Elana Vandermolen is “stuck” living in Davis County, but not because she doesn’t like her neighborhood, where she’s close to an orchard and hiking trails.
Instead, it’s because housing costs are too high closer to her work at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. So, she lives in Fruit Heights and commutes — around 30 minutes on a good day, but it takes nearly an hour in rush hour.
She’s among close to 450,000 Utahns who commute at least 30 minutes one way to work. More than 77,000 of those people commute for at least an hour.
Her commute used to be shorter, but upgrading their house eight years ago meant moving further away.
“Just trying to find something affordable that met what we needed, we just had to keep going further and further north,” Vandermolen said – and another move probably would mean looking in Ogden, another 20 minutes away from work.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Elana Vandermolen pets her cat Sophie as she sits on her porch in Fruit Heights on Friday, July 25, 2025.
In today’s housing market, it’s clear some households commute long distances either out of necessity or preference, said economist Jim Wood.
Wood, who studies housing and related topics at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, said some people would rather have money to spend elsewhere than pay a premium to live closer to work.
The Salt Lake Tribune talked with ten Utahns, including Vandermolen, about their commute and heard from dozens more through an online survey.
Most said housing costs affected their decision about where to live.
Housing prices jump more than 25%
Utah once was in the middle of the road compared to other states, ranking as the 20th most expensive in 1970, according to a report Wood authored on the state’s housing market.
In the ‘70s, Wood — who specializes in housing, construction, real estate, development and economic research — was a graduate student at the University of Utah, and his wife was a teacher. They made about $700 a month and had little to no savings, he said, but were still able to secure a loan to buy ⅓ of an acre about two miles up Emigration Canyon, about a 10-minute commute to the university, for $5,000.
The state’s housing market has changed dramatically in the decades since.
Utah is now tied with Idaho and Rhode Island for the seventh most expensive market in the nation, with a median listing price of $599,450, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. That’s behind Montana and just ahead of Colorado.
Wood said the lot he and his wife once bought would be $250,000 today.
“A graduate student trying to finance it is laughable,” he said. “And that’s the tragedy of our situation.”
That considerable growth in housing costs didn’t happen evenly, Wood said. The 1980s only brought about a 20% increase in housing prices, he said, but there’s been a “pattern of accelerating prices” except for during The Great Recession since the 1990s.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Housing under construction at Firefly, a new subdivision in Eagle Mountain, on Friday, May 2, 2025.
They jumped more than the entirety of the ‘80s in 2021 alone, when the median sales price jumped from $355,000 to $446,000 – a 25.6% increase.
Increasing housing costs have pushed construction into the suburbs.
Wood said there has been increased residential construction in Box Elder, Juab and Tooele counties in recent years.
The three counties are adjacent to the heart of the Wasatch Front, he said, but housing prices there are “considerably lower.”
In Grantsville – a city of about 15,000 in Tooele County – someone looking to buy a home can probably find one for “about ⅔ the cost of what it would be in Salt Lake County,” Wood said.
Cheaper housing but a longer commute
Leigh Ann Bauman left Salt Lake County to buy when she and her husband were ready to start a family. They needed to find a newer, more reliable home to upgrade from their 900-square-foot house in West Valley City but couldn’t find anything in their budget.
Instead, they bought a newly built home in Tooele City just before welcoming their first child in September 2022.
The trade-off, however, has been the commute.
On a good day, Bauman’s drive into Salt Lake City is about 50 minutes. With traffic, it can stretch to as long as two and a half hours, she said.
Some days, Bauman weighs their decision to live in Tooele.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Leigh Ann Bauman, a Tooele resident who commutes to Salt Lake City for work 3-4 times a week, is pictured on Tuesday, July 29, 2025.
“I wish, in deciding where we were going to move, we kind of focused a little more on schools and childcare and just things to do,” Bauman said, adding that she and her husband frequently travel to Salt Lake County for leisure as well as work.
Bauman isn’t alone. Lots of folks travel an hour or more to work, especially Utahns who live in counties with lower housing prices.
As of April, the median sales price for a home in Utah was $500,000, according to data from the Utah Association of Realtors. That varied from less than $300,000 in Carbon and Piute counties to more than $1 million in Summit and Wasatch counties.
The variation generally correlates with the percentage of workers commuting at least an hour to work. That was 4.7% statewide, but ranged from 3.1% in Iron County to 12.4% in Tooele and Wasatch counties.
For example, of 21 counties with median sales prices lower than the state overall, 12 had higher-than-average percentages of workers with a commute of at least an hour.
That includes the three counties Wood said have seen more residential construction:
The data illustrate people’s willingness to commute further to pay less for housing, a sentiment backed up by the results of a nonscientific poll by The Salt Lake Tribune.
That survey had 120 respondents, and 92 of them said they considered housing costs when deciding where to live compared to where they work – even if that means a longer commute.
But quality of life is a balance between housing affordability, commute time, willingness to live in a city and other factors, people told The Tribune.
A trade-off for an affordable home
Jan Triplett has the option of closer hospitals but is willing to drive more than an hour and a half to do a job she loves at Primary Children’s Hospital while living in Cache County, where her three boys grew up and where they “always come back to.”
She and her husband purchased their 3,200-square-foot rambler on a cul-de-sac in Providence in 2003, just before housing prices in Cache County began to surge, Triplett said.
Today, her house is worth roughly four times what they paid for it, she said.
“Up here, it’s not so affordable,” Triplett said. “I mean, we lucked out in 2003 because we bought this for less than what we sold our West Jordan house for.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Jan Triplett, at Primary Children’s Medical Center on Wednesday, July 23, 2025.
Nearby homes now sell for between $1 million and $2 million, she said
Lisa and Nicholas White are also far from a big city. She works from home, but he commutes more than an hour from Fairview in Sanpete County to Provo.
They moved to the little town they didn’t previously know existed during the pandemic after being priced out of “pretty much all of Utah County.” The move also gave their “very loud, very active kids” space and made it so they could garden.
Smaller class sizes, unlike the overcrowding they experienced in Utah County, and a lower crime rate are bonuses from the move, Lisa White said.
“It’s super quiet here,” she said. “People leave their doors unlocked, cars unlocked. Nothing happens here.”
Vandermolen, who drives from Davis County to Primary Children’s Hospital, also has come to like the suburbs.
“It would probably take a lot to convince me to move right back into the city, but sometimes it would be more convenient,” Vandermolen said.
She could find a closer job – they live eight minutes away from Intermountain Health Layton Hospital – but her work is so specialized that it probably would mean a pay cut and an inequivalent position.
Weekdays away, weekends at home
Even though Spencer Kohler’s education job in Provo pays significantly more than one in southern Utah, he and his wife can’t afford to move closer despite a dual income of six figures.
He drives from Parowan in Iron County to stay with his mother in Midway during the week, then travels home on the weekends to be with his wife and four children for the weekend.
Kohler said while the routine has been taxing, the commute is still more affordable than paying the high cost of housing closer to work, and moving would uproot his children from the schools and the home they know and love.
He said he wishes more companies were open to remote or hybrid work to create more job opportunities for rural Utahns.
“Even if companies did…where it was three days on campus and two days off, that would even help out significantly,” he said.
The cost of gas would have been a deterrent for Paul Fisher when he took his current job near the airport, even though he initially only had to go in three days a week.
He has an electric vehicle that he drives for the 50 minutes to an hour it takes to commute from Pleasant Grove. He said it saves him at least seven times his potential travel costs.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Paul Fisher at a park near his work says he commutes about 50 minutes from his home in Pleasant Grove to work near the airport, is pictured onTuesday, July 29, 2025.
Fisher did look at homes in Salt Lake County at one point while working for a company in West Valley City, but they ultimately stayed in Utah County.
“If I were younger, I would definitely be considering either looking for another job or moving closer,” he said.
But he’s expecting to retire soon, and his kids, who live with him, are going or will go to Utah Valley University in nearby Orem.
Slowed population growth could help
Wood indicated there could be some relief coming for prospective homebuyers as the market catches its breath and the state enacts programs to help people buy homes and make it easier for developers to build.
“We’re still in the shadow or the wake of COVID-19,” he said, and though housing prices boomed at the start of the pandemic, they “haven’t moved much since.”
High rates of growth and employment put pressure on Utah’s housing market, he said, driving up prices. Idaho, Nevada and Florida also had a lot of population and economic growth correlated with some of the highest percent changes in housing prices between 2010 and 2024.
But Utah has started to see a slowdown in growth, he said, and there’s a chance that could lead prices to come down or level out.
“It’s needed because we’ve had a real run-up,” he said.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Interstate 15, in the area of 14800 South in Draper, is pictured on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.
Wood wasn’t sure how that could affect commuting – the institute’s researchers haven’t studied the direct relationship between housing costs and commute times, especially in the age of remote and hybrid work.
In the current market, though, it’s difficult for many to find housing despite the availability of downpayment assistance and a push to build more starter homes.
“It would be nice to think everybody could make a good living and live less than 30 minutes away from where they work, but I don’t know how people can pull that off these days,” Vandermolen said.
Megan Banta is The Salt Lake Tribune’s data enterprise reporter, a philanthropically supported position. The Tribune retains control over all editorial decisions.
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