BOISE, Idaho — Cody Draper stood outside his Boise Bench warehouse on a cold February afternoon and watched as a crane truck, flooding the area with the smell of diesel, lifted a house into the sky.

Workers carefully placed the home out of the way, then slid green straps over a second home to lift. Those homes, says Draper, could be a solution to Idaho’s painful housing shortage: a home that can be ready in two to six weeks for a fraction of the normal cost of a new house.

Draper is the founder and CEO of a Boise company called Mountain Modular. The startup builds sturdy, steel-framed homes in its two warehouses that it can truck and lift into Treasure Valley backyards as accessory dwelling units, or ADUs.

“Essentially, you get your home delivered like a pizza,” Draper said. “We just do all the on-site work, and in a week you’re living in a home watching football.”

Mountain Modular’s plan to add homes to the Treasure Valley’s housing market comes as residents are jumping to build ADUs in their backyards since the city of Boise loosened restrictions during an overhaul of its zoning code in 2023. The company is drawing attention from local leaders with visits from the staffs of Boise Mayor Lauren McLean and Meridian Mayor Robert Simison.

The business is not the first in the Boise area to build ADUs. Multiple builders offer the prospect of a home for elderly or other family members, a space for work or a place for guests, and the chance to earn supplemental income from tenants. Models range from striking custom homes with big windows to inexpensive structures resembling backyard sheds. (Like most other such builders, Mountain Modular builds larger houses too.)

ADUs, Draper said, could help alleviate some of the pain from the housing crisis as the price to buy remains high.

ADUs are homes that contain a kitchen, a full bathroom, and living and sleeping areas but are not the main structure on the property, according to the city of Boise. ADUs are usually smaller than the main home and normally built on-site.

Unlike mobile homes or manufactured homes built on chassis, Mountain Modular’s homes are built to international standards, qualify for traditional financing, and are inspected and delivered in sequence with the buyers’ foundations and building permits, Draper said. The company is a “one stop shop.”

“We are not a tiny home, we are not a mobile home,” Draper said in an interview. “We are actually a real home that is just built in a warehouse.”

The company has blueprints for several types of garages, ADUs and larger homes with studio to three-bedroom units ranging from about $100,000 to $300,000, though Draper said the ultimate price depends on how far Mountain Modular needs to take a unit. The homes are modern with vaulted living-room ceilings, and they range from 450 square feet to nearly 2,500 square feet, with options for up to two bathrooms and a two-car garage, a patio and a covered porch.

Alley Homes, a traditional stick-built ADU builder in Boise, estimated that the average total cost for an ADU in Boise was $150,000 to $325,000 in 2024.

According to Marc McConnell, a partner at Mountain Modular, the cost could decrease as the company grows and it finds ways to build more efficiently. The company still subcontracts some work out but is planning to start bending its own steel frames and doing its own insulation work.

Still, the cost is low compared with historical home prices that saw fast growth after the Great Recession then lurched further skyward during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The median price to buy a home in 2025 was $415,000 in Canyon County and $540,000 in Ada County, according to Intermountain Multiple Listing Service data. Since 2019, that’s a price increase of over 67% for Canyon County, 56.5% for Ada County.

In remote Valley County, where Draper got his start in development, the numbers are worse. The median home price in 2025 was an eye-watering $776,000 — a nearly 82% increase since 2019.

“Affordable housing in Valley County doesn’t exist,” Draper said. “And (in) 95% of Idaho.”

Fixing Valley County’s housing shortage

Draper started his development career with a 20-acre subdivision in Lake Fork, about 7.5 miles south of McCall, but struggled with the remoteness, travel and lodging costs, traffic and shutdowns on Idaho 55 and the seasonal nature of homebuilding in the area.

“When you work out of town, your rates are high,” Draper said. “It’s just one of those (things) that we have to face and say ‘look, we need to quit trying to reinvent the wheel of building in Valley County, and throw that in the garbage and come up with a new idea and a new system.”

Draper said he wanted a better way to deliver his own affordable developments and realized building in a warehouse took out most of the variables and let workers build year round. He started Mountain Modular in 2023, aiming for remote and hard-to-get-to areas.

McConnell said their vision is to put homes throughout the state including areas like Challis or Sun Valley, which have struggled with housing affordability. Draper said that while it could normally cost $700,000 for a two-bed in Ketchum or Sun Valley, they could put one of their models down for about $250,000.

“The dynamic in all of Idaho is dead,” Draper said. “There’s no way to do it. This is the solution.”

A hope for housing in Boise?

According to a presentation in February to the Boise City Council by Deanna Dupuy, a planner with Planning and Development Services, 130 ADUs were permitted in 2024, up from an average of 61 in previous years.

“(ADUs have) kind of become the star of the zoning code,” Dupuy said. They “kind of stole the show of the first year of the zoning code.”

ADUs are primarily going up in the North and East Ends, which Dupuy said is consistent with past trends. But more are cropping up in the Central and West Bench neighborhoods and in Southeast Boise since the code rewrite.

Mountain Modular is trying to get a slice of this market, and Draper said they were fortunate that Boise and Meridian allow people to place a second homes in their backyards.

“We didn’t start this for the ADUs,” Draper said. “It kind of popped up right as we were unfolding.”

The need is high. To keep up with the demand for housing, Boise needs to build 2,700 homes per year until 2032, according to a 2022 analysis. Of that demand, 77% is for housing that is affordable for those earning 80% or less of the area median income.

In Boise in 2025, 80% of the area median income was $54,000 for a single person household and $78,400 for a four-person household. According to Zillow’s mortgage calculator, if your household earns $78,400 per year, you have $0 in debt and make a $20,000 down payment, you could likely afford a $290,000 home.

Of the nearly 8,000 homes sold in Ada County in 2024, just 46 were sold for $299,999 or under, according to Intermountain Multiple Listing Service data. That’s about 0.006% of all home sales.

McConnell said he’s received calls from Wyoming, Montana and Nevada with people who can’t find workforce housing. In McCall, he said the local Albertsons has struggled to find checkers since few can afford to live there.

“We get it,” McConnell said. “It’s not just a Treasure Valley problem. It’s a national problem.”

The company is expanding to meet the need. Draper recently opened a second warehouse, wants a third and hopes to expand into Reno, Nevada, and a few other states that have struggled with affordable housing.

“Our mission is to deliver thousands of homes to the Northwest,” Draper said. “We’re well on our way with our own developments.”

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