Housing in Utah has become like a Ding Dongs in the first-grade lunchroom, Steve Waldrip said.
The chocolate cake went from 22 cents in the store to “gold” in the school cafeteria because of scarcity, said Waldrip, who serves as Gov. Spencer Cox’s senior adviser for housing strategy and innovation.
During a recent event previewing proposed housing legislation, Waldrip described his job as helping the state navigate growth and provide housing “so that our kids and grandkids have an option to achieve the American Dream” of owning a home.
But that’s becoming increasingly difficult in today’s environment, he said, where a housing shortage of about 40,000 units is driving an affordability crisis worsened by high demand, interest rates, tariffs and other factors.
“I firmly believe that if you’re a Utah kid, and you’re born in Utah, and you’re raised in Utah and you’re educated in Utah, you should have the option to stay in Utah, build a family, build a career,” said Rep. Cal Roberts, a Republican from Draper who serves as the co-chair of the Utah Commission on Housing Affordability. “And that is becoming increasingly harder.”
Roberts and other lawmakers in both chambers of the Utah Legislature are proposing a host of bills to address the issue from multiple angles.
Addressing infrastructure needs
A bill that’s already made it through an interim committee focuses on one particular aspect of Utah’s housing crisis – streamlining the state’s response through a complete reorganization of responsibility for dozens of housing programs.
The current fragmentation of more than 40 programs creates a “labyrinth” and makes it “really difficult for policymakers to get their arms around what exactly is happening in the housing space,” Roberts said.
HB68, sponsored by Roberts, would create the Division of Housing within the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity and move most housing programs under its purview.
Homelessness and federal programs will remain under the purview of the Utah Department of Workforce Services, lawmakers said during the interim session.
Roberts also looks to address what he called a “choke point” in getting more housing supply into the market – infrastructure.
He and others are looking at how the state can provide money that otherwise is going unused to facilitate building roads, sewer and other needed infrastructure for housing. Doing that can unlock thousands of units that are in planning and development but haven’t yet been built, he said.
Helping tenants and owners
Other bills related to housing seek to:
Several other proposals, including a handful from South Jordan Republican Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, who co-chairs the Utah Commission on Housing Affordability, were still being developed ahead of the session.
Legislative leaders said Tuesday that those bills will focus on everything from optimizing the use of state-owned land that, they say, is prime for development to changing regulations to disincentivizing large companies from owning large swaths of properties.
‘A local issue’
Failing to address the housing crisis is the “fastest way to ruin the state,” Waldrip said, because it will lead to replacing “the kids and grandkids we have raised here with people from somewhere else with cash” and taking over the state’s housing.
If families can’t build a life and wealth in Utah now, said Rep. Candice Pierucci, a Republican who grew up and lives in Herriman, the state “will be in a world of hurt when they go into retirement and they’re still paying rent.”
Kristin Andrus, head of the Andrus Family Foundation and a philanthropist through other efforts like Gathering for Impact and SisterGoods, is a mom of six and hears from other mothers through her social media network.
Those include grandmothers who can’t see their grandchildren because their children can’t live within 45 minutes of them, despite a dual income, and newlyweds who both work but aren’t sure they can afford to stay in Utah, said Andrus, who’s married to Traeger Grills CEO Jeremy Andrus.
She asked Utahns to show up in person and online to “demand more supply,” echoing a new campaign from Utah Workforce Housing Advocacy.
“We cannot keep saying, ‘Not in my neighborhood, not right over there,’ and then grieve when our kids and grandkids cannot live near us,” Andrus said.