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When Calvin Roberts started as a legislator last year, he wanted to get involved in housing policy.

The Draper Republican quickly found that challenging, saying it’s “difficult to get your arms around how it’s being administered” because dozens of programs are spread across various state agencies.

Steve Waldrip, who serves as Gov. Spencer Cox’s senior advisor for housing strategy, calls it a “veritable spaghetti bowl of organizational structure.”

That’s a problem because of what Waldrip calls a crisis in “housing for normal people.”

Legislators often don’t know which staffers to consult about housing issues, Roberts said.

Even between state departments, Waldrip said, that leads to disconnects – like a budget-reduction proposal that would have cut $7.5 million in funding for attainable housing grants that the Utah Housing Corporation said are crucial.

That would change under HB68. The bill would move most housing programs under a new division of the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity and direct the governor to appoint a deputy director – to be confirmed by the Senate – for that division.

“Let’s pull out all of the housing policy. Let’s put it into one thing,” Roberts said last week before the House Economic Development and Workforce Services Committee. “Let’s have a director.”

The bill has wide support from organizations involved in housing and local government. It even brought the Utah League of Cities and Towns and the Utah Home Builders Association – two organizations often at odds, as Taz Biesinger with the latter pointed out – into agreement during testimony.

If it is enacted, some programs would remain under the purview of the Utah Housing Corporation, an independent, self-funded government agency that offers mortgage loans to lower-income people and provides resources to developers and builders for affordable-housing projects.

The bill also would eliminate the Commission on Housing Affordability, which Roberts co-chairs.

The department wouldn’t add costs, Waldrip and Roberts said.

“This is not growing government,” Roberts said. “This is not adding heads.”

The “more streamlined org chart” will improve accountability and cut down on redundancies, Roberts said.

Representatives for half a dozen organizations encouraged the committee to support the bill.

The state’s housing affordability crisis didn’t happen overnight and will require statewide leadership to fix, said Lauren Cole with Wasatch Advocates for Livable Communities.

“In order for Utah to remain a place where people can afford to live near jobs, raise families, and age in place, the state must lead,” Cole said. “The bill is a step in this direction.”

Putting housing under “a division with a singular focus” will help address the crisis, said Cate Klundt, with the Utah Association of Realtors.

The bill is now in the hands of the full House after the committee approved it 6-1.