Sprawl and growth in northern idaho

[Cnynrat]

Originally Posted by RunningfromCalifornia

Is Northern Idaho anything like the Missoula area? I remember driving across Highway 12 and not seeing much of anything but beautiful scenery, but Missoula is starting to sprawl out a bit much for my liking. Checking out Google Earth it looks a lot like the Coure d'Alene area is sprawled even more, which I guess makes sense because Spokane is larger.

The Missoula area was also on our short list of potential retirement locations, so we spent some time there as well before deciding on north Idaho. As mentioned earlier in the thread, sprawl is somewhat subjective and hard to define. That said, I think the CdA area is a bit more sprawling than Missoula. Missoula is a larger city (67k vs 44k for CdA), yet the population of Missoula county is smaller than Kootenai county (109k for Missoula, 139k for Kootenai). The population density in Missoula county is lower than Kootenai county. Al of that points to people in Missoula being more centrally located in and around the city, which is what it subjectively feels like to me.

Another difference worth noting is that Missoula is a college town, and even though there is a remote campus of U of I in CdA it really doesn't have the feeling of being a college town. The University of Montana seems to have a positive impact on the character and culture of Missoula.

At first blush the climates appear to be similar, but Missoula, like most of MT, is drier than north Idaho. Missoula gets 14" of rain and 37" of snow per year, compared to 26" of rain and 38" of snow for CdA. That is reflected in the forests, which in the Missoula area are almost exclusively pine, predominantly Ponderosa and Lodgepole. North Idaho has a more interesting mix (to us) of various species of fir along with the pine. I think you will find the growing season is significantly longer in CdA compared to Missoula. Another way of saying that is the winters are longer in Montana.

Most of the larger cities in Montana tend to be sited along rivers, and are located in somewhat confining valleys or basins. Land in the surrounding mountains tends to be federally owned, which naturally limits sprawl. CdA and Sandpoint are sited on lakeshores, and even though there is a lot of federally owned land in the area there is more private land so people have spread out more. If you are looking for a larger rural property, say 10-20 acres or so, I think they are easier to find in north Idaho than in the Missoula area. We had reached the conclusion that if we did settle on Missoula we'd most likely have been south of Missoula in Ravalli county, probably somewhere near Hamilton.

Dave

[RunningfromCalifornia]

Thank you! What a great post.

It sounds like Missoula might be worth further investigating. Did you factor in Spokane when looking at the sprawl of an area? I'm trying to get an idea from Google maps, but that doesn't tell the on-the-ground story very well.

[VandalsLOL]

If you include Spokane, the Couer d'Alene area is much more sprawling than Missoula. It's a different sort of sprawl, as another poster alluded to. Missoula is a lot more constrained by public lands than the Spokane is (which is as well, just not as much).

As for the apparent impacts and feel of that sprawl, it would be hard to tell and depend on where you live, but I would wager they feel very similar.