Growth bursting on Spokane’s edges: West Plains, north continue to be focus in county

When he was a kid, Rob Higgins used to float on an inner tube in a drainage ditch along what is now MeadowWood Golf Course in Liberty Lake.

What once was nothing but open fields is now packed with large homes as residential growth expands out of Spokane and has begun to explode in places like Airway Heights, Cheney, Post Falls, Deer Park and Spokane Valley.

“You get to my age, and it’s like, ‘Wow. That happened faster than I thought it would,’” said Higgins, 72, who is a former Spokane City Council member. “But, it took forever.”

With a residential housing boom and seller’s market driving housing prices to record levels, the pressure for growth in Spokane County has continued north and east. But the West Plains, with the addition of the massive Amazon fulfillment center in 2020 and access to flat, buildable land, appears to be one of those areas set to reap the benefit of the current growth.

“Spokane is fortunate. We can grow in 360 degrees,” Higgins said. “We aren’t hemmed in by mountains. We just need to make sure we plan for that growth. We need to think 20, 30, 40 years out.”

Cheryl Stewart, executive director of the Inland Northwest Associated General Contractors, agreed, saying that local governments have worked to improve infrastructure, but much work remains.

“As residential booms, everything that goes with it needs to grow: schools, water, energy and sewage,” she said. “Right now, we don’t have enough to maintain and keep our current roads let alone build new ones.

“We are going to have to invest in our infrastructure because it’s going to impact everyone.”

Joel White, executive director of the Spokane Home Builders Association, sits on the Spokane County Growth Management Steering Committee. He said a 2016 settlement of four lawsuits limits the county from expanding its urban growth boundary until 2025.

Spokane County adopted that boundary in 2013, which designates development within the boundary as urban and dictates where utilities, such as sewer, can be extended to make way for future growth.

As a result, Spokane County’s expansion has fallen behind places such as Kootenai County across the Idaho border, White said. Last year alone, Post Falls approved more building permits for homes than all of Spokane County.

“If you drive across the (Rathdrum) Prairie, it’s housing development after housing development,” White said. “Because of the lack of available land or the price point, they are going over to Idaho.”

Despite the growth to the east, developers are still adding homes north of Spokane, in Spokane Valley and to the west, White said.

“The city of Spokane really is not growing very fast,” he said. “West Plains is really starting to grow. The North Side … and the south Valley are the largest areas of growth.”

Higgins, who is executive vice president of the Spokane Association of Realtors, said you could ride 50 feet up in a hot air balloon 35 years ago and it was obvious where services needed to be extended in Spokane.

“Back in the ‘80s, we used to sit around and look at the crystal ball,” Higgins said. “We have all this growth going east towards Coeur d’Alene and growth going north. But downtown is sitting at the end. Nothing is going west. We said we better get sewer and water out to the West Plains and start doing that.”

Growth in Airway Heights began to boom after Northern Quest Resort & Casino opened in December 2000 and steadily began to expand. Now, 20 years later, Amazon brought thousands of jobs when it opened the fulfillment center.

“There’s all kinds of land out there for housing,” Higgins said. “There is more growth with jobs on the West Plains. It makes sense.”

Higgins said when he unsuccessfully ran for Spokane mayor in 1989, he thought Spokane was poised for prosperity.

“I was 30 years off,” he said. “But my thought always was that the intermountain West, Boise, Salt Lake City, Spokane, those areas are going to be where people are going to want to live.

“It’s away from the congestion of the West Coast, but it’s where we have water and that’s gold. We need to make sure we are preserving that as best we can.”

Higgins said he agreed with Stewart that local leaders shouldn’t get so consumed by fostering growth that they lose sight of providing the infrastructure needed to sustain what residents already have.

“We are fortunate here, but we need to be thinking in the future,” he said. “Those water and sewer lines are expensive. It just takes common sense to manage our growth.”