How Utah is working toward increasing more affordable housing

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — A new website will track Gov. Spencer Cox’s goal to create affordable housing in Utah — he’s aiming to build 35,000 starter homes in Utah over the next four years. However, realtors and the governor’s housing advisor have said that there is still quite a way to go before that point.

“So far, in the last year, we’ve built about 4,600 starter homes that would qualify under that definition… there’s a long way to go, but I think we’re definitely on the right track for the time being,” Dejan Eskic with the Salt Lake Board of Realtors told ABC4.com.

The Board of Realtors has said that, with high interest rates, many people are priced out of the housing market and the existing supply is still recovering.

“The prices are up… We’ll probably have slight, modest growth this year just because we’re hitting that affordability ceiling,” Eskic said.

Eskic said a single-family home in Salt Lake County is about $618,000, with about $180,000 needed to qualify for a mortgage. As for townhomes and condos, Eskic said they average about $450,000 to $475,000.

The governor’s Senior Advisor for Housing Strategy, Steve Waldrip, told ABC4.com that the plan is to drive that price down even further.

“We want to make sure we are not overly aggressive in those price points, but that we’re creating opportunities for affordability,” Waldrip said. “Our goal, really, is to drive that price down — if we can get that to $350,000, that’s where we would like to see it.”

Recent reports suggest that middle-class salaries in Utah range from $59,439 to $178,336. Waldrip said only 25 percent of the state’s population can afford a home in the $450,000 price range.

“What we’re seeing now is that, in order to get home ownership, you’re gonna have to have two working partners contributing both to that,” Waldrip said. “It makes it really difficult for single parents who are raising kids to be able to afford to get into home ownership… those are some of the barriers we are trying to attack.”

According to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, the living wage for a single adult with no children in Salt Lake City is an hourly rate of $24.16 — and a single adult with one child would need to make $41.47 an hour.

That means a living wage in Utah can range from about $45,000 per year (for one adult with zero children) to more than $124,000 per year (for one adult with three children). The minimum wage in Utah has remained at the federal $7.25 an hour since 2009.

Waldrip continued on to say that the government is stepping in.

“This is not going to be solved by government funding — we can’t tax and spend our way out of this issue,” Waldrip said. “The only way this works is if the private markets can make sufficient return on their investment to be willing to commit the investment to build these homes.”

The website tracking the governor’s housing goal is expected to be launched soon. Salt Lake City has other housing resources available online, including a Housing Stability Dashboard and the recently released Affordable Housing Construction and Preservation Dashboard.

Addy Bink contributed to this report.