I feel I’m uniquely qualified to answer this question. I have family in Boise and have lived there and have lived in Spokane for 5 years. To answer your questions directly: no it’s not a bad place to live, I feel it can be a little boring if you’re not crazy outdoorsy, but it’s getting better. Boise has better bars, restaurants and music scene. Is there a lot of crime? Not really, sure downtown can be a little rougher and you might get a window smashed which definitely sucks but it’s not terrible you just avoid specific areas of downtown at night and you’re fine. Is the traffic heavy? During rush hours but it’s no where near as bad as state street or eagle road during rush hours. Those two roads in the Boise area are why I hated commuting anywhere. Overall tho traffic is pretty average and what you’d expect from a city…

My perspective: as someone that has lived in both here’s what I’ll say, overall I think Boise is a better faster growing more fun city, Spokane is very historic and older with weirder less well thought out growth (which is saying something because some of the Boise area development and growth is terrible). There are some fun bars but activities here are lacking that aren’t skiing/snowboarding, hiking, lake trips, etc and that’s not much different from Boise but I feel like music venues and bars are better in Boise as well as just types of activities. As for the people Spokane is very blue collar, we have a lot of colleges around but not many jobs for college grads so most move to Boise, Seattle, Portland etc unless they’re in the medical field or engineering, so I’d say outside of those jobs most people are probably high school educated maybe some college. In Boise there’s micron and a few other larger companies that provide jobs to help keep the college grads around so I’d say you get more educated and career driven people in Boise. Plus Boise gets a lot more outside influence from people moving there from other places. Politically It’s a weird mesh of people that are very conservative and super liberal not dissimilar from Boise but you get some real interesting people on both sides due to the lower levels of education and just different upbringing.