From the eleventh floor of a former office building, there are now sweeping views of the Wasatch Front and the Salt Lake valley from living rooms, bedrooms and balconies.
Arbor 515 sits at the eastern edge of downtown and, once fully converted, will boast 96 housing units ranging from studios to four-bedroom apartments, many of which will serve moderate and low-income families. The building also houses a Montessori school, a gym, a co-working space and other amenities.
It also offers a unique opportunity for people to break the cycle of poverty by distributing most of what would have been the developer’s cash flow from a property to residents through a Tenant Wealth Initiative.
And a national task force, Gov. Spencer Cox said, is using it as “an example to everyone across the country of the good that can happen when the nonprofit sphere, the public sphere and the private sphere all come together, looking for opportunities to do big things and to change the narrative.”
“Hopefully, we can start to scale in a way that makes a dent,” Cox said in front of fellow members of the National Housing Crisis Task Force – a group he cochairs along with the mayors of Cleveland and Atlanta.
The group toured the partially renovated 1980s building, of which eight floors are complete. While the 14-story former office building’s insides are undergoing renovation, its brick and steel exterior remains intact.
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) 515 Tower, an office converted into affordable housing in Salt Lake City, Thursday, Oct. 30, 2025.
There were challenges to “taking a building that never wanted to be housing and making it housing,” said Chris Parker, co-director of Utah’s Perpetual Housing Fund.
The Perpetual Housing Fund, along with the Rocky Mountain Homes Fund, bought the property in 2023, and Arbor 515 is the fund’s inaugural project.
Most of the challenges were architectural, Parker said, and there was a lot of creativity with layouts. The three-bedroom, two-bathroom model unit featured lots of angles and creative spacing.
There also were advantages to working with an existing building, Parker said, including a faster project than starting from the ground up and earlier move-in times because they could deliver units by floor instead of in one big chunk.
“We had people living in this building very quickly after we started renovating it,” Parker said.
Megan Banta is The Salt Lake Tribune’s data enterprise reporter, a philanthropically supported position. The Tribune retains control over all editorial decisions.