Latah County, Idaho

• Income gap: Households earn meaningfully less than the national median, which directly affects retail demand, housing absorption, and tax base.
• Elevated poverty: At 17.6%, the rate is in economically distressed territory and supports federal funding narratives (CDFI, NMTC, EDA).
• Talent advantage: Bachelor's-or-higher attainment exceeds the national average by 7.3 pts, supports knowledge-economy and tech attraction.
• Young population: Median age of 31 is materially below the U.S. norm, a workforce pipeline asset.

• Largest sector: Health Care and Social Assistance employs 2,155 workers (23.5% of tracked sectors), at an average wage of $47,198.
• Economic scale: Regional GDP of $2.1B (2024).
• Wage stratification: Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services averages $80,244 while Accommodation and Food Services averages $20,293, a 4.0x spread in the same local economy, with implications for workforce development and talent strategy.

• Top specialization: Forestry and Logging concentrates at 32.16x the national norm, top-decile concentration, the kind of signature sector that defines a region's economic identity to site selectors.
• Cluster depth: 6 sub-sectors register LQ ≥ 1.5, suggesting an interconnected industrial base rather than reliance on a single employer or sector.
• Attraction whitespace: 8 sub-sectors register LQ < 0.5, candidates for diversification or recruitment depending on labor-market fit.

• Stretched market: Home value to income ratio of 5.6x is well above the ~4.1x national average; attainable workforce housing may be a recruitment friction.
• Affordable rent tiers: 4 of 5 HUD Fair Market Rent bedroom tiers sit below the 30%-of-median-income affordability threshold (~$1,636/mo).

• Short commutes: 18.7-minute mean commute is a quality-of-life and labor-access advantage worth surfacing for site selectors.
• Talent pipeline: 6 regional institutions feed the workforce; the top three combined produce 17,074 annual credentials.

Latah County shows strong potential for forestry and logging attraction, with a 32.16x concentration and 142 jobs in this sub-sector. It ranks in the top decile nationally.

The interconnected base across forestry and logging, wood product manufacturing, and building material and garden supply retailers creates supply-chain attraction leverage rather than single-employer risk, a structural advantage for industrial recruitment.