Cd'A approves seven-acre annexation
A bird's eye view looking east toward the newly-annexed property on Atlas Road. The property, which is now R-8 and could fit 62 homes, is penciled in for 41 single family dwellings.
Coeur d’Alene absorbed another seven acres of land Tuesday night, annexing a patch of Kootenai County agricultural property into the city for residential development.
The 7.69 acres sits on Atlas Road south of West Wilbur Avenue, across from The Landings development. Harmony Homes intends to develop the property — once deemed County Agricultural but now zoned Residential-8 — into approximately 41 single-family units.
The surrounding neighborhood is almost exclusively zoned R-8 already. Merle Van Houten, the civil engineer on the project, said with Sunshine Meadows to the north and east, Coeur d’Alene Place to the south and The Landings to the west, the project intends to blend in with the housing density around the area.
“You could make some other different requests for single family developments,” he said at the Coeur d’Alene city council meeting Tuesday night, “but you’d be hard-pressed to make a better case than R-8, in this case.”
While Harmony Homes is within its rights to build up to 62 units on the 7.69 acres, Van Houten stressed that the developers were trying to remain in keeping with the density of the neighborhood.
“I think we’re doing our best to become good neighbors,” he said.
While the annexation, which passed the city council unanimously, doesn’t expand the perimeter of Coeur d’Alene’s boundaries, as the land is surrounded by already-annexed developments, the move does all-but-pop one of the last remaining outlier county bubbles within the city limits. The northwest corner adjacent to the Harmony Homes property remains privately owned unincorporated land.
The council approved the relatively small annexation but used the time to deliberate about larger future developments, asking for more input from the Coeur d’Alene School District, the police department and the fire department.
“I don’t see any communication with the police department,” council member Christie Wood said. “I wonder, on a larger proposal, if maybe in the future, we should have them do an assessment. They could probably find a way to calculate calls for service. It might not change our minds at all, but it’s always good to have that data.”