The cost of housing is a supply and demand issue. There are some levers local governments can pull to provide more affordable housing, but they should mostly stay out of the way. For example, once a project is approved, obtaining a building permit should not take weeks or months. We need to improve and streamline this process because time is money and adds to the cost of the project.The City Master Plan should be updated to reflect best practices for supporting and building strong communities and maintaining quality of life. The Master Plan is the blueprint of where, what, and how we should move our city forward; we need to reevaluate it often to reflect a vision of how to best support our residents.
I strongly support personal property rights and have always voted against increasing the government’s ability to claim eminent domain.
Miles says:
Hopefully we can get more súrtanle housing for families. Currently work full time, as dues my wife in the schools around here and we’re can’t afford to buy a home and barely afford rent. We’d love to live in the community we work. I know many teachers in the west side commute 30-40 minutes because of how expensive housing is
Marsha Judkins says:
I completely agree. There are some things that Provo could do to increase affordable housing stock. Here are a few ideas–let me know what you think.
1. Allow developers to create more high density apartments within five blocks of BYU. Students want to live close and as they move out of housing that is farther away, it will hopefully free up some of that for families.
2. Better code enforcement of ADUs. I love ADUs–owner occupied homes that have a separate rental unit somewhere on the property. They have a bad name because many homeowners/corporations are not following code on these and they are not owner occupied. If we enforce the current code and make sure they are owner occupied, corporations and people who own these homes but don’t live there will be encouraged to sell, freeing up housing stock. As we enforce this code, residents who are resisting allowing ADUs in their neighborhoods will hopefully see that allowing ADUs will enable families to buy a home–because they will have help with the payment by the rent.
3. Creating public/private partnerships with city/county owned land. The city/county would retain ownership of the land but lease it to developers, who would build starter homes. These homes would be sold for market value minus the cost of the land, which will take out about a third of the price. There would be deed restrictions that the owners could sell for only 3% or so increase in value each year. So if a family lived there four years, they could sell for 12% above the buying price, keeping the cost more affordable for subsequent buyers.
4. Make permitting for construction quicker and easier. It currently takes months and is an arduous, inefficient process. Other cities get permitting done in a day. The longer it takes to get a permit, the more expensive a project is. It also discourage new construction, ADUs, and additions.
I would like to hear your ideas!
Marsha
Julie says:
Thanks for a bit more thorough explanation in response to the previous comment, I always appreciated that you do your best to actually listen to your constituents.
This page, with an essentially hands-off “supply and demand” philosophy of housing has me worried and I don’t think it will earn many people’s support who have ever struggled to pay rent, which is almost all of us. (Pretty sure wealthy homeowners are not the only people in Provo who vote.)
“Supply and demand” as a way for people to control things somewhat, doesn’t work for housing, it’s not possible. People can boycott a product so that (in theory) demand and thus prices go down. But people will always need a place to live, and we do not have power over either side of that supply/demand equation. I can’t boycott all landlords for having too high of prices –because it’s not optional to have a place to live! Does it really make sense for everyone to have higher rent prices because there are a lot more unhoused people than housing? (When demand is high and prices go up for one place or area, ALL landlords raise their prices because they all just have to stay roughly comparable to what’s “typical” for the area, giving cover for them to do it. Which they do, readily. Ya know, kind of like price fixing.)
So when trying to find a place to live, you can either afford the place to live that’s available, try your luck in a different city or with lower quality/ size of housing than you really need, try to get HUD subsidy help requiring being on a waiting list for well over a year and still having to find a place that fits their too-low rent limits, or live with friends/relatives (which is a form of homelessness).
Solutions #2 and #3 above may be helpful for potential homebuyers, I’m not really sure, they seem creative at least. Since that’s not an option for me I’ll not address them.
iHigh density housing seems great, it’s always the go-to solution named. But…. every single time a new apartment complex is built in Provo, which seems pretty dang frequent to me, the rent for them is so high they may as well be all considered “luxury”.
(And many of them are built as student housing with even higher total rent.) So I don’t see how simply building more of that and letting builders do so even faster is going to be helpful at all to average families?
The city needs to do more to control rent prices. Landlords sure as heck aren’t going to do it for us! I’d think for a start, the city needs to set regulations that limit rent prices based on inflation, cost of living, and local wages (and not city-wide-“local”, but neighborhood-local, as we’re all aware that there is a wide wage and wealth disparity in different areas of the city). Even better would be to work with the county as a whole and get all cities on board with it so you don’t have to fear landlords fleeing Provo and the city also dealing with more “tent camps”, because not every homeless person has family or friends they can crash with.
So, what’ve you got that is helpful to struggling renters? If you were actually able to fix not just housing availability but *affordability* for people? You’d be the hero of the decade, Marsha. Pretty sure they’d erect a statue in your honor. In fact, I’d be the first to spearhead that project. 🙂
Marsha Judkins says:
Hi Julie! As you know from legislation that I sponsored, I worry about the percentage of renters’ income going to housing and about the difficulties of planning ahead and stabilizing your future when you don’t know when or how much your next rent increase will be. I also understand that landlords face increasing costs, and need to make a profit. That being said, there are predatory landlords, and there are horrible renters. I would love to fix the affordability issue.
I wish there were an easy, effective answer, but there isn’t. Rent control is not legal in Utah, nor has it been the panacea that it might seem.
Supply is a big part of the equation because prices are directly affected by supply and demand. A city cannot create less demand, so we have to look at more supply, but we do have to be careful about how and where we create more housing. One of the reasons I am running is because I have not seen a vision articulated of how we want Provo to develop. It has been haphazard and doesn’t seem to consider the residents of Provo. We also have a permitting process that discourages landlords from fixing up their rentals.
Something I am looking at is setting up a Housing Office for Provo under the Mayor’s office. It would be responsible for educating renters and landlords about their rights and responsibilities: doing outreach to seniors and others who qualify for property tax relief (both renters and home owners) and help them apply and to answer their questions; helping Provo citizens find housing resources; educating residents on city codes; and finding creative, evidence based solutions in the housing arena that we could implement here.