Can having designers and architects involved earlier in the housing and community development process help combat Utah’s housing crisis? Some experts think that just may be the key to ensuring Utahns have an affordable place to call home.

During a Thursday morning panel titled “Design Solutions to Housing Affordability in Utah” at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, those experts also stressed the importance of smaller homes, walkability and density as tools to help with Utah’s housing crisis.

“We need to facilitate designers to come in with the elected officials, who are ultimately going to be approving this far, far earlier than we are doing,” said Steve Waldrip, a senior adviser for housing strategy and innovation with the Utah governor’s office.

Home prices in Utah have skyrocketed in recent years and are among the most expensive in the country. But while officials talk a lot about policy and the market, panelists said, there isn’t enough conversation about design, and how it can help improve affordability.

That’s especially true for housing density, they said, though there’s been pushback to dense and tall multi-family buildings in existing neighborhoods through NIMBYism — short for “not in my backyard.”

Officials need to learn to speak up when NIMBY pushback floods planning commission and city council meetings, Waldrip said.

Top 10 most expensive housing market

More than 80% of all Utah households and about 90% of renters are priced out of new homes, said Moira Dillow, a housing, construction and real estate analyst at the Gardner Institute.

That’s a 25% increase from 2021, Dillow said.

Utah’s median home listing price started spiking in 2020, increasing from less than $400,000 in late 2019 to more than $500,000 by the end of 2020, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Prices peaked at around $640,000 in the summer of 2022 and have come down since, but they haven’t been below $500,000 since October 2020.

As of Sept. 1, 2024, Utah’s median home listing price was $599,900, according to Federal Reserve data.

That’s among the most expensive in the nation.

Six states — New York and Massachusetts in the northeast and Montana, Washington, California and Hawaii in the west — had higher median listing prices, though Utah was close to Montana and Washington in price.

Part of the issue is home size, Dillow said.

‘Almost too late’ once designing starts

The average home size in Utah is around 3,000 square feet, she said, and it’s 4,000 if you just look at the past decade.

Yet the increasing home size directly contrasts with shrinking household sizes, she said, meaning “our supply and demand is not matching what the housing market needs.”

Panelists said that’s partially because of historic tendencies and partially because of local policies.

“We’ve designed and built homes the same way for a lot of years, a lot of decades,” Waldrip said, pointing to contracting firms that often are passed down between generations.

The design framework is also part of it, said Jason Wheeler, executive director of ASSIST Inc. Community Design Center, a Salt Lake City-based nonprofit focused on developing design alternatives for public improvements in underserved communities.

Local jurisdictions set requirements for setbacks, allowance for density and minimum parking numbers, he said, that limit what can go on a lot.

By the time design starts, he said, “it’s almost too late” to be creative and make housing units more affordable.

“We need to have a framework in place that will allow us to exercise design solutions … and through design, lower the price of housing,” Wheeler said.

He pointed to Daybreak, a neighborhood south of Salt Lake City, as an example of where master planning can help address density and bring down the cost of housing.

Rural Utah could use similar communities, but it’s hard to get developers interested, said Epicenter Executive Director Maria Sykes.

Epicenter, a Green River-based nonprofit, is building Canal Commons, a neighborhood along the canal in Green River that will have smaller, affordable homes.

‘Punch back’ against NIMBY rhetoric

When density — and sometimes affordability — is on the table, neighbors often show up in droves to oppose it, panelists said.

“I think density is a four-letter word, no matter how you spell it, in Utah and a lot of communities,” Waldrip, with the governor’s office, said. “Fear around the loss of value is really driving a lot of these discussions.”

That’s despite data showing different outcomes, he said, and proximity to density actually increasing property values.

It’s all about perception, Wheeler said. He had the same negative perceptions growing up in Hyde Park, he said, specifically about a multi-family building in North Logan just south of his home city full of subdivisions.

There’s irony in the negative opinions, Wheeler said, because people love to visit Europe and its dense cities. “We could have that here, we really could have that kind of life here if we were willing to embrace it from a design standpoint.”

There’s a similar but different problem in rural Utah, Sykes said.

People there react negatively to low-income housing, she said, and then it’s important to increase the understanding that “low-income housing is a lot of us in our town,” and that housing would be for workers who already live there.

Local officials need to learn to “punch back” against NIMBY rhetoric, Waldrip said.

Developers and other housing experts can help elected officials deal with “Kens and Karens talking about children dying and an increase in crime and traffic up the wazoo” in public hearings, he said, and give them the ammunition to push back against false statements.

This story is part of The Salt Lake Tribune’s ongoing commitment to identify solutions to Utah’s biggest challenges.

Megan Banta is The Salt Lake Tribune’s data enterprise reporter, a philanthropically supported position. The Tribune retains control over all editorial decisions.