Utah housing official touts regional approach in spurring housing development

OGDEN—Encouraging housing development can be problematic for local leaders, particularly when development proposals prompt backlash, says Steve Waldrip, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox's chief housing adviser.

"I was in a public meeting where, I swear, if they'd made a different decision, none of those council members would have made it out alive. I mean, they would have just been beaten to death on the spot," he said at a housing forum Thursday in Ogden hosted by Weber County officials.

Maybe he's using hyperbole, but Waldrip's point is sometimes the backlash to development proposals along the increasingly crowded Wasatch Front can be so intense that it stifles housing projects, no matter the dire need for new homes. With that in mind, Waldrip proposed addressing housing development from a broader, regional perspective, not limited by the "arbitrary" boundaries dividing cities.

As is, local leaders can face "relatively small contingents of citizens who can make a lot of noise and make life really miserable for our elected leaders because they get a bee in their bonnet about one particular issue that they view as having a negative impact on their lifestyle and their livelihood," Waldrip said. Instead, Waldrip called for taking "a step back from that hyper-locality" and focusing on regional infrastructure — roads, water lines, sewer lines — in promoting housing development.

"If I was king for a day, we'd already be doing that — but no one's given me that job yet," he joked. "I think that's a critical thing we have to look at. I think we can look at housing needs as a region."

Meantime, he said, Utah's on track to face a 50,000 home deficit by year's end, "which means we have 50,000 more households than we have places for them to live."

Thursday's forum — mainly an informational gathering — drew local officials from across Weber County. It was organized by members of a housing subcommittee of the Weber Area Council of Governments, made up of elected leaders from the many locales across Weber County.

Harrisville Mayor Michelle Tait heads the subcommittee, unique in Utah, and said it seems to have been accepted across Weber County, though it's only an advisory body. "We've had a lot of investment from the cities. We've had buy-in from a lot of people that we had hoped would come to the table," she said.

Now she's hoping for recognition and assistance from state lawmakers. One of the subcommittee's functions, she said, has been identifying the infrastructure needed in Weber County to better promote housing growth.

Comments from Matt Dixon, the South Ogden city manager, spurred much of the discussion about looking at housing issues regionally. While Weber County leaders have been collectively discussing how to foster housing development, he said, "It'd be great if we were tasked as a region to come up with a plan."

Still, Amy Mabey, the Pleasant View city administrator and part of the panel Thursday that addressed the matter, noted the complexities in balancing local and state pressure on housing matters. With "the residents pulling you one way and the state pulling you another way," she said, coming up with a housing strategy can be "a really difficult challenge."

Whatever the fix to the issue, Waldrip said the private sector has to be involved. The government has a key role through zoning and other policies aimed at encouraging home development, but the private sector is the source of the funding and financing, by and large, to build new houses.

"The county doesn't build the houses. The cities don't build the houses. The houses are built by private companies that have to make a profit in order to pay their people and have a reason to show up to work. So we can't vilify, you know, private enterprise and say, 'Well, they're just making too much money,'" he said.

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