Advocacy in Action
High Growth Utah Communities Push for Federal Housing Support
While the housing crisis continues to impact the entire country, its challenges manifest in ways unique to each community. That's why planning advocates like Tippe Morlan, AICP, the president of the APA Utah Chapter, are bringing their stories to Congress in the hope of securing federal action that provides planners with resources for local reforms that communities in Central and Northern Utah need to increase housing supply.
Tippe Morlan, AICP, met with her congressional representatives on Capitol Hill to discuss Utah's housing challenges and the need for federal support.
From the Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing (PRO Housing) grant program, to the APA-endorsed Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) Act, bipartisan support for housing solutions is steadily growing. Planners are weighing in to help Congress shape current and future legislation, data, funding, and other tools that planners need to advance on-the-ground housing reforms.
APA's Brenna Donegan sat down with planning advocate Tippe Morlan, AICP, to discuss what housing challenges she sees in the Utah communities she serves, and what she hopes her Congressional representatives take away from her story.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
BRENNA DONEGAN: How would you describe the state of housing in Salt Lake County and Utah County right now?
TIPPE MORLAN, AICP: Rapidly growing. It's one of the top high-growth areas in the country. We have a lot of births and a lot of people coming in from out of state, a lot of people returning that grew up in Utah and want to come back to live close to family. There are a lot of factors that are contributing to our growth rate. We're trying our best to keep up.
For the last three years, Utah has led the country in housing starts, but we are still behind 28,000 units per year.
We will need to build 28,000 housing units per year in order to keep up and try to fill the gap for housing in our state. And that's not including any potential future growth that might happen.
A lot of people think of it in the mindset of, 'Okay, we're going to build off of what's existing.' And when you're growing as fast as we are in certain parts of Utah, we want to try to get ahead of the growth. It's really difficult to try to meet the needs of the people that live there today or in 5, 10 [years], even one year.
DONEGAN: How does that projected growth affect the way you plan for transit in addition to housing?
MORLAN: Development is happening so fast now that if we don't try to have some foresight into where potential transit corridors or even roadway corridors are going to be — and we're waiting for other entities and other statewide or regional entities to try to collaborate — sometimes that's not enough.
For example, we're working to try to come up with ideas to bring transit to the highest-growing areas of the west side of both Salt Lake and Utah counties. At buildout in about 20 years, we'll have over 1 million people between the six communities in that area alone. We need transit to support all those people. As is, it wouldn't meet the needs of people today, much less in 10 years.
The way that myself and my fellow local government planners in this region are trying to get resources from entities above us is saying, 'Hey, we're willing to do the work. Tell us where we can rezone properties. Tell us where we can preserve, or purchase land as it develops, or require developers to save.'
In communities like Salt Lake County, planners are thinking comprehensively about how housing and transit can support high population growth. PC: Getty Images-georgeclerk
DONEGAN: Do planners have the support you need to enact that foresight in the communities you serve?
MORLAN: Some of these cities growing super-fast only have two or three — or even one planner. When I started five years ago, we had a population of 32,000 people three planners, and a planning director. Now, five years later, we have a population close to 70,000, and we have seven planners just trying to keep up with growth.
When I was in Park City, they had a separate staff just for housing, and they still were struggling to keep up with the workload for new affordable, attainable housing.
My current position is a new one where I'm trying to manage relationships with neighboring cities and regional entities on a longer-term scale. But I still have the same projects I've had as a current planner because we don't have enough resources to keep up with the rate of applications and units that are coming through. And that doesn't mean that they're going to have a shovel in the ground as soon as that approval is given.
We're doing the best we can to try to get ahead of the projects that people want to do in our city. But we're barely scratching the surface in terms of how to provide housing for our populations and citizens that we work for.
DONEGAN: Are there any reforms that are having positive outcomes?
MORLAN: We're making small strides. As of the last two and a half, three years, the state legislature has mandated that most cities report their moderate-income housing policies to the state. We had to adopt a moderate-income housing plan with an action plan to our general plans.
The state issued certain goals. If you wanted to qualify for state transportation funding, then you had to do a certain amount. So they tied it to carrots and sticks. I don't know if that's seeing tangible results yet, but it's getting cities talking.
We have also passed the statewide requirement to allow internal accessory dwelling units and IADUs. These are things that we're starting to track and keep numbers and data and hard evidence so that we can prove how our processes affect housing starts, whether approvals lead to units being built, and in what timeline.
It's finally starting to get all the cities and governments in Utah on the same page with how we look at housing, which is the only logical foundation for trying to take the next step to say, 'This is hard evidence as to what is working and what isn't working, and what increases the price of housing versus doesn't.'
DONEGAN: How has APA Utah been involved in these reforms?
MORLAN: APA Utah has tried to be very involved with helping set up a forum for these conversations. We work with our League of Cities and Towns. We work with the State Housing Department, trying to collaborate on having these discussions at a city staff level to say, 'How do we come together and have the same definitions to start from?'
For instance, we had to report on entitled units, but every single city had a different definition of what an entitled unit was.
Trying to come up with those definitions has been challenging in Utah, specifically because we have such a variety of communities, from these high-growth suburban-urban areas that were rural two years ago. These communities are changing quite quickly. We have a lot of communities that are at build-out. They've never had development agreements before. The way that they track their numbers is completely different than a brand-new city that is growing at a rate of 6 to 20 percent a year. So we're asking the questions, and that's exciting to see.
DONEGAN: How could federal support help expand Utah planners' capacity to increase housing supply?
MORLAN: Trying to keep up with the growth, doing what we can on a city and regional and state level -it's not enough. We're doing the best we can, and we're still short 28,000 housing units a year, regardless of the debate between multifamily, single-family, attached product, or not.
Bipartisan federal support that is very public and very vocal and accessible for people to understand provides more support for the state and provides more support for the city. That is one more voice in a position of power saying, 'Reform is the way that we can provide the basic needs for the people that live with us and near us and among us.' And in Utah, specifically, that is our family. Utah has huge, huge families. In the county I work in, Utah County, the average population for most cities is 50 percent under 18 years old.
So we're planning for these children and teenagers to grow up and live here. Whether they're living with their parents and need basement apartments, or they go to college and decide they want to stay here because Utah is growing, and we have more amenities and whatever they want in their lives. They love it here. We need to have housing for them.
DONEGAN: When you met with your Congressional representatives recently, what was the main takeaway you wanted them to know?
MORLAN: Housing is a universal problem, and we need more voices to lift this problem and make it more visible and more acceptable to provide solutions to housing issues.
It is exciting to see that people are interested and that it has become a bipartisan issue. Everybody recognizes and understands that this is a problem, and we're trying to work together to make solutions.
Housing Supply Accelerator Playbook
Local Reforms that work for your community
Get tips on how to expedite your permitting process, expand ADU access, and other reforms that can help your community increase housing options in the Housing Supply Accelerator Playbook.
Top image: Communities like Provo, Utah are facing housing challenges to support high growth. PC: Getty images - DenisTangneyJr