Here’s a follow-up to the Millennials’ call for allowing more housing to be built (see April 28 blog post), this one by a local Millennial!  This is from a TEDx BYU Talk by Dejan Eskic, a senior policy analyst at the Gardner Policy Institute, who is:

“… a 30-something-year-old who is fully employed, my family and I have spent 18 of the last 24 months living in my in-laws’ basement. Not because we wanted to, but because we couldn’t find a house to buy,”

The problem, Eskic says, is due in large measure because:

Utah was already the fastest-growing state in the country over the past 10 years, and was already grappling with a housing shortage that fueled its affordable housing crisis long before the pandemic hit. Yes, Utah did see a spike in-migration from states like California in recent years, but it’s important to remember the majority of Utah’s population growth over the years has come from natural growth.

What does Eskic see as the solution?

While there is no one solution, Eskic said — noting that home construction needs to take advantage of technology to become more efficient and build homes quicker — another solution “has to do with us and how we grow and where we grow.”

But, he says,

“The biggest obstacle to more housing is us,” Eskic said. “We keep having kids, but when obtainable and affordable housing is proposed in our neighborhood, we scream and shout. And that mentality is really robbing our kids of a stable financial future.” Eskic went on to read a letter from a concerned citizen to a local Utah city council, in which the resident opposed a proposed townhome development and said they didn’t want to “live next to the kind of low-income people who typically reside in high-density housing. I do not want their delinquent children attending the schools that my children attend. I do not want to deal with the increase in crime and drug use that inevitably accompanies such high-density housing units,” Eskic read from the letter. “I do not want my home values to decrease.”

What to do?  Eskic continues:

“… we really need to lead with empathy and understanding, and ask ourselves, ‘Why do we need cheaper housing? Who’s it for?’” Eskic said. “It’s for all of us. It’s for our community, it’s for our kids, so we can have a stable community.”

Maybe the problem is how we make land use decisions, or at least how we obtain public input and what we do with it.  I have just recently found some really interesting research pieces on this topic, which I will be sharing in future posts.  Stay tuned!