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Note to readers: As a community-funded paper, The Salt Lake Tribune has chronicled Utah’s housing crisis for years, but also looks to find solutions. In this series of stories, “ Building Options ,” we will look to outline the issue and why it matters, but also how a state program is showing signs of chipping away at the affordability crisis. Brian Dobson’s budget was tight enough in October that he canceled his health insurance for a year.
He hit the “magical age” of 50 and insurance costs increased more than 20%, he said, and his mortgage, homeowner association fees and property taxes already take up about half of his paycheck. “It’s a gamble, but it’s what I have to do to be able to survive right now,” he said. Dobson is among hundreds of thousands of Utahns – whether they own or rent – who struggle to afford housing, which, experts say, can lead to long-term, negative health outcomes.
Households are considered cost-burdened when they spend more than 30% of their income on rent, mortgage payments, and other housing costs, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Higher housing costs reduce the ability to pay for necessities like health care, according to a report from the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute , or may force people to live in lower-quality housing or neighborhoods. [READ: Amid a housing crisis, this Utah program is helping increase homeownership opportunities ] “Research shows that housing affordability has both direct and indirect impacts on health outcomes,” the report reads.
“By addressing the state’s housing crisis, Utah is also investing in the health of its residents.” Direct and indirect effects Housing affordability affects people’s health directly because of cost and indirectly because of housing and neighborhood conditions, Gardner Institute researchers wrote in the policy brief. Poor quality housing or a house that has not been maintained is likely to be cheaper, they write, and contributes to higher rates of indoor allergens that cause respiratory illnesses, like asthma.
It also is cheaper to buy in certain neighborhoods, but that comes with tradeoffs like not being able to safely walk or run outside and not having access to jobs or grocery stores with healthy food. Safety concerns also can exacerbate stress and lead to worse mental and physical health outcomes, researchers said. And it all comes down to housing costs, which Utahns said can cause stress on their budget even without other factors.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Homes and construction in Riverton on Friday, May 3, 2024. Jacob Klausmeier said it’s “always a concern in the back of your mind.” Though he and his wife are not as worried about making the rent on their portion of a split home in Cedar City since he got a raise, it creates “a lot of latent, passive stress.
” Even with his raise, Klausmeier estimated housing costs take up about 35 to 40% of their combined income. He and his wife are far from alone in Iron County, where about 30% of households are cost-burdened – the fourth-highest rate in the state. That rate varies from 13.
6% in Emery County to 32.1% in Grand County — and in most counties, the highest rates are for renters rather than homeowners. Renting comes with other stressors, too, Klausmeier said, like surprise rent increases and fees.
“The way out, as I see it, is if we make more money we’ll have more options,” he said. It’s “demoralizing,” he said, when searching for a place and seeing “huge swaths of potential renting places disappear” once adding your maximum budget for rent to the search. Buying a home is out of reach There is more stress as they look at homes along the Wasatch Front, he said, and that buying a home seems unattainable.
And it is for many. “When we were growing up, a mailman used to own a home, and civil servants used to be able to buy their home, and we’ve lost that capacity now,” Steve Waldrip, who serves as Gov. Spencer Cox’s adviser for housing strategy, told a legislative subcommittee in January.
The median price of a home has gone up “dramatically” in the past seven years, he said, and wages have not kept pace. A typical home in Utah used to be three times the median income, he said, but is now around six times what the typical household makes in a year. In most counties, renters living in the county could not afford a mortgage on a home if they were to buy now, based on a Tribune analysis of housing prices and U.
S. Census Bureau Data. Utahns needed to make $136,500 to afford the median home price of $500,000 last year, according to data from the Utah Association of Realtors.
That varied from about $68,000 in Carbon County to $366,500 in Summit County. And in no county was the median renter household income enough to afford a home without moving counties. Only tenants making as much as a typical renter household in Morgan, Wasatch and Summit counties could afford to buy a home somewhere else in the state, and their options would have been limited to rural counties further from the recreation options of the Wasatch Back.
Dobson knows something about having to look outside the county to find housing. He works in Sugarhouse but lives west of Thanksgiving Point in Lehi and describes the commute as awful. He lived and worked in Salt Lake City for almost 30 years but started looking to buy when his rental was no longer going to be available.
“I looked for a good three months, and this was the only place I could find that was even remotely affordable,” Dobson said. Even with a longer commute, homeowner association fees and a mortgage, it was still cheaper to move south to buy, he said. No more “McMansions” (Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Homes under construction in Park City, Friday, Nov.
18, 2022. Housing is least attainable in Summit County, but Thomas Cooke remembers when that wasn’t the case. When he and his wife bought their home in the Snyderville Basin shortly before the 2002 Winter Olympics, almost everyone in the cul-de-sac worked for Delta Air Lines or a ski resort.
Cooke sat on the county planning commission for about eight years, resigning at the end of 2024 . His cul-de-sac is still pretty modest and blue-collar, he said, with four ski patrollers sharing a rented house across the street. But the head of Park City Mountain Resort also lives down the street, he said.
“The problem is, they’re not making neighborhoods like mine anymore,” Cooke said. Utah officials need to support more building, he said, but need to be careful about how they do so. Dobson said hundreds of thousands of people face anxiety and wish they could live closer to work because the state seems to be missing the basics.
“We cannot keep building McMansions and luxury apartments and 4,000-square-foot homes,” he said. “We’ve got to work on density and infrastructure for viable public transit.” Megan Banta is The Salt Lake Tribune’s data enterprise reporter, a philanthropically supported position .
The Tribune retains control over all editorial decisions..
