually afford from ever getting built.

One of those rules is Idaho’s requirement that apartment buildings taller than three stories must have two stairways.

At first glance, that sounds like a commonsense safety measure. In practice, it’s one of the biggest reasons we’re not building smaller, more affordable apartment buildings—the kind that fit into neighborhoods and serve working families.

House Bill 706 offers a simple fix.

Not all housing is created equal. Large apartment complexes and single-family homes dominate today’s construction, but there’s a “missing middle” in between—duplexes, fourplexes, and small apartment buildings.

Buildings with roughly 2 to 19 units tend to have some of the most affordable rents. They’re easier to finance, cheaper to build per unit, and fit naturally into existing neighborhoods.

But in much of Idaho, we’ve effectively made these buildings illegal to construct at scale.

Why? Because the two-stairway requirement makes them financially unworkable on smaller lots.

To comply, developers often need to combine multiple parcels into one large site, redesign buildings around a central corridor, and absorb significant added costs. Estimates suggest a second stairway alone can add hundreds of thousands of dollars and consume valuable floor space.

That’s often the difference between a project moving forward or never getting built at all.

The two-stairway requirement dates back to a time before modern fire safety systems were standard. Today, buildings are constructed very differently. Sprinkler systems, fire-resistant materials, and advanced detection systems dramatically reduce risk.

Recent research—including analysis of real-world buildings over more than a decade—shows that modern single-stair apartment buildings of this size perform just as safely as comparable buildings with two exits. In major cities where these buildings already exist, there are no recorded cases where the absence of a second stair contributed to a fatality.

In other words, the safety case for requiring two stairways in these specific buildings has largely disappeared.

House Bill 706 doesn’t ignore safety—it strengthens it.

The bill allows cities to permit single-stair buildings only under strict conditions:

• A full NFPA 13 sprinkler system throughout the building

• Advanced smoke and fire detection systems tied to occupant alerts

• A two-hour fire-rated stair enclosure, equivalent to high-rise standards

• Fire-rated corridors separating units from the stairway

• Short travel distances to exits and emergency escape windows on every floor

These buildings would be among the most fire-protected mid-rise structures in the state.

At the same time, the bill keeps projects modest in scale: no more than six stories, four units per floor, and 6,000 square feet per level.

This is not about large developments. It’s about enabling small, neighborhood-scale housing.

Importantly, House Bill 706 does not force any city to adopt this approach.

It simply gives local governments the option to allow these buildings if they believe it makes sense for their community.

Cities that want to move forward can. Those that don’t are free to keep their current rules.

That’s how policy should work: flexible, local, and responsive to real needs.

Idaho is not alone in confronting a housing shortage. Other states—including Texas, Montana, and Colorado—have already taken steps to modernize similar building codes.

They’ve recognized a simple truth: we cannot solve a housing shortage while banning one of the most affordable forms of housing.

House Bill 706 won’t solve the entire problem. But it removes one unnecessary barrier and gives communities a proven tool to build more homes.

At its core, House Bill 706 is not a subsidy, a mandate, or a government spending program. It is a deregulatory reform—one that removes a barrier that prevents the market from producing housing people clearly want and need.

Right now, the housing market in Idaho is not operating as a true free market.

When prices rise, the normal market response should be straightforward: more homes get built. That increased supply helps stabilize prices and expand options for renters and buyers.

But that mechanism only works if the market is allowed to respond.

In this case, it isn’t.

The two-stairway requirement acts as a binding constraint on supply, especially for small and mid-size apartment buildings. It doesn’t just make construction more expensive—it makes many projects impossible to build at all. Entire categories of housing that would otherwise be viable simply never get proposed.

That’s not a market outcome. That’s a regulatory one.

House Bill 706 restores a measure of market function by allowing builders, property owners, and local governments to decide what works—within a framework that still maintains strong safety standards.

By removing a specific regulatory bottleneck, it enables more homes to be built, increases competition, and gives both builders and communities more freedom to respond to real-world demand.

That’s what a free market approach to housing should look like.