Every multifamily community has a press release, a rendering, and a lease-up. Most don't have a six-year archive of drone footage of the land, from the year we bought it, through the canal, the roads, the infrastructure, the buildings rising next door, the foundations going in. We do. This is the build, in pictures.
We've been flying the same ground since 2020, the first full year on our land. Year after year, the parcel we bought as bare farmland is becoming the residential heart of Discovery Meridian: a 36-acre community wrapped in retail and adjacent to the District at Ten Mile. The work happened in plain sight, week after week, on our own dirt. This is the story in eight frames.
When it was still farmland.
The parcel in 2019 was a quiet stretch of agricultural land off Ten Mile Road, well-drained, well-positioned, and quiet. A few hundred feet south, the I-84 freeway. A few miles east, downtown Boise. Nothing on the parcel yet but the agriculture that had been here for decades.
What was unusual about it. And what made it worth buying, was where it sat. The Ten Mile interchange had opened in 2009 and the area was already shifting from farms to suburbs in slow motion. The first comp apartment buildings on Cobalt Drive (the Lofts, what would become Altair) were just starting to be planned or built. The District at Ten Mile, across the interchange, was still a vision. We saw what kind of corner Ten Mile and Franklin was about to become, and we bought it.
One year in. Nothing built, plenty learned.
The image at the top of this page is from August 31, 2020, about a year after we bought the parcel. Almost nothing on the ground itself had changed. But you can see in that shot the neighborhood around it was lighting up: the existing developments to the east and south becoming more visible, the road network beginning to fill in, the first signals of what would happen next.
The year between purchase and that flight was almost entirely about the work nobody sees. Zoning, master-planning, infrastructure design, civil engineering, the canal alignment, the relationship with the City of Meridian, the relationships with neighbors. Every project worth building has a "year zero", the year where the world thinks nothing is happening because nothing is visible from the road. This was ours.
Fifty-three drone flights. One year of dirt.
If you only watched one year of this build, you'd want to watch 2022. We have fifty-three videos from this single calendar year — January through November, every month. And they show a transformation. From frozen ground and snow-covered trenches in January, to massive earthwork through spring, to the first concrete structures going in for the canal and drainage, to the wide grading of the building pads through the back half of the year.
We started in winter on purpose. The frozen ground is actually easier for heavy equipment than the mud of an Idaho spring, and we wanted the canal alignment locked in before anything else. You can see it cutting through the snow on the right side of the frame above, the diagonal line that runs north-south through the property. Once the canal is in, every other piece of infrastructure organizes around it.
February was about moving dirt. A lot of dirt. The shot above is the road through the property starting to form, what's now the main access spine of Discovery Meridian. You can see equipment tracks running every direction, the way a real construction site looks when there's no choreography for the camera. It's just work.
March was the canal proper, the concrete structures, the channel lining, the embankment work. This is the kind of thing that takes longer than people expect and matters more than people realize: it's what keeps the property dry, what manages the water rights, and what allows everything else to be built on top of it. Once it's in, the rest of the site becomes possible.
By May, the road network was scaled up. The shot above shows the main arterial road carved through the property, with surrounding ag land still visible to the south and east. From the air, the geometry of what was coming was finally legible. By October and November the building pads had been graded out and the site was ready for the next phase.
From construction site to community-in-waiting.
By April 2023, the site had transformed into something that looked finished, even though nothing was built on it yet. Paved roads. Curbs. Storm drains. Utilities run. Building pads cleared and ready. From the air, you could trace exactly where every building would go.
The shot above is from two months later. Look at the upper-left: those are the comp apartment communities that arrived just before us, finished, leased, and operating. The Discovery Meridian site sits in the middle of that, with the foothills in the distance and I-84 just out of frame. By summer 2023 the property had stopped being "raw land we bought" and started being "the next piece of an arriving neighborhood."
Commercial activates first. The retail wrapper goes live.
Master-planned communities don't all open at once. They activate in stages. By March 2024, the commercial pads around the perimeter of Discovery Meridian had buildings up and operating. A grocer. A coffee shop. A dental office. A credit union. A Panda Express. Cars in parking lots, people walking in and out, a real, functioning neighborhood spine, just waiting for residents to live in the middle of it.
The residential pads, the future Arête, were still bare. That was on purpose. The retail wrapper had to be open and stable before residents would believe the walkability story. By the time leases sign in 2027, this won't be a "will it be walkable?" question. It already is.
Foundations. Finally.
This is where the build is right now. The full 36-acre Discovery Meridian master plan visible in one frame. The commercial pads still operating along the perimeter (you can see them along the top of the shot). The residential ground graded and ready. The first foundations going in for buildings that, by this time next year, will be apartments and townhomes with residents in them.
The Construction Update series, which you can subscribe to at the bottom of this page, will publish a fresh drone shot from this same angle every month from here forward. Twelve months from now, you'll have watched the apartments rise from this dirt in time-lapse.
Locally built. Year after year.
The single most-asked question about a new multifamily community is some version of: who's actually behind this? An out-of-state institutional operator? A REIT spinning up its hundredth project? A private-equity flip?
For Arête, the answer is the same as it's been since the day we bought the parcel in 2019: a local team, on local ground, building it ourselves. The canal was our canal. The road was our road. The infrastructure was our infrastructure. The plans were revised down the hall, not in a boardroom in another state. And the building that opens in 2027 will be managed by the same team that bought the dirt in 2019.
There's no marketing line for that. There's just six years of drone footage.
Watch the build, month by month.
The Construction Update series publishes a fresh drone shot every month, same angle, same time of year, so over twelve months it becomes a real time-lapse. Vol. 1 is live; Vol. 2 lands in late June.