State and city leaders know the federal cavalry isn’t coming and have built a road map to help elected leaders implement housing solutions in their communities.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox serves as a co-chair of the task force that built the road map and said the state has pulled several levers in an effort to make housing more affordable.
And while the governor said during a webinar Tuesday that Beehive State officials “still haven’t made the kind of dent that we’re hoping for,” one of those levers is featured in the National Housing Crisis Task Force’s State and Local Housing Action Plan.
With federal policy in “near stasis for decades,” as the plan’s executive summary says, states and communities have started coming up with their own solutions. Now, they hope to share ones that are working.
“As any mayor or governor will tell you, we love stealing each other’s ideas,” said Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb, one of Cox’s fellow co-chairs.
The plan aims to provide elected officials with tools to implement innovative solutions, including the Utah Homes Investment Program, to address the growing housing crisis – something they’re likely to inherit more responsibility for as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to cut and restructure federal housing programs.
Housing is one of the biggest issues facing state and local governments today.
“You can’t sit with a mayor or a governor or anyone who works nearby them without talking about housing these days,” said Mary Ellen Wiederwohl, CEO of Accelerator for America.
The nonprofit, which is dedicated to finding and developing solutions to economic insecurity and sharing them with cities, helps staff and advises the national task force.
It’s also part of helping communities implement the 15 ideas in the plan that Wiederwohl described as “tried and tested.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Gov. Spencer Cox convenes a news event at the governor’s mansion where he met with mayors and local government officials from around the state for a housing summit titled “Built Here,” to focus on building 35,000 new starter homes in the state, Thursday, May 29, 2025.
The guide highlights recent innovations by state and local officials that the task force says communities could “implement now without any federal support” to improve the housing crisis.
“We think much of what they’re doing is worth diffusing and scaling across the country”, said Benjamin Preis, who helped found the national task force.
Choices ‘got us into this,’ and can ‘get us out’
Cox is one of the task force’s four co-chairs and said during Tuesday’s webinar that the housing crisis is universal but not unsolvable.
“There were choices we made that got us into this, and there are choices we can make to get us out of it,” he said.
Utah has made some of those choices, he said, including the starter home program that repurposed $300 million in state funds to provide low-interest loans to developers willing to produce homes and condominiums for sale at a price point below $450,000.
And it’s looking at other solutions, like increasing small lot density for new developments and infill.
Utah also has a problem with “papered” lots, Cox said. Those are parcels of land that have received the necessary legal and administrative approvals for development but have not yet been physically developed.
The biggest issue, Cox said, is land that’s seemingly available for housing but has no infrastructure.
“We’re working hard to figure out, especially on regionally significant projects, [if we could] use public funding to get the infrastructure there that then allows the developers to do their thing,” he said.
Five areas for housing solutions
Infrastructure is key to several of the solutions highlighted in the plan.
Those solutions cover five segments of the housing ecosystem – land, capital, construction, regulation and policy and governance.
Those five segments are key, said Preis, who now advises the task force, because development requires available land and financing to start the construction process, all in a regulatory environment set up by the government.
The solutions include:
‘Well done is better than well said’
There are barriers to implementing the solutions, panelists on the webinar said, including backlash.
Though there’s “much less” NIMBYism – short for not in my backyard – sentiment around starter homes, Cox said, there is still backlash. Most of that, he said, is based on “false choices” like growth versus quality of life.
Density has nothing to do with quality of life, Cox said, unless the planning process isn’t smart and doesn’t account for things like infrastructure needs.
Communities need to get around that backlash and other challenges and act, Bibb said.
“Well done is better than well said,” Bibb said, quoting his late grandmother – a sentiment Cox agreed with.
Bibb encouraged officials to adopt that mentality as the task force works with communities to implement the solutions in the plan at an appropriate scale.
“Washington’s not coming to save us,” he said. “We need to save ourselves.”
Megan Banta is The Salt Lake Tribune’s data enterprise reporter, a philanthropically supported position. The Tribune retains control over all editorial decisions.