Why six
The county would have
let us draw five.
Kootenai County's Rural zone sets a minimum lot size of five acres. Every homesite here could have been drawn at five, and there would have been more of them to sell. They are drawn at six instead, and there is a reason for each of the acres.
In his own words
He answered this on camera
before anybody asked.
Stand in the middle of one of these lots and look around. The next house is far enough away that you can't hear it.
That's six acres, not five. That one extra acre is the difference between a neighborhood and a homestead.
It's the timber exemption that honors the forest. It's room for your horses, your shop. It's the silence between you and your neighbor.
That is four arguments in about twenty seconds, and the rest of this page is just checking each one against the plat.
One · The sound test
Far enough away
that you can't hear it.
This is the only claim on the page you can settle yourself, in about ten minutes, standing on the ground. It is also the one that matters most, because nobody buys rural land and then measures it. They walk out to the middle of it and listen.
Acres are a poor way to describe quiet, which is why the line is not about acres. A six acre square runs a little over five hundred feet on a side, so a house near the middle of one sits better than two hundred and fifty feet off every boundary, and your neighbor's house sits that far back on their side. Put the timber that is already standing between the two and a conversation on a back porch stops carrying.
Two · A different kind of place
A neighborhood,
or a homestead.
Six acres is twenty percent more land than five, which sounds like a rounding decision. It is not. Five acre rural lots are the standard product in North Idaho, and they produce a recognisable kind of place: houses in a loose row, each one aware of the others, a neighborhood that happens to have long driveways.
The sixth acre is what moves a parcel out of that category. It is the difference between a lot that holds a house and ground that holds a life: the house, the shop, the pasture, the garden, the burn pile, the place you park the trailer, and still timber left over that you never have to touch. Joe calls that a homestead. The word is doing real work.
Three · The timber exemption
Idaho taxes working
forest differently.
This is the leg of the argument with a statute behind it. Idaho assesses land held and used for growing and harvesting trees under its own forest land classification rather than at market value, and the threshold in Idaho Code 63-1703 is five acres. Below five, the code says the land is taxed without regard to its timber-producing ability.
Six acres clears that floor by a full acre rather than landing on it. That is the whole of what we will tell you, because the rest depends on facts about you that we do not have. The designation is a ten year commitment, it wants a management plan and proof you are actually tending the trees, and the form goes to the county assessor by the last day of the year. Whether any of that is worth doing on your parcel is a conversation with your accountant and the Kootenai County Assessor, not with us.
Four · Room for your horses, your shop
The film promised these.
The plat delivers them.
When Joe said that line, the two things in it were intentions. Both are now conditions of the county's approval, which means they are not ours to quietly drop later.
- Your horses
- Pedestrian and equestrian pathways run along the road rights-of-way and between the homesites, maintained by the association under the covenants. Six acres is enough ground to keep horses on, and the paths mean you ride out from home rather than loading a trailer. How the pathways work.
- Your shop
- Three-phase power is in the corridor, which is the rarest thing this plat has to offer and the reason a real shop is possible here at all. Welders, dust collection, machine tools that would dim the lights on an ordinary residential panel. The three-phase story.
The honest note
What six acres
does not buy you.
It does not make the land cheaper. Fewer, larger parcels is the more expensive way to subdivide ground, and that cost sits in the price of every homesite here. If the only number you are weighing is dollars per acre, five acre lots down the road will win and they should.
It does not make you a farmer either. Six acres of North Idaho timber is a woodlot and a place to live, not an operation. And it does not guarantee silence forever, because the land beyond the plat belongs to other people who get to make their own decisions, the way we made ours.
What it buys is the thing Joe said it buys. Distance you can hear, room for the life you came out here to have, and a parcel the state is willing to treat as working forest. Those were worth more to him than the extra lots would have been, which is the only real answer to why six.
The sound test only works
standing on it.
Walk out to the middle of one and listen. That is the part of this page you should not take our word for.