Haven’t had a chance to post anything new for a while, partly due to a trip to the Galapagos and Panama, but I’m back!  What amazing places those are!  But, while I was gone, plenty happened with meetings of the CHA, legislative interim meetings and the UEOC.  Also some noteworthy interesting tidbits to share.  So, to start…

Looks like we will be getting a statewide housing policy plan, likely sometime early next year at the earliest.  It was brought up in last year’s legislative audit on housing, and was highlighted in last week’s meeting of the legislature’s Political Subdivisions interim meeting.  State housing czar (I like that moniker for him! 😊) Steve Waldrip discussed it some at the committee meeting, which was well reported by Utah News Dispatch writer Katie McKellar.

Jake Dinsdale, an audit supervisor within the Legislative Auditor General’s Office, briefed the Political Subdivisions Interim Committee on the audit last Wednesday, telling lawmakers, “we see a need for some long-range strategic thinking” when it comes to housing.

“We understand there is a difference between what (the) government can reasonably do and the economic forces at play,” Dinsdale said. However, he added legislative auditors believe “that accelerating housing production is a strategic imperative for the state.”

Steve Waldrip, Gov. Spencer Cox’s senior adviser for housing strategy and innovation, told lawmakers he and a team have begun working on drafting a proposed statewide plan — a draft of which he hopes legislators can consider ahead of the 2025 legislative session.

“We are creating that statewide housing plan, which we should have to present to this committee hopefully before the next legislative session,” Waldrip told the Political Subdivisions Interim Committee. “We’d like to have something we can present, get feedback from the committee (and) make sure we come up with something that we can get behind as a state and have some concrete action items.”

I’ve been around long enough to remember that any mention of any kind of statewide plan to address growth issues was a totally verboten topic with local and state electeds.  My how times have changed!  Crises have a way of doing that (think not just housing, but water, traffic, air quality and so on – but not climate… yet!)

So what about zoning reform as it’s been happening in other states to deal with the housing crisis, most notably to increase housing options and density?  This was a point noted in the legislative audit:

Auditors also reported if there continues to be a focus on single-family housing rather than higher-density housing, that could mean a “recipe for trouble as Utah continues to grow.”

It’s possible the Utah Legislature could do something similar to Montana and change land use regulations more broadly to increase zoning density “on a wide scale throughout the state,” Dinsdale said, but pointing to Montana he added, “There’s pros and cons to that approach.”

I’ve said it before, and I guess I’ll continue to say it – looks like another interesting year in land use planning coming up.