Idaho Business Review: Idaho Falls Sets the Pace with Mixed-Use Development at Snake River Landing

Idaho’s largest, most diverse mixed-use development may well be across the river from historic downtown Idaho Falls. Snake River Landing in the past 15 years has converted a former gravel pit with some 300,000 square feet of Class A office/commercial space, a nuclear engineering company, 22 single-family homes so far since 2009- 10, an extension of the city’s Greenbelt with a pier stretching into the river, and a 228-unit The Falls apartment complex that started construction in October and will be completed in summer.

Snake River Landing is just getting started.

Eastern Idaho’s largest developer, Ball Ventures, so far has developed just 40 acres of the 450 acres that Allen Ball assembled in 2001 without a specific game plan. Mixed-use development emerged toward the middle of the decade with the first structures in place in 2007.

Another 300,000 square feet of office/commercial development is anticipated in coming decades along the development‘s Pier View Drive, which is where the first wave of offices are clustered. As many as 1,800 to 2,200 single-family homes, townhomes, condos and apartment units could ultimately sit in what has become prime real estate wedged between the Snake River and Interstate 15 running from the mile-and-a-half from Pancheri Drive and Sunnyside Road.

“We definitely want to be a higher density with 16 units per acre,” said Eric Isom, chief development officer at Ball Ventures. Ball Ventures offered to donate 23 acres... (read more here)