13 Feb Salt Lake City Affordable Housing Incentives
UPDATE: This was approved by the Planning Commission April 26, 2023 and now goes on to the City Council.
Salt Lake City’s Planning Division is considering zoning amendments to encourage the construction of additional affordable housing. This may include an affordable housing overlay that would modify zoning requirements in some areas of the city.
An affordable housing overlay zoning district would provide incentives to developers who include affordable homes in their projects. An overlay would encourage the production of affordable homes rather than require it. This may be done through zoning code modifications such as: allowing additional height, reduced parking requirements, or through process waivers.
Rather than imposing restrictions, affordable housing incentives aim to present developers with more choices by offering additional benefits to projects that increase the supply of homes that more people can afford. Ideally, the incentives would reduce development costs to allow the construction of more affordable homes.
Here is a link to the Planning Commission Staff Report. Note that the staff report calls for tabling this, rather than approval. Perhaps they want to make more corrections to the proposal before they go for approval, so please feel free to give them your opinion. This is the letter I wrote to the Planning Commission, with community comments. Read the summary of the project. Dig into the details here. If you need to read the proposed zoning code, you can find it here, at the end of the details document. This was on the May 11, 2022 agenda of the Planning Commission. After two hours of public comment, the Planning Commission voted to table the proposal and rewrite it. I removed the comment form from this page temporarily. We should wait to see the next proposal and give them feedback at that time. The proposal as written didn’t have any controls in it, no way of monitoring, or enforcing what is happening. They say it’s because they don’t know how many people it would take, but that is the wrong answer, They have to start somewhere, design those systems and add staff as the workload increases. These would all be approved over the counter, no public input (trying to reduce the amount of time a developer has to spend getting a project approved. And given the cost of materials, we expect that the materials used will be inexpensive and not as durable.
They would like to have it approved in September.
