Do you want to be part of the first generation in American history to leave the country worse off for your children and grandchildren? It’s a question Utah Gov. Spencer Cox says he asks himself often.
“Right now, the answer appears to be ‘yes’ across much of the United States,” Cox said Wednesday morning during the second day of his workshop with the Western Governors Association, focused on the housing crisis afflicting the West.
During his first term as governor, Cox announced a $150 million budget to create 35,000 new starter homes by 2028 because “that’s where the gap has happened over the past 20 years,” he said. “It’s the one thing we stopped building.”
Cox’s team shared two videos by Demand More Supply, an initiative managed by Utah Workforce Housing Advocacy. In one of the short clips, children act out how Utahns are aware that a supply-and-demand issue is occurring in their state but don’t want to deal with the mess or noise that comes with new construction in their neighborhood. One of the major downsides to this is communities will continue to lose essential workers if housing remains limited and unaffordable.
Demand More Supply shared projected estimates that Utah will be short 153,000 homes through 2030, with home prices currently up 300%.
A foundation of the American dream is owning property, Cox said to the room filled with state lawmakers, government workers, housing professionals and so on. The crisis has become so severe that more than half of Americans cannot afford the national average price of a home. “In such a polarized country right now, this is one of the areas where there’s true bipartisanship happening,” Cox said, adding that it’s unclear in discussions with other governors which ones are Republican and which ones are Democrats “because we’re all just trying to figure this out.”
Cox and other state leaders are also trying to remedy the supply issue by developing federal land into housing.
“The federal government owns about 70% of Utah,” Cox said. “We are looking at the state inventory of lands right now where we have property and could use that.”
He said the state needs smaller lot sizes, and federal land would be the place to build. “I’m pretty sure that we’re going to see a bill this year in the legislature here to help us with some of those state public plans to allow for that very thing to happen here.”
Last year, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee introduced the Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter (HOUSES) Act, which would convert Bureau of Land Management land into housing parcels.
Housing: Utah’s No. 1 financial concern
Prior to Cox’s reelection, The Utah Foundation released a report in October after asking Utahns what top two issues they wanted the incoming Governor to prioritize. The top answer was housing, followed by politicians listening to voter concerns.
An even more recent Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll, conducted by HarrisX, asked registered Utah voters if they would say that their personal financial situation is improving, getting worse or staying the same:
- Improving: 20%.
- Getting worse: 42%
- Staying the same: 37%.
- No opinion: 1%.
One in four Americans fear they will never own property. A report this summer by Clever Real Estate found that 63% of Generation Z alone worry that homeownership isn’t in their future.
Steve Waldrip, Utah’s senior advisor for housing strategy, told the Deseret News that older generations broke the “social contract” with younger generations by handing them the financial consequences of the current housing market.
“We told you growing up, ‘Hey, if you do the right thing, get the grades, then you’ll get a job and then get to go buy a home,’” he said. “That’s what we all got to do.”
Waldrip compared the disservice to how black homeowners were treated in the mid-to-late 20th century.
“We froze black homeowners out of the equation. They had 25% home ownership for most of the 1900s and now they have one of the largest participations in our welfare programs because they couldn’t build generational wealth.”
“Housing is no longer a policy issue. It’s become a moral issue. When we look at our values, as Utahns, as Americans, our values align with how we talk about this ability for people to pursue happiness, this social contract that we have with our kids and our grandkids that if you do these things, then you get the American dream. And we have a generation coming up right now that is going, ‘I’ve done all these things, and I’m looking at the future and I don’t see the dream,’ and that’s a moral hazard for our country,” he said Wednesday.