How can innovative design tackle housing affordability in Utah?

As many as 90% of Utah renters cannot afford the state’s median home price of $549,100, a 25% increase since 2021, according to statistics presented by Moira Dillow, a housing, construction and real estate analyst at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. In the last year, the average home price increased by 3.6%, continuing to price out many Utahns trying to enter the housing market.
“It is important to note that 70% of Utahns own their homes, so they are creating that long-standing equity … (so) a lot of this burden is all around renters, Dillow explained Thursday morning to a crowd of designers, business professionals and students at the institute’s monthly gathering focused on issues facing Utahns.
A key reason housing is becoming less affordable for potential buyers is that the supply is not meeting demand, Dillow said. The average family has gradually decreased over the years and, as of 2023, consists of 3.15 persons. Yet homes are getting larger.
“So there’s a significant correlation between when the house increases in size, your sales price and the end will also increase, and a lot of that goes back to construction,” Dillow added.
Data from the New Home Trends Institute showed that builders across the country are noticing this disconnect and changing their master plans to fit the market’s needs:
“To keep costs down, builders and architects have been continuing to simplify homes — from limiting the number and size of windows to making homes boxier. Now they are taking it a step further and removing parts of the home, like the formal dining room, basement, and even the garage.”
Dillow emphasized that just because a home is smaller to ensure affordability does not mean it has to be cramped or lacking in design.
“We don’t talk about design enough,” Natalie Goshnour, director of the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, said as she introduced the panelists in Thursday’s discussion focusing on new and creative design work in creating affordable housing across the state.
The typical conversations surrounding housing focus on “the cost of labor, the cost of inputs, how we finance,” she added, and less on how actual home design can improve affordability.
Part of the reason is that home builds have been mimicked for decades because contracting is typically a trade passed down to generations, directly affecting design as well, Steve Waldrip, Gov. Spencer Cox’s senior adviser for housing strategy and innovation, explained.
Waldrip said that designers willing to break the mold to create better, more affordable solutions that don’t strip a home of its uniqueness just because it may be smaller is the “key component going forward.”
“There’s this attitude throughout the world, maybe that design and architecture is for the elite, is for the rich,” said Maria Sykes, executive director of Epicenter, a nonprofit in Green River, Emery County, focused on initiatives that combine architecture and design to build up local communities. For rural Utah communities, housing issues are more severe because there is a lack of industry coming in to build new homes, Sykes emphasized.
Canal Commons is a new affordable housing development in Green River, developed by Epicenter. The housing units are designed to address the town’s need for accessible rental and starter homes and emphasize affordability, energy efficiency and accessibility to reduce residents’ costs.
“Design should be for all of us, and we should be able to apply design to everything that we’re doing so that we can benefit society,” Sykes added.
Another reason design is often overlooked in the housing affordability discussion is because designers must follow the framework of local zoning ordinances and design policies.
“So as creative as architects and designers want to be, by the time you get to designing a building or even a community, it’s almost too late, meaning that we need to have a framework in place that will allow us to exercise creativity for design solutions that can improve density and through design, lower the cost of housing,” Jason Wheeler, executive director at Assist Community Design Center, said during the discussion.
Wheeler used Daybreak, the 4,000-acre community in South Jordan, as an example “of what creative master planning and what creative kind of framework can do to help address issues of density and to help bring down the cost of housing.”
“It’s fascinating to me that, as Americans, we love to go to Europe on vacation. We take all of these photos, and we think it is so beautiful, all of these thin, small towns. And then we come home, and we drive to the big box stores because it’s convenient, and we reminisce about how good our vacation was,” Wheeler said. “We could have that here, you know, we really could have that kind of life here if we were just willing to embrace it from a design standpoint.”
To convince local political leaders on how design can help with affordable housing in our community, Waldrip said designers need to be brought into planning much sooner into the conversation than usual.
“Typically, it’s the developer driving that design based on what their pro forma looks like, and so we end up getting it kind of backwards,” he said. “It would be really wise if we could create a framework where designers could come in, work with the staff and elected officials before anything happens, and then use that vision then to drive everything beyond them.”