“We’re not nibbling at the edges anymore, that is certainly true,” said Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall. “I think it’s exciting.”
That’s backward looking but we have been in a perfect storm of housing loss and pressure, with relatively stagnant wages. And so it’s reasonable that Salt Lake City has invested more in affordable housing in the last three years — and last year alone — than we ever have before in that amount of time. But the creativity around it is also more than we’ve seen before, as a result of pressure.
Homes along Salt Lake City's Harvey Milk Blvd. and 600 East, just north of Liberty Park, as seen Oct. 20, 2020. City officials are studying a host of new zoning changes to encourage tiny homes and row homes in backyards in neighborhoods such as those north of Liberty Park. The affordable housing overlay seems to be guided by two key recognitions. One is the dire lack of places where new housing can actually go in the city under existing zoning. The other is the deep-seated nature of inequity with regard to where housing has been built in the past andas well. The majority of the city is not zoned for residential, period.. That has ended up converging intellectually with this conversation about housing and “more people, more people” as we’re growing.
It was a frustrating lesson for all of us on the council. What we learned is: It isn’t only the cost of land creating a disincentive for developers to put affordability into high-opportunity areas. It’s sustaining costs of decreased rent, when in a high-opportunity area, they know they could charge market rate or more and have much larger, ongoing revenue.for affordable housing — with $27.
It’s easy to understand, in some ways, the reluctance that some of the public have to the notion of affordability being insisted upon by the city, because we are just barely beginning to see what that actually looks like and feels like in a modern city. We have a very restrictive environment compared to many of our Western sister cities, in terms of population and economic growth. So we work creatively. Our housing policy team, led by, they are builders. They are not literally building housing, but they are relationship and policy builders outside of City Hall.
When the business and the development community start to make their own case, as is beginning to happen, for the benefits of economically dynamic communities, then it’s no longer, “The capital city wants to do inclusionary zoning and none of the developers do.” And that’s what’s happening.
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