The usual rule-of-thumb cutoff point for when you’re paying more than you probably can afford for rent or mortgage is about 30 percent of your income.
In 2003, nine counties — six of those urban or urban-adjacent — had a high percentage of renters, 35 percent and up, who were in that financially-stressed category. Ada, Kootenai and Bonneville were unsurprising leaders of that group. Gem County, increasingly a bedroom area for Ada, was included, too.
In 2023, those stressed renters amounted to 35 percent or more in not just nine, but in 37 counties, as the situation spread through the metro areas to places like Custer, Caribou and Benewah counties. When it comes to Idaho housing, rural doesn’t necessarily equate to cheap.
That was just one of the rural stress indicators suggested in a useful new report, “Rural Profile of Idaho,” produced in November by the state Department of Labor. Besides the specific data points, it provides approaches to thinking about rural Idaho in a more nuanced way than many past studies have done.
For example, Many people tend to divide Idaho’s counties (and those in other states) into urban or rural. But anyone who travels much knows that’s simplistic, and this report comes up with four shades instead. Besides urban (including, for Idaho purposes, any county which has a city of 20,000 people or more), there’s “commuting” (where a large portion of the population commutes to or from an urban county), rural center (farther away but with a city of 7,500 to 20,000 people) and “open country” (away from urban places and no city of as many as 7,500 people).
In 2023, that gave Idaho nine urban counties (same as in 2003), eight commuting counties (compared to six earlier), eight rural center counties (compared to five earlier), and 22 open country counties (compared to 21). The shifts are significant.
So is this: “Idaho’s nine urban counties accounted for 72 percent of statewide population in 2023, up four percentage points from 68 percent in 2003. All three rural classifications saw their share of total population decline between one and two percentage points each from 2003 to 2023. Open country rural counties had the largest decline as their share of total population decreased by two percentage points from nearly 12 percent to under 10 percent.”
And there’s the point that the expansion of urban influence into the commuter counties has been growing: “As an increasing number of people migrated into bedroom communities in rural counties but were employed in urban counties, three of the counties classified as rural center in 2003 changed to commuting counties by 2023.”
While only a small number of Idaho counties tend to lose population by year or decade, the relative decline in overall state impact is clear and growing. (Wait till the next legislative reapportionment comes around and the open country counties lose even more representation compared to what they had 30 or 50 years ago.)
The demographics of the different types of counties are changing, too.
Urban and commuter counties are disproportionately picking up the from-out-of-state newcomers. And open country counties are aging — their average age increasing — and adding Latino populations at a higher rate, owing to agricultural-related employment. (That latter trend could be softening this year.) Growing service industries are becoming increasingly urban, and manufacturing and industrial economies are becoming more rural. The long-standing image of Idaho rural areas as places where there were few minority populations, an image not really accurate for quite a while, may become more unavoidably untrue in the years to come. And that in turn could affect the nature of the people who immigrate to the state in times to come.
It’s not just that the population balance between “urban” and “rural” parts of Idaho is changing (with the shift being in the direction of urban and commuter). It’s also that urban and rural areas are starting to look different, take on different characteristics, and different kinds of populations. Those stats about housing costs are just one example of how that is happening.
Looked at long term, those changes could have a significant effect on Idaho politics as well as the basic character of the state.
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