For more than two decades, local advocates of lower income affordable housing have offered legitimate proposals to Salt Lake City mayors and City Councils to no avail. With great determination, we try here once again.
We are concerned the Affordable Housing Overlay and the rezoning proposals therein now before the City Council will be insufficient. It will produce few if any affordable units if implemented as is.
Unless and until the following issues and concerns are addressed by policy-makers, this proposal is a prescription for further gentrification in our city neighborhoods already engulfed in an affordability crisis.
There is no mandate and inadequate incentives for developers to include rent-restricted units in developments that could occur on the 5,000 or more parcels identified by the city in its pending proposal. Simply increasing housing supply by building new units has not and will not result in more affordable units in the near or long term. In the city literally thousands of apartments have been built during the past two mayoral administrations and hardly any of them are affordable to the lower income.
There is no plan or ability in place to mitigate the loss of existing housing, especially naturally occurring affordable housing units, as there are in other cities that have adopted similar up or re-zoning policies (e.g. Minneapolis). For starters, the city should not adopt these policies without first adopting a workable housing loss mitigation ordinance.
There is no data or projections in the proposal to indicate how many units on the parcels identified in the plan would be lost, or how many of those are considered naturally occurring affordable housing or “NOAH.” There are no estimates of how many new units could be constructed on these parcels, nor any guess as to how many would be rentals or homeownership units or their price range.
These proposals (overlay, up-zone) are not part of the city’s adopted Moderate Income Housing Plan. They do not appear to be part of the broader city zoning re-write that Mayor Erin Mendenhall, starting in her time as a council member, envisioned publicly but has not yet produced.
There is no specific focus on Transit Oriented Development in these proposals, nor any explanation of how this might fit.
We understand the intent to create more housing opportunities in areas of the city providing better economic opportunities. Yet we are skeptical that creating new market-rate units in these higher opportunity neighborhoods will produce the desired outcome without a strong emphasis on inclusion and affordability.
We strongly suggest a different tack to achieve greater supply and affordability city-wide:
Appropriation of city funds and guarantees of any city subsidies to write down the rents in any of the units to be built or redeveloped.
Adoption of mitigation and inclusionary housing ordinances.
Dedication and write-down of city-owned parcels for affordable and permanent supported housing projects.
In addition, staunchly challenging and changing the dilatory statutory and budgetary barriers the Utah Legislature has erected preventing the city from effectively addressing its affordable housing crisis is essential.
Finally, we urge postponing any action on the current draft overlay proposal until a more comprehensive strategy that includes the above suggestions and critiques can be constructed.
As noted above, we have been dealing with these concerns for many years, getting it right this time is worth more work.
Tim Funk
Timothy J. Funk is a housing advocate at the Crossroads Urban Center in Salt Lake City.