The apartments planned at the old Sears at Boise Towne Square still aren’t built. Now this

It was pandemonium for the Treasure Valley when the Boise Towne Square opened in October 1988.

Over 10,000 people shopped at the Sears and Bon Marche — now Macy’s — on the first day they opened. Borah High School’s marching band played, and tuxedo-clad men handed out 2,000 red roses, according to Idaho Statesman archives.

“Within minutes after the Bon’s doors opened, credit cards were being plunked down on polished counters, and customers clutched new purchases as they shopped for more,” according to an 1988 Statesman story by Jana Pewitt and Betsy Russell.

“You can’t sit on a basket, or anything else, without being knocked off, possibly trampled, by shopping junkies,” wrote Tim Woodward, a Statesman columnist, at the time about the Boise Towne Square. “The only defense is to stay out of the way, which usually is impossible.”

Nearly four decades later, the hordes of shoppers have faded away, and the fate of the now-vacant Sears building, which closed in 2019 but was once a pearl in Boise Towne Square’s crown, is once again up in the air. A proposal three years ago to build apartments there has gone nowhere.

A new life for Sears?

Sears closed its Towne Square store in 2019. Seritage Growth Properties, an offshoot of Sears Holdings, sold the property in April 2021 to North Carolina’s Madison Capital Group, according to prior Statesman reporting.

Permits at the time showed plans to demolish the 120,000-square-foot building and build 246 apartments spread among three four-story apartment buildings. The plans also called for a two-story clubhouse with amenities on the first floor and apartments on the second floor.

The 8.3-acre property includes the 119,400-square foot Sears building and two sizable parking lots on the north side of the mall. The Sears building and parking lots are owned separately from the rest of the mall. Two of the apartment buildings would have covered 100,000 square feet each, the third 88,000 square feet and the clubhouse 12,000 square feet, according to prior Statesman reporting.

But, like the once unrelenting stream of shoppers, those plans for apartments in West Boise appears to have faded away.

Boise’s CSHQA, the architecture firm working on the project, withdrew its application to the city of Boise for the apartments in late 2021 to resubmit a new plan. CSHQA did not immediately reply with answers to a Statesman request for information about what happened afterward and why. Madison Capital Group did not return a call requesting information.

The withdrawal came a few months before the city of Boise published its 2021 Housing Needs Analysis, which found that the city has not kept up with growing demand for new housing.

The analysis found that the city would need to build 2,773 homes every year for the next decade to meet demand and that, over the previous 3 years before the study, Boise had built over 4,100 less than needed.

“It would cost roughly $4.9B in development costs to address the entire affordable housing deficit over the next 10 years,” according to the analysis.

Little had been heard of the Sears apartments project until Boise’s TOK Commercial, a real estate agency, published a sales flier May 30 for the building for $8 million. TOK has since reduced the price to $7.5 million.

John Stevens, Boise sales manager and partner at TOK, said the owner would entertain offers to either lease the property or buy it outright. TOK has seen interest from some office and retail tenants for parts of the building, he said.

The asking price of $7.5 million is low for what buyers would get, Stevens said. “You’re not going to find 8.3 acres in the center of Boise that is just sitting there waiting for development,” Stevens said by phone.

The site is zoned for mixed-use development, which means future owners of the building could use it for things such as office space, commercial or residential — such as Madison Capital Group had planned.

Stevens said he wasn’t sure why Madison Capital Group changed directions, as the company had been working through the approval process for the apartments.

He said it could be from macroeconomic factors. Construction boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic with favorable market conditions and growing population as people moved to Idaho. But the market changed in 2023 with high interest rates, swelling construction costs and a labor shortage that affected projects across the Treasure Valley.

Developers scrapped or pulled back on planned projects, such as reducing the height of the 26-story Arthur Apartments in downtown Boise and changing terms on previous agreements, as with the proposed Block 68/69 project that would see the construction of over 400 apartments and a new downtown Boise YMCA.

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