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The Roosevelt Market was built around 1900.
Each weekday, scores of youngsters pouring out of East Boise’s 9 Roosevelt Elementary School stop in the Roosevelt Market, the iconic corner shop on North Elm Avenue off of Warm Springs Avenue, for what co-proprietor Susan Wilder calls the after school “sugar rush.” “For an hour, we close down our sandwich bar, and it’s only the kids,” said Wilder. “They’ll come over here and completely fill the store. We’ve only had a few people that have managed to come in here during the ‘sugar rush,’ and they don’t make that mistake again.” When not full of students purchasing snacks, the Roosevelt Market is a weekend brunch stop and summertime hangout. But earlier this month, owners of the property put the store, and a second floor apartment over the market, up for sale. “We need to consolidate our finances,” said Sheila Trounson, who shares ownership of the building with her mother, Gay Milligan. Mother and daughter purchased the property in 2003. Wilder and her business partner, Nicki Monroe, began operating the market six months later. Milligan and Trounson are looking for a buyer to purchase the 2,409-square-foot building, with an asking price of nearly $250,000. Listings indicate the structure was built in 1900. “We would love it if the buyer keeps the market,” said Trounson. “We’re not selling it for any reason other than consolidating. It’s such a fantastic community location; it’s not a money-maker, it’s an investment in the community is what it is.” Wilder said she was concerned the location would no longer a serve as a neighborhood market, and might go the way of the Hollywood Market. “Our concern would be that somebody wouldn’t want us here,” said Wilder. “And that they’d want to purchase this and then maybe start up their own business.” Trounson said they previously offered to sell the property to Wilder and Monroe before placing the building on the market. “They’re not in a situation to do that, that I know of,” said Trounson. “We really want it to stay a part of the neighborhood, but we couldn’t put it contingent on the sale because we need to sell it.” Wilder pointed to a newly launched blog, saverooseveltmarket.blogspot.com, which suggests East End residents could work together to purchase the building in a “community-owned” model and preserve its role “as a permanent historic, economic and cultural asset for the East End.”
Plans for a bike share program would include stations in Boise downtown core and the Boise State campus, with a total of 140 bikes at 14 stations.
FEWER WHEELS, MORE STUDENTS Bike, car-sharing programs slow to take off but here to stay ANDREW CRISP Boise State University occupies one of the busiest slices of real estate in the city. More than 20,000 people regularly descend upon the 170-acre campus, which includes more than 150 buildings and that massive blueturfed stadium. “We kind of think of ourselves as a mini city,” said J.C. Porter, assistant director of the Transportation Department at Boise State. Not unlike any metropolis, Boise State also has its own ideas about 21st century alternative transportation options--and they were all too happy to share their concepts at a Jan. 23 Urban Lunch, held at the university’s home away from home, Boise State Center on Main, tucked inside downtown’s Alaska Center. A panel including Porter and Drs. Susan Mason and Thomas Wuerzer, associate professors in the Boise State Department of Community and Regional Planning, focused on the university’s research on urban issues, with a particular focus on people movement. In fact, Mason and Wuerzer’s department worked alongside the Central District Health Department to craft a proposed bike-share program, using mapping systems to find the most active portions of the city.
“Our question wasn’t, ‘Does Boise need a bike-share or not?’” said Wuerzer. “Instead, our question was, ‘If we get a bike-share, where would the best locations be?’” Wuerzer and Mason pointed to a map showcasing active cores of Boise. Bright red areas showed zones active for residential, restaurant and retail use, locations better suited to feature one of 15 stations with 10 rentable bikes. “Keep your eye out for more research on cycling in Boise,” said Mason. “There will be more research on how we [cycle throughout the city] and when we do it.” Other urban initiatives, such as a carsharing program, also originated with the university. ZipCar debuted on the campus in 2010, with four cars, a project to free up sparse parking space by letting users rent cars permanently housed at the school. According to Porter, the few surface parking lots on campus are destined to serve as footprints for future buildings, “We have to come up with alternatives for people driving to campus,” said Porter, who added his department already runs a bike rental program for faculty and students.
Boise State’s density is, in large part, because the campus has “hard and fast boundaries” requiring multistory buildings for oncampus expansion, according to the scholars. “The only other place to expand is the residential area to the south,” said Porter. “And that gets expensive.” And while the panel unveiled a university survey that indicated 24 percent of students and teachers regularly rode a bicycle to campus, 10 percent walked and 48 percent drove alone in a vehicle, the experts are anxious to push down the number of cars on campus. “We want to promote to students, ‘Hey, you don’t need to bring a car to campus,’” said Porter. More than 2,600 students, many of whom bring a car, live in on-campus student housing, Porter said, and many of those students are reluctant to give up their own keys in favor of a shared ZipCar. The company’s target of 30 percent of the Zipcars being used each day hasn’t been consistently met, according to Porter, so the fleet was reduced to two vehicles. As of December, Boise State’s ZipCar program had 257 members, with 30 to 40 drivers making reservations per month.
—Andrew Crisp and George Prentice
10 | JANUARY 30 – FEBRUARY 5, 2013 | BOISEweekly
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