Once again, only a relatively minor land use-related bill shows its face, while the biggies continue to be out of sight.

Yesterday, we saw HB372 – Short-Term Property Rental Act appear.  This is a short bill, one that was anticipated as we reported in an earlier posting because of residents’ concerns about ADUs becoming short-term rentals.  The bill provides that a local jurisdiction can by ordinance prohibit the offer of housing for short-term rental on a short-term rental website if it is not in an area that is authorized by local ordinance for short-term rentals.  It appears to me this is trying to give a cause for enforcement action to such unauthorized STRs because in the STR bill passed by the legislature a couple of years ago, it stated that advertising an STR on-line could not be the sole cause of action for enforcement against such facilities.  Okay.  We’ll see if this works.

On another topic related to the more anticipated bigger land use bills, it became more obvious to me that there is a lot of behind-the-scenes “open” discussion going on over the station area planning requirements bill.  A number of our local government friends have been involved in this as the bill becomes more and more a vehicle to achieve an “easy” win on the housing affordability issue.  Everybody thinks that higher housing densities and mixed use belong around fixed-rail transit stations, right?  This approach has been used in a number of places around the country lately – take a look at such moves in California (and some more California), Massachusetts, Washington State, Toronto, Montgomery County, and many other places.  The common factor here is that areas around transit stations are viewed as the place to start with allowing more housing and more kinds of housing.  That issue is now playing out here in Utah as well.  As I said, we’re hearing about lots of talk ongoing.  There are lots of interesting issues playing into this, including if there should be minimum density levels, and since such development can serve an area that includes more than one community, how would a potential referendum be handled?  Can’t wait to see what the bill finally says.