SALT LAKE CITY — It's almost dinner time and the smell of creole seasoning fills the kitchen of Grace Cunningham and Jamal Cureau's rental home.
"Some people in Utah call it bratwurst, but where I'm from in the Deep South of Louisiana we call it fresh sausage," Cureau says as he stirs the dish.
He moved to Utah from Baton Rouge, La., four years ago and was shocked by the high cost of housing. He'd vowed not to pay more than $1,200 in rent, but "I couldn't find a place under $1,200," he says. "So here I am $1,750 a month later." And the couple is grateful for that good deal, renting from a family friend.
They are engaged, planning a wedding next year and a family after that, and their ultimate goal is to be homeowners. Each was raised by a single mom who managed to buy a house, and they feel they're doing all the right things to make that happen.
Cunningham, 26, works at a nonprofit and moonlights at two more jobs, and Cureau, 31, gets good pay in construction. Still, they can barely save for groceries let alone a down payment. Cunningham says it's frustrating that buying a house in today's market feels almost impossible.
"I am a young woman, born and raised in Utah, and I am being priced out of my hometown," she says. "Honestly, it breaks my heart and it makes me angry."
"We're stopping young people from creating wealth"
Utah's home prices started rising even before the pandemic, then spiked amid a crush of remote work newcomers. The state's median home price has skyrocketed to $506,000, putting it out of reach for 87% of renters. That makes it one of the least affordable housing markets in a country where a record share of people struggle with the high cost of renting and buying.
"This is no longer a problem of the lower class. This is a problem of the middle class and the upper-middle class," says Steve Waldrip, who advises Utah's governor on housing. "We're stopping young people from creating wealth."
Historically, homeownership built the U.S. middle class, he says. Federal policies that denied that to Black people for generations led to dire economic consequences, and now he worries an entire generation of Americans could be shut out.
"The median first-time homebuyer age in the United States last year was 38 — that's a shocking statistic," Waldrip says. "We've just killed 10 years of wealth creation there, and that will have impacts generationally."
And that median age of 38 is an all-time high, up from 31 a decade before.
A key problem pushing up prices is a massive housing shortage. In large parts of many cities, restrictive zoning rules allow only single-family homes. And while some places have updated their zoning to allow duplexes and apartments, trying to change the rules is often controversial, time-consuming and costly. Frustrated by this, a growing number of states — both red and blue — have started pushing local governments to build more places people can afford, and passing laws that make that easier.
Utah started requiring cities and counties to provide affordable housing options in the 1990s, focused on people who make 80% or less of the local median income. But that rule was easily ignored. So in recent years, the state has amped up both the carrot and the stick, passing laws to encourage development and to enforce its mandate. Towns and counties now have to pick a handful of ways to create denser, cheaper housing and report on their progress every year.
Some states are going even further. Texas is the latest to pass a more sweeping law that overrides local zoning to allow smaller homes on smaller lots. Utah tried that and failed, but Waldrip says the state won't give up.
High costs are a challenge for developers, too
In an industrial-looking area near a light-rail station, Francis Xavier Lilly pulls up to an apartment building under construction. He's the planning director and assistant city manager for Millcreek, a popular suburb of Salt Lake that's been developing its own town center. Lilly says the city is going above and beyond Utah's housing mandates.
The Howick building will have 150 units, half with three or four bedrooms for families. Subsidized rents will range from $900 to just under $2,000, depending on the apartment size and people's income. Lilly says it will help some who really struggle to pay market rate rent.
"They're either doubling up or they're considering moving out of town or they're potentially, you know, one paycheck away from homelessness," he says. "If we can meet that need at the very bottom, I think that will be both a moral and fiscal success for our city."
The city partnered with the Community Development Corporation of Utah to build this place. CEO Todd Reeder says it's a big shift to create large-scale housing from scratch. For nearly three decades, the nonprofit mostly helped lower-income people become homeowners by flipping existing houses.
"We'd acquire homes at $200,000, fix them up and sell them at $210,000," he says.
But those cheap fixer-uppers no longer exist, so Reeder says he'll have to get creative about finding other ways to help people buy. He's scouting for small plots of public land on which to build tiny homes or cottage communities.
Millcreek has also reduced parking requirements, streamlined permitting and loosened zoning to allow more density.
At City Hall, on a sixth-floor balcony, Lilly shows off a new rock climbing wall and skating rink for people to gather and build community. And he points out several sites slated for new residential construction.
"If you look around here, you see in all these buildings a lot of service jobs. And it's a tragedy to me that people are expected and are asked to work here, to serve this community, but can't afford to live here," he says. "I think that's wrong."
He's hoping the city can buy out one development site and build housing that would be permanently affordable. Because otherwise, much of the new construction here will still be out of reach for many. The land is expensive, he says, and developers need to maximize profits. Lilly recalls pitching new incentives to one developer, explaining he could add more units if they sold for less.
"He replied to me, like, 'Why? Why would I sell eight units at $450,000 when I could sell six at almost a million?' " he says. "It's harsh, but that's a fair question, right?"
For some cities, Utah's housing mandates are "flouting the will of the people"
There's also been widespread pushback from many places concerned about losing local control.
"State mandates coming top down are really just flouting the will of the people," says Trent Staggs, mayor of Riverton, a fairly affluent city about half an hour south of Salt Lake.
Not long ago, Riverton was mostly a farm community. Now, Staggs says some constituents have moved away complaining of overcrowding. And he worries that "conscientious, decades long planning" for things like roads, water and sewer is getting blown up.
"Where there's so much housing going on and density going up that has been forced on us by the state, and the infrastructure isn't there, you've seen that quality of life diminish," he says.
Some mayors and city council members have been voted out for supporting too much density. Last year, when Waldrip, the governor's housing adviser, spoke at a public hearing in favor of a new development in the city of Orem, it was a tough crowd.
"I find it insulting when the governor sends in a mouthpiece to preach and talk down to us," one resident said during public comment. Others criticized the smaller size of the proposed houses, saying they would not fit in with the rest of the neighborhood.
"It's all gonna be ticky-tack homes in tiny little lots," one person said.
Waldrip says he understands such fears, but that something has to give. For all Utah is doing to encourage more affordable housing, it's still not enough. The state's housing shortage keeps growing.
For Salt Lake City renters Grace Cunningham and Jamal Cureau, the lack of options has them thinking about leaving, maybe for Louisiana or somewhere else cheaper than Utah.
"Because I want to have little kids, I want to have a space to run around, I want to have people over," Cunningham says. "And I'd say it's the American dream."
It's how she grew up, she says. But she worries Utah is no longer a place where she could raise her own children that way.
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