This week on Inland Journal:
Idaho has a new law aimed at lowering housing prices. It takes away the ability of cities and counties to set minimum lot sizes and allows developers to build on smaller lots as a way to lower land prices. Coeur d’Alene land use attorney Peter Smith will provide more details.
"There's a lot of tension in the cities over increased population and traffic and everything else and so the state's goal is to say, if the subdivision qualifies as a starter home subdivision, that you can't mandate lots be larger than 1,500 square feet. That will drive down the cost of the land to the developer and the future homeowner, and, in theory, it should drive down home prices.
We remember the late Idaho human rights activist Bill Wassmuth. The former Catholic priest was thrust into the spotlight when someone bombed his Coeur d’Alene home in 1986. A human rights center in Boise named after him is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. We’ll talk with its director, Christina Bruce-Bennion, about Wassmuth’s legacy.
"He was someone who loved to talk and he had a gift and he believed very strongly that what the Aryan Nations stood for is not what that community or Idaho, in general, should be known for. And so the louder they got, the louder he got."
We’ll hear about a project that preserves Washington’s newspapers by converting their ink-stained pages into digital files. Some of those newspapers will be familiar to Inland Northwest listeners. We talk with Shawn Schollmeyer from the Washington Digital Newspaper Project.
"I will travel all the way to Republic or over to Bellingham or other areas and I talk to people about how to preserve those newspapers in their communities. And if they want something online, then I talk to them about the usage and understanding the scope of a project and different aspects that might go into a project like this one that makes those historic resources available to the public."
