How to Build the Future of Post Falls

Jan 10

What a Small Church can Teach a Growing Town

A Town With Good Bones

My church has the blessing of needing to expand the church building, which means the congregation has the blessing of meeting in the Red Lion Hotel for now. We’re happy to have a larger, renovated building soon, but it is another growing pain of a congregation that has seen a lot of change.

The inconvenience is tempered by the beauty of the setting. The Red Lion has a terrace overlooking the Spokane River, and during the service, you can see the mountains breathing mist, and the sun glistening from pine needles and settling on the ripples of the waves. The coffee and donuts still fit in the building, and the children still get to run around and play. There’s a lot to be thankful for.

On the way to our first church service, I noticed the apartment buildings right off the highway by Falls Park and City Hall. The Red Lion itself is surrounded by Old Post Falls, a bunch of houses on smaller lots built 40-50 years ago.

It all goes to show how much we have to be thankful for. The town, like an old house, has good bones: a town center with a beautiful backdrop, plenty of homes to feed businesses, parks, the Rathdrum Prairie, the Spokane River, space for small industry, the Centennial Trail. All the “core four” towns in Kootenai County have these blessings.

And where there are great blessings, there will always be a lot of contention on how to preserve it.

Fear of Loss Leads to Loss

Psychology teaches that fear of loss is a stronger motivator than hope for gain. Both forces are powerful — but our animalistic nature responds to fear more viscerally than hope. Hope has to be cultivated.

This fact is why so much political messaging is built on the fear of loss - losing rights, losing your country, losing your life. But rhetoric and messaging built around fear, even when accurate and appropriate, will tend to be toxic. It may be natural, but it leads us to be reactionary rather than visionary.

Though it is against our nature, cultivating hope is what this article is about — a call to cast a vision for the future and have the courage to build it. Because reacting in fear to the growing pains of our community will likely lead us to lose a lot more than we expect.

Fear gets us more of those apartments by the highway going to the Red Lion. But I don’t want the mass building of tri-level apartments that trap people in a rent/debt cycle. I don’t want the proliferation of single-family subdivisions, gobbling up the prairie because we were too afraid to do anything proactive to plan what our community looks like in 2030, 2040, or 2050.

I want a community that is growing but still feels small. That has housing for all socioeconomic levels but is still safe. A county with land for farms and suburbs, but that also has beautiful, walkable communities. One that took the time to preserve part of the prairie and their past, and wasn’t afraid to adapt new and innovative zoning codes to do so.

Fear and laziness lead to sprawling developments to accommodate transplants. It leads to reactionary groups merely slowing growth instead of redirecting it. It only serves to make things worse in the long run.

Good Intentions, The Road to Hell, and Paving Paradise

I was at a Post Falls city council back in 2019 and suggested finding alternative forms of development that might be able to save the prairie — or even preserve parts of it. The Mayor, Ron Jacobson, dismissed it out of hand, “the prairie is gone,” he laughed and moved on.

Jacobson has been, overall, a good mayor. Competent, and well-connected to local banks and local developers, he’s positioned well to understand local issues. He’s been endorsed by the KCRCC and has the trust of voters.

Yet, many voters, including many members of the KCRCC, would probably be just as affronted by his off-hand comment to me as I was at the time. The sad part is though, as I looked into it, he is right.

Under the existing paradigm, every square foot of that prairie is being eyed by developers, and there exists no one on any city council or Planning and Zoning board that cares to do anything about it. What can they do? We need a place to live more than we need a field to look at, and developers, it’s assumed, are always going to maximize ROI per square foot and build cheaply.

Proposed solutions from “Responsible Growth” groups really just boil down to no growth and NIMBYism. Slow growth devours the prairie the same way Jacobson would – just slowly.

Many of these proponents fail to recognize that it is the suburbs they advocate for that are driving our local issues: lack of tax revenue, slow growth of infrastructure, disappearing prairie, and higher crime and over-doses. Suburbs don’t bring in the revenue needed to support themselves, much less the rest of the city, and if they are the primary tool mode of development, it will only lead to urban rot as infrastructure continues to fall behind.

You Know, I’m Something of a Conspiracy Theorist Myself

I’ll admit to harboring views others think are crazy — my personal opinion is that Black Rock and Bill Gates should not be allowed to buy any more farmland or 3-bed-2-bath houses. Property bought by Chinese government agents should be forcibly seized and redistributed to Americans. Make a reality show out of it. When the WEF says “decarbonization,” you are the carbon they are talking about.

But here’s a conspiracy I’ll add to this list: I think suburbs are somewhat Soviet. They are good in moderation – I grew up in one – but, on a massive scale, they can be a tool of the globalist elites.

Suburbs give you only the illusion of ownership — you “own” the house until you don’t pay your mortgage or property tax. The HOA prevents you from putting the yard to productive use for the sake of “property values.” You are just as dependent on centralized power stations and global supply chains as someone in an apartment – no one in Crowne Point is living off their garden.

Worse, when all houses start at $500,000 as they do here, suburbs just drive more hard-working people to rent because they can’t get a large enough loan. Slow Growthers are driving people into apartments, not providing a way out.

The R1 Residential suburbs are what are swallowing up the prairie at a much faster rate than the apartments. For me, that’s personal. After having a number of jobs that required me to be up at the crack of dawn, after seeing the dawn roll back the night above the purple mountains and prairie, you can’t help but be changed. Those skies and that prairie will be with me forever.

Some Alternatives — Grow Don’t Gobble

Some people, usually from New York City, will tell you that renting is a better investment than owning. The cost of renting is lower than the total cost of home ownership, and the difference, if rightly invested, puts you ahead of homeowners.

I’m not convinced. Even if that works in theory, most of us won’t invest like that. It’s easier to simply put your money into something that will maintain its value or even appreciate — and out here, rent is more than a mortgage.

The base issue is that housing can either be a good investment or it can be affordable. And due to demand, housing in our area has been a good investment for a long time. And it’s been a good investment for many for out-of-state landlords when it ought to be so for the families living and working in our community.

Finding ways to give locals a chance at homeownership before giving out-of-staters another asset in their portfolio is a huge step that the city should consider. For example, curbing the number of short-term AirBNBs or only allowing local people to operate them. Keep capital local.

There also needs to be more stepping stones from rental, multi-family housing to home ownership or land ownership. That means making more rent/ownership hybrid developments: tenement housing, mobile homes, and tiny home communities.

And actually, there are even better ways to make housing affordable and a good investment: leave room for sweat equity. Make it easier to install ADUs or, even better, don’t build to a finished state and allow space for new houses to build additions. Create limited development zones that allow new owners to improve their houses.

As much as I hate what Mayor Jacobson said, I can acknowledge the harsh reality behind his words. Still, you don’t have to accept it whole. Set aside just a small patch of the prairie that can be preserved — make a communal farm, not just a garden, or turn it into a park where you can still see the sunset and sunrise as it used to be.

Building with the strategies mentioned above means there will be more room for the prairie. Smaller homes in smaller areas mean slower growth and incentivizes redevelopment of city centers. We can create walkable, close-knit communities there, optimized for economic growth and local prosperity, and preserve suburbs and land on the outskirts.

The real issue with all these solutions isn’t the political will or the legal language required to enact them. It’s the old money in town. There are a lot of local politicians who have a vested interest in keeping the existing developers building exactly as they are.

There are developers who would rather leave a legacy than maximize ROI. They’ll make enough profit to lead a good life, they don’t mind building something extraordinary at the same time. Reach out to them.

This kind of developer exists and isn’t hard to find. You just have to ask people besides the Wideymers or friends of the mayors in Post Falls and Coeur d’Alene.

Facing the Truth — The Way Back is the Way Forward

The truth we need to face is most of us don’t want to have to build a new future. We, very understandably, want to go back 20 to 30 years to a small community where no one locks their doors, housing is available, and even land is attainable on a single income. Back to when driving on Prairie Ave, you saw nothing but farms and Big Sky.

But the harsh reality is: we’ve already grown too much to go back even 10 years. The other harsh truth is we tend to see the past a little rosier than it actually is. If we want to have a community like that — safe, with social mobility, set up for single-earner households — we need to create it. We need to have the courage to incarnate the past through a new vision for the future.

Our community wasn’t perfect 30 years ago. There were drugs and crime, there was a lack of opportunity and desperation back then as there is now. It was a little boring. Even up to the 2000s, Post Falls was little more than a bedroom community for Coeur d’Alene and Spokane – a great place for some to live for some, but not so for many others.

We have the chance now to make it more than that. To make it, not like it used to be, but more true to our memory of it than it really was. That’s the hope and vision we need to cling to.

Learning from a Small Church Getting Bigger

Some members at my church have been congregants since it was founded over 15 years ago. As you try to squeeze by them in narrow aisles, they’re happy to tell you how intimate things were back in the day. At potlucks and parties, you’ll find this bread-eating protestant body packed in as tightly as communion wafers: “Sorry I haven’t said ‘hi’ in a while; it is just so hard to move around and find anyone nowadays!”

The people in Post Falls, Hayden, and Coeur d’Alene can relate. Especially those going down I-90 or 95 during rush hour. Rubbing shoulders there, however, is considerably less pleasant than at church. But overall, it’s a good thing, and our church gives thanks for the growing pains. We’re taking steps to alleviate them.

We don’t do a perfect job. There are other ways to make a medium church feel small, and we’re committed to them. And there are ways to make a medium city feel like a Mayberry. We have to be open to those ways.

The catch is now you have to be intentional about it – no more just letting space and expansion take care of it. Your whole approach changes because it has to. No more just letting people filter in and out on Sunday – you have to make a point to greet them.

This article suggested a few possibilities to look into. Kootenai Strong is an entity dedicated to looking at new ideas and proposing them, explaining them to the community. But most of all we are dedicated to hope. To vision. That’s the primary solution we want to offer here.

Remember that the way back is the way forward and be brave enough to build an even better Post Falls. We’re crammed into the meeting hall of the Red Lion for now, but there’s still so much to be thankful for. And soon, we’ll move into our renovated, improved building with even more blessings than we can count if we will simply take hold of them.

Daniel Finley