I attended the Utah Housing Solutions Summit yesterday, put on by the Sutherland Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, where they had a variety of national and local speakers, including Gov. Cox, Rep. Steve Whyte (CHA co-chair), and Rep. Ray Ward (sponsor of a bill on ADUs and setting minimum lot sizes statewide).  While there wasn’t really anything new discussed, there were some interesting perspectives and points emphasized.

The featured main speaker, Edward J. Pinto, co-director of the AEI Housing Center, focused his remarks on what he calls “gentle density,” which to me is really just another name for missing middle housing.

Here’s a story in the DesNews about the summit, which described Pinto’s comments this way:

“In 2023, Utah was ranked as the most unaffordable state for blue-collar workers to buy an entry-level home (and according to the data, Utah has been less affordable than the national average since at least 2012).  Utah’s housing supply has been unable to keep up with in-migration rates, and around 28,000 homes need to be built annually to meet demand.”

Pinto said he feels that the public has a gut opposition to anything described as higher density because they see development as either single-family lots or high-rise multifamily buildings.

One solution is the building of light-touch-density homes, a term coined by Pinto. These types of builds involve increasing the density of single-family lots by allowing 2-8-plexes, townhouses or accessory dwelling units.

Sounds like missing middle housing to me!

Pinto had rafts of data to show the issues and explain what needs to be done.  You can see his slides here, there’s a lot to mull over.

Pinto also emphasized his view that there should be as little interference with the free market as possible, that it will be the best way to get the housing needed and get the pricing down.  The way to do that, he said, is just free things up to allow as much building as possible of gentle density – which often means allowing for much smaller lot sizes, as the cost of land is one of the major drivers of high housing costs, particularly when large lots are required for building homes.  This goes right to the heart of what Ray Ward is proposing in his draft bills which would set small lot size minimums (around 3,500 sq. ft.) in residential zones statewide.

The idea of just letting the market take care of it was somewhat challenged by a later speaker, Benjamin Pries, Director of the National Housing Crisis Task Force, of which Gov. Cox is a co-chair.  Pries (and others) said that opening up the market to build more will definitely help, but it will take some time to see any effect on prices.  Something needs to be done to speed things up now.  One idea Pries floated was to have entities like housing authorities or other government-backed entities that can secure money at much lower interest rates to offer financing to private housing developers at these lower interest rates in return for a given number of “affordable” units.

Gov. Cox, along with Rep. Whyte and Rep. Ward, put emphasis on needing to get affordable home ownership options in place rather than apartments and rentals.  They characterized this as a need to keep communities viable and strong.

“My biggest fear is that if we make it so that people are not able to buy homes,” then it will “change the nature of our communities in ways that won’t be good,” Ward said.

As kind of a real life demonstration of the issues talked about at this summit, KSL News just a few days earlier reported on a citizen referendum in Clinton City to overturn a rezone approved by the city council to allow for a substantial townhouse development proposal.  From reading the news story, it seems to be a fairly typical situation of the NIMBYs just saying no to any more development, or at least “high density” development.

The 341 units — 266 townhomes and 75 single-family homes — “may not sound like a lot compared to some cities, but it is situated right next to Clinton’s border, where West Point has already planned 200 townhomes. So we are concerned it’s going to become a townhome city there. It’s way too much,” said Sierra Coombs, another Clinton resident involved in the effort.

But looking into the situation a bit further, it appears that the neighbors are not so much opposed to any development, but rather how that development is designed and situated.  It appears that the neighbors would have been more accepting of a design where there were more small lots, arranged around the boundaries of the development adjacent to the existing neighborhoods, with the townhouses placed more in the middle.  “Gentle density!”  Maybe.

There does seem to be somewhat of a sense among elected community officials that the governor’s and legislature’s emphasis on requiring more affordable housing means that if you want to stay in the state’s good graces, communities had better approve whatever higher density projects are proposed.  I know that’s somewhat of an over-generalization, but there’s a bit of that sense as city’s Moderate Income Housing Plans are again being reviewed.

The real danger is the public perception of what’s going on, and the backlash it may inspire.  That has been amply evident in what’s happening in other states, with lawsuits filed by citizen groups and refusals by some communities to comply with state requirements.  Can it happen here?  Maybe.  The Clinton situation may have been such a reaction, but it is actually more nuanced than that.

In a more detailed story on the summit, Katie McKellar of Utah News Dispatch noted the comments from Gov. Cox that may be putting that concern into local officials:

Cox did not paint a clear picture of what state leaders might do to take certain housing planning decisions out of local leaders’ hands, but he said, “We’ll continue to work with our cities and towns to do this.”

“But I’ve also said, like, if you don’t play ball, then it will be forced upon you,” Cox said. “So I think we have to hold that incentive out there at some level, and these are the debates we’re going to have.”

McKellar’s story quotes much more from Utah leaders’ comments, which may mean some interesting times coming up.  Stay tuned!