Kuna outside the kave
As the Boise metroplex reshuffles
Three decades ago in Boise I attended a stand-up comedy night where the travelling comedian seized on the local place name “Kuna,” and kept scoring off it all night. It seemed so remote, and rural, and it sounded - what? - a little funny. Must’ve seemed a good comedy word.
Times change. Kuna never was especially remote, even if it was a little out of the way. The Kuna Kave (which I once descended into, in what then felt like an eerie experience) is still there, and still gives the local high school a mascot name, but it’s a lot less central to the identity of the area now.
The Kuna I knew from 40 or 50 years ago still largely exists, mainly around the downtown area which seems preserved in a time capsule. Almost everything around it is transformed. Back then, say in 1980, Kuna’s population was 1,767. Now, the number is approaching 20 times that.
The new hallmarks of Kuna are the subdivision and the strip mall. This is, after all, one of the fastest - maybe the fastest, with Eagle - growing communities in Idaho.
In the Ada-Canyon metroplex, a word that genuinely might be applied to it these days, Kuna is at a southern edge; all that lies between it and the Snake River canyon and birds of prey area to the south is miles of straight-up desert. Some what is now urbanized Kuna used to be farmland or rangeland, but some was open desert by the Snake River Birds of Prey Area.
Much of Kuna today looks like a replicant of the other suburban Ada and Canyon areas, as if someone had copied large pieces of Meridian and pasted them a few miles south. Meridian and Kuna, once clearly separated by seven miles or more, retain a visible gap between them, but one one much thinner and likely to mostly fill in before long.
The explosive growth around Kuna to the south of the Boise area and Eagle to the north represent expansions about as close to the center of the urban mass as realistically possible. Growth to the west - beyond Caldwell - and to the east - well east of Micron Technology and what used to be the Boise Outlet Mall - still seem like a bridge too far. But maybe not if the new casino, business and residential developments planned for the Mayfield area really start to take off.
This suggests the Boise area still has some cohesion, with Boise itself still the center hub of commerce, government and employment, along with much of the social activity.
But that may not be a fair assumption. Meridian is becoming a business behemoth on its own (just count with big office buildings there near I-84, not to mention elsewhere), and businesses looking to build on not-too-expensive land already has led many to start to look at places like Eagle - and Kuna.
Bringing us to the development at Kuna (encouraged by state tax exemptions) of two massive data centers, developed by Meta (the Facebook people) and Diode Ventures. Diode, explaining why it chose Kuna as a location, said, “Agencies, chambers, and economic organizations throughout Idaho undertook concerted efforts to attract data centers to the state because of the recognition of the community investment with a low developmental impact of these types of projects. Over the course of several years, this advocacy helped create a welcoming environment for IT infrastructure providers to set up shop, help grow the state’s technology sector and stimulate the creation of tech-related jobs. Diode identified Kuna as an ideal location …”
There are challenges to both centers, and concerns which include a number of issues, foremost being water: Since data centers use a lot of it (often really tremendous amounts), and since there’s not a lot outside the already diminishing aquifer underground. Both the state of Idaho (through the Department of Water Resources) and the Idaho Water Users Association have warned about the possible impacts on long-term water supply.
If water demands from data centers and residential expansion combined put enough pressure on the water supply, that may force an eventual limit to Kuna’s expansion. The question to come may be how severe that pain has to be before limitations are imposed.
Most likely, severe indeed, and there’s nothing funny about that.