Closing the $233,000 Gap
Twelve things the Legislature can do now
Closing the $233,000 Gap
I have spent two years explaining the problem. This is what I would do about it: twelve state-level fixes, what each one is worth to a family's monthly payment, where it has already worked, and what it costs.
I sell houses for a living. For the last few years a big part of that job has been telling good people what they cannot buy. So before I get to the fixes, I want to put one number on the table, because every proposal on this page has to answer to it.
HUD sets the 2026 area median income for a family of four in the Salt Lake City metro at $126,100. Run that family through the Salt Lake Board of Realtors' affordability model, the one they publish every quarter, and they can buy a home of about $412,000. The median Salt Lake County home sold for $645,000 in the second quarter of 2026.
What a Salt Lake family can buy, against what a home costs
Scale runs 0 to $700,000. Maximum purchase price at 30 percent of gross income using the Salt Lake Board of Realtors' Q2 2026 assumptions. Run backward, the model lands on the Board's published income requirement within one tenth of one percent. The distance between the median family and the median house is $233,000.
That is the whole test. A housing policy either moves a family closer to a house they can buy or it does not. Everything else is a press release.
How I score these. At today's rates, every $1 a month you free up in a household budget buys about $154 of house. Every $1,000 you take off the price of a home is worth about $6.49 a month to the buyer.
That one ratio lets you put a car payment, an impact fee, and a district tax bill on the same page and compare them. It is the arithmetic behind every estimate here. It is also why some popular ideas turn out to be small and some boring ones turn out to be big.
Twelve options follow, grouped by what they actually do: change what gets built, take cost out of the price, take cost off the monthly payment, or stop the state from bidding against its own first-time buyers. None of them needs Congress. None of them tells a Utah family they ought to want to live in a tower. Several were proposed by Republicans in this Legislature, and I say so where that is true. I want the house built. I do not much care who gets the credit.
| # | Option | Lever | Estimated effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Let factory-built homes go anywhere a house is legal | Product | Large |
| 02 | Fund the infrastructure publicly instead of at 40 years on a tax bill | Price | Large |
| 03 | Retire public infrastructure district debt at buildout | Payment | Large |
| 04 | Fix condo liability so the missing starter product gets built | Product | Large |
| 05 | Design the second car out of the household budget | Payment | Large |
| 06 | Buy small-lot and starter-home zoning with infrastructure money | Price | Medium |
| 07 | Decouple Utah from federal bonus depreciation | Competition | Medium |
| 08 | Scale impact fees to the size of the home, collect them at occupancy | Price | Medium |
| 09 | Make down payment help shared equity so it recycles | Payment | Medium |
| 10 | Put a real floor under the rental side | Rent | Medium |
| 11 | Close the HOA reinvestment fee exception | Equity | Small |
| 12 | Define "starter home" in statute and report on it every year | Accountability | Enabling |
Utah will not let people build the cheapest housing we know how to make
Let factory-built homes go anywhere a house is legal
The biggest per-square-foot cost cut available to this state. What stands in the way is zoning and financing, not engineering.
A manufactured home costs $84.45 per square foot. A site-built home costs $168.86. A modular home, built to the same code as a site-built house and assembled in a factory, comes in 10 to 20 percent under site-built.
Before 2000, factory-built housing was 27 percent of new single-family homes in this country. In 2025 it was 10 percent. Modular alone fell from 6 percent to 3. Nobody forgot how to build them. We made them harder to place and harder to finance.
Two barriers. Most Utah cities zone a manufactured home as a different land use instead of as a house, which keeps it out of the neighborhoods where people actually want to live. And 40 to 50 percent of manufactured home buyers finance with a chattel loan, the kind Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will not buy, which means higher rates and shorter terms for the buyers who can least afford either one.
The state can fix both. Write into law that any modular or manufactured home that meets the building code is allowed in any zone that allows a single-family house, on the same terms. Then make it simple to title the home as real property with the land under it, so it finances like a house.
Cut the per-square-foot cost of a 1,400 square foot home in half and you have taken more than a hundred thousand dollars off the price. That is a big bite out of $233,000 from one change in the law, and it does not cost the state a dime in subsidy.
Fix condo liability so the missing starter product gets built
Condos are the closest thing Utah has to an entry-level home you can own, and we made them risky to build.
In 2025 the median Utah condo or townhome sold for $430,000. The median single-family home sold for $564,000. One in four Utah renters could afford a condo priced at 80 percent of the median. Only 16 percent could afford a single-family home on the same terms.
Condos are where renters turn into owners. I have handed over a lot of first sets of keys in a townhome parking lot. And condo construction in Utah has been falling for years, with construction defect liability and the insurance cost that comes with it named as the reason over and over. A developer who can build the same building as apartments, with one owner and no association to sue him, will build apartments.
Oregon dealt with this in 2025 with HB 3746, and they did it as a trade, not a giveaway. The window to file a defect claim dropped from ten years to seven, with a one-year discovery window if a problem shows up in years six or seven. In return, condo boards have to hire an independent moisture-intrusion inspection before the end of year two and again before year six, paid from reserves, and follow a notice and board-vote process before they can sue.
That is the right trade: less open-ended exposure for the builder, mandatory early detection for the buyer. Utah has already worked next door to this. HB 175 in 2025, from Rep. Ray Ward and Sen. Calvin Musselman, exempted three- and four-family buildings up to two stories from sprinkler requirements and streamlined inspections. That took real cost out of small multifamily.
Ninety-six thousand approved homes are waiting on a pipe
In late 2025, eight Utah cities counted 109,074 housing units that were already entitled, meaning approved and ready to go on paper. Twelve percent were construction-ready. The other 88 percent were stuck behind infrastructure. Not zoning. Not a planning commission. Not an angry neighborhood meeting. A sewer trunk line and a water treatment upgrade that nobody had figured out how to pay for.
Hold onto that fact. The next three options come straight out of it.
Fund the infrastructure publicly, at public rates, on public books
We are already financing this. We are doing it the most expensive way possible and handing the bill to the buyer for forty years.
Since 2019, Utah's public infrastructure districts have issued $3.8 billion in bonds. That is more than three times the bond debt of the entire State of Utah. At one point new districts were forming at a rate of four a week.
In 2026 the Legislature built a public alternative. HB 492, from Rep. Calvin Roberts and Sen. Kirk Cullimore, created the State Housing Infrastructure Partnership Fund. It makes revolving loans to cities for exactly the system improvements blocking those units, priced within 1.5 percent of the federal funds rate, with preference for detached owner-occupied starter homes. It is a good instrument. I would have voted for it.
It got $100 million. Spread across roughly 96,000 infrastructure-blocked homes in eight cities, that is about a thousand dollars a door.
The private market found $3.8 billion for this in six years because the private market had a mechanism and the public did not. Scale the public fund until it is the default way a sewer line gets built. Attach conditions so the public gets paid back. Then the forty-year assessment on a family's tax bill stops being the only option on the table.
Buy small-lot and starter-home zoning instead of preempting it
The preemption fight lost this year and it will lose again. Pay for the outcome instead of ordering it.
HB 184 in 2026, from Rep. Ray Ward, would have let builders ask for smaller minimum lot sizes with an automatic approval clock. It died in committee. The Utah League of Cities and Towns said creating a preferred state land use "was a step over the line into our legislative authority."
I believe in local control. I am not going to drop that because it is inconvenient for a housing bill. But local control does not mean the state has to be neutral about outcomes. It means the state persuades instead of commands.
So tie the money to the policy. A city that adopts a small-lot pathway, a starter-home approval track, or lower parking requirements near transit goes to the front of the line for the State Housing Infrastructure Partnership Fund. A city that does not, does not. Nobody gets preempted. Everybody knows the terms.
The Legislature has already shown this works. SB 284 in 2026 requires certain cities to allow detached accessory dwelling units by October 2026. It sets a statewide floor and leaves the details local. The next step is lowering the 11,000 square foot lot threshold that limits it, and building a financing product so a regular homeowner can actually afford to put one up.
Scale impact fees to the size of the home, and collect them at occupancy
Two changes that cost cities almost nothing and change the math for small builders and small houses.
Utah's Truth in Taxation law works. Statewide property tax rates are down about 42.7 percent since 1994, and more than 20 percent of that drop came between 2020 and 2025. I am not running to repeal it.
But the sewer still has to get built, and more and more of that money comes from impact fees on new construction. Those fees are paid by the person buying the new house. In May 2026, Wasatch County proposed raising its per-unit fee from about $1,500 to about $3,516.
I want to be careful here, because people on my side of this argument overreach. I could not find a study that proves Utah cities raise impact fees because Truth in Taxation holds down property tax. That is an inference, and I am labeling it one. What is not an inference: an impact fee lands entirely on the new buyer and never shows up on a ballot.
Two fixes, both in common use elsewhere. First, tier the fee to the demand the home actually creates. Kirkland, Washington charges $5,009 for a detached house and $1,427 for a senior unit, because they put different loads on the roads. A 1,200 square foot starter home does not stress a road network the way a 4,000 square foot house does, and it should not pay the same fee. Second, collect the fee at certificate of occupancy instead of at permit. The city gets the same dollars. The builder stops carrying them for a year. That matters a great deal to a builder doing twelve houses and not at all to one doing four hundred.
And put every jurisdiction's per-unit fee in one public table, updated every year, so a buyer and a legislator can both see what it adds to the price.
The buyer is not stopped by the price. The buyer is stopped by the payment.
Retire public infrastructure district debt at buildout
The Legislature took the first step this year with disclosure. The second step is ending the forty-year handoff.
Under Utah Code 17D-4-301, a public infrastructure district bond can run forty years. The developer builds, sells, and leaves. The debt stays on the property tax bill of whoever bought the house.
One buyer at Black Desert Resort in Ivins expected about $2,000 a year in property tax. His actual bill came in over $10,000. The present value of that difference over the life of the assessment is roughly a quarter of a million dollars.
Run a smaller case through the conversion rate. A $2,000 annual assessment is $167 a month. That is about $25,700 of purchasing power gone before the family ever looks at a house. The district exists to make housing possible, and it makes the buyer poorer.
Our State Auditor, Tina Cannon, a Republican, put developer access to municipal bond rates plainly: "For a developer, this is a gift." State Treasurer Marlo Oaks, also a Republican, has warned about the systemic risk in how fast these districts are growing. This is not a partisan finding.
The 2026 Legislature acted. HB 507, from Rep. Calvin Roberts, passed the House 57 to 1 and the Senate 27 to 1 and was signed March 25, 2026. It reworked board governance, created a path from developer-appointed boards to boards elected by the residents, and required disclosure to homebuyers at or before closing. That was a real step and I will say so.
But disclosure is not a fix. Telling a young couple at the closing table that they just accepted a forty-year second tax bill does not make the house affordable. It makes them better informed about why they cannot afford it. I have sat at that table. Colorado has lived with these districts longer than we have, and it went further. SB 23-110 requires mill levy caps and maximum debt limits written into the service plan up front, annual town halls for districts with residents, and disclosure at every resale, not just the first sale. A companion bill barred district directors from buying a personal interest in the district's own debt.
Cap the term. Cap the levy in the service plan. And draw a hard line around what public credit is allowed to finance at all. One Utah County district issued a $40 million bond that included $17.5 million in private improvements. Public borrowing power should build public infrastructure.
Design the second car out of the household budget
The largest monthly expense we can actually remove from a family budget, and it is not a housing program.
AAA puts the cost of owning and operating a new vehicle at $11,577 a year, or $964.78 a month, at fifteen thousand miles.
Run that through the conversion rate and one car is worth about $148,000 in home purchasing power. A household that goes from two cars to one, or trades a $500 car payment for a transit pass, picks up about $77,000 in what a lender will approve. I have watched a car payment kill a preapproval more times than I can count.
This is not an environmental argument. It is the second biggest line in a family budget, and we have spent seventy years building neighborhoods that make it mandatory.
Utah already has the tool. Housing and Transit Reinvestment Zones let a city capture future tax increment around a transit station. The statute requires at least 51 percent of developable acreage to be residential and at least 12 percent of units to be affordable: nine percent at 80 percent of county median income and three percent at 60. Clearfield's mayor has estimated the zones will produce about 42,000 units where the market alone would have built 16,000.
Now the part people in my party do not like to say out loud. Utahns do not want to live in towers. Utah Foundation surveys found fewer than half willing to accept even medium density, meaning duplexes, townhomes, and cottage courts, and 18 percent strongly opposed. Young families want a yard. I have six sons. I am not going to tell anyone they are wrong to want one.
The answer is not a lecture about density. It is a small house with a yard, on a smaller lot, within walking distance of a bus that actually shows up. That is what people say they want, and it is dramatically cheaper to carry than the same house forty minutes out with two cars in the driveway.
Make down payment help shared equity so the money comes back
A grant helps one family once. A shared appreciation loan helps a family, then helps the next one.
In December 2023 the state announced Utah First Homes: $150 million split between first-time buyer assistance, the State Infrastructure Bank, and starter home innovation, tied to a goal of 35,000 starter homes by 2028. The Utah Homes Investment Program followed in 2024, placing up to $300 million in state deposits with banks to lower developer borrowing costs, with every deposit due back by June 30, 2028.
One question about every one of those dollars: does it come back?
California's Dream For All program lends a first-generation buyer up to 20 percent of the purchase price. When the home sells, the state gets its principal back plus a proportionate share of the appreciation, and puts it into the next buyer. The 2025-26 California budget put $300 million behind it, expecting to serve about 2,000 households, with the money that returns funding the rounds after that.
Utah should build its buyer assistance the same way. Same dollars, more families, and the taxpayer shares in the appreciation their own money helped create.
Utah's own tax code helps pay for the bid against a first-time buyer
Decouple Utah from federal bonus depreciation
One bill. About two dozen states already did it. It raises money instead of costing it.
In Salt Lake County in the first quarter of 2026, 17.3 percent of single-family homes sold went to a buyer who will not live there: 474 out of 2,743 sales. About one in six.
Before anyone goes looking for a Wall Street villain, look at who those buyers are. In Salt Lake County, 95.5 percent of investor-owned homes belong to owners with ten properties or fewer, and nearly 82 percent belong to someone who owns exactly one. Institutional owners with a thousand or more homes hold 1.5 percent. Nationally, GAO puts institutional ownership at about three percent of single-family homes, and Congress capped further institutional buying in July 2026 through the ROAD Act, which applies to entities holding 350 or more homes.
So Washington just dealt with the smallest part of the problem, and the part that barely exists here.
When an investor buys a rental, federal law lets them accelerate depreciation and write off a big share of the purchase in year one. The 2025 federal tax law made 100 percent bonus depreciation permanent. Somewhere between 26 and 30 states, plus the District of Columbia, refuse to let that deduction flow through to the state return.
Utah is not one of them. Under Utah Code 59-7-101 we conform fully. When an investor outbids a first-time buyer on a starter home in Kearns, our own tax code helps fund the bid. I have been on the losing side of that offer with a client. It is not a good afternoon.
A correction I owe on this one. I had said before that many states also decouple from 1031 like-kind exchanges. That is wrong. Pennsylvania was the last holdout for individual income tax and it conformed in 2023. Utah could still choose to decouple from 1031, and I think it is worth the debate, but it would be a first, not a follow. When I get something wrong, I will tell you.
Close the HOA reinvestment fee exception
Small money, taken from exactly the families we say we are trying to help.
Utah already did the hard part. Private transfer fee covenants recorded on or after March 16, 2010 are void under Utah Code 57-1-46.
What survived is the reinvestment fee, which an HOA can charge when you sell, capped at half a percent of the property's value. On a $500,000 townhome that is $2,500 out of a young couple's equity on their way out the door. Since May 2025 an association at least has to get a majority of its members to approve one.
The cap has a hole in it. It does not apply if the property "is part of a large master planned development." Those are disproportionately the attached, entry-priced homes that first-time buyers can actually reach. Half a percent should mean half a percent everywhere.
Two things that get left out of every housing speech
Put a real floor under the rental side
Every household priced out of buying stays in the rental pool and bids against the household below it.
Utah's homeownership rate fell from 71.2 percent in 2022 to 68.3 percent in 2025. Those families did not leave the state. They stayed, and they rent.
Utah now has 28 affordable and available rental homes for every 100 extremely low income renter households, a shortfall of about 44,097 homes. A two-bedroom at fair market rent of $1,582 takes $30.42 an hour to afford. That is where the housing fight and the wage fight turn out to be the same fight.
Utah is building rentals. The state permitted 9,683 apartment units in 2025, the third highest year on record. What it is not building is deeply affordable rentals, and the tool designed for that, the Olene Walker Housing Loan Fund, has never received an increase in its ongoing appropriation since the day it was created.
Fund it on an ongoing basis, not through one-time appropriations that no developer can plan around. And pair production money with preservation money. Keeping an affordable unit affordable is cheaper than building a new one every time.
Define "starter home" in statute and report on it every year
A goal with no definition and no reporting requirement is a press release.
The state committed to 35,000 starter homes by the end of 2028, inside a larger target of 150,000 new homes. As of early 2026, about 5,100 had been built and sold. Two years into a four-year goal, that is about 15 percent of the way there.
The bigger problem is that "starter home" has no legal definition, so it drifts up with the market until the label stops meaning anything. Define it in statute: a home affordable at 80 percent of county area median income, using the same standard the Realtors already publish. In Salt Lake County today that is about $315,000. If the market moves, the definition moves with incomes, not with prices.
Then require a public accounting every year: how many were permitted, how many were built, how many were sold to someone who lives in it, and at what price. HB 68 in 2026 created a Division of Housing and Community Development to pull together more than forty scattered housing programs. Good. Now give it a number it has to report against.
Public land is not the answer to this
Sixty-four point four percent of Utah, 35 million of our 54.3 million acres, is federally owned, second highest in the country. That fact gets used to argue that the way out of a housing crisis is selling public land.
Look at the numbers on this page and ask if that holds up. There are 109,074 entitled units in eight cities and 88 percent of them are stuck behind infrastructure. Manufactured homes cost half what site-built homes cost per square foot and we mostly will not let people put them in neighborhoods. Our own tax code helps an investor outbid a first-time buyer.
We did not run out of land. We ran out of ways to pay for a sewer line, and we made the cheapest housing we know how to build the hardest to place.
Utah's public lands are not a housing reserve. They are the reason people move here. We can fix this on ground we have already approved for building, and we should, before anyone talks us into trading the thing that makes this state worth living in for a problem we wrote into our own statutes.
Twelve options. None of them is magic. Most of them are boring.
I got into this race because I asked a question about housing costs at a town hall and a Republican state representative told me somebody ought to go find out. So I did. This page is what I found.
Taken together, these twelve are the difference between a family making $126,100 a year staring at a $233,000 gap and that same family signing on a house. Every number here has a source at the bottom of the page, and most of those sources are the state's own.
Go check me. Then ask anyone else on your ballot for their list.
Sources
- Salt Lake Board of Realtors, Q2/Mid-Year 2026 Municipal Affordability Tracking Report, via Utah Business, August 25, 2026.
- Salt Lake City Housing Stability Division, 2026 HUD Area Median Income limits.
- Utah News Dispatch, Q2 2026 county median prices, July 21, 2026.
- Urban Institute, factory-built construction and starter homes, June 17, 2026.
- Davis Wright Tremaine on Oregon HB 3746, May 2025.
- Salt Lake Home Builders Association on Utah HB 175 (2025).
- Salt Lake Tribune, condo construction decline in Utah, March 11, 2025.
- Deseret News, Utah's strategic housing plan and entitled unit counts, February 5, 2026.
- Utah Legislature, HB 492 (2026), enrolled, and HB 507 (2026) status.
- Building Salt Lake, 2026 legislative wrap-up, and Wasatch Advocates for Livable Communities session summary.
- Eric S. Peterson, Utah Investigative Journalism Project, Hidden developers' tax is zapping Utah homebuyers for billions, April 28, 2026, and companion report via KSL.
- Utah Code 17D-4-301, public infrastructure district bonds.
- Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck on Colorado metropolitan district legislation, covering SB 23-110, HB 23-1090 and HB 23-1065.
- National Housing Conference, common revisions to impact fees.
- Park Record, Wasatch County impact fee proposal, May 8, 2026.
- Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute on Truth in Taxation, via Utah Business, August 7, 2026.
- AAA, Your Driving Costs, September 16, 2025.
- Wasatch Front Regional Council, Housing and Transit Reinvestment Zones white paper.
- Utah Foundation, Utahns overwhelmingly prefer single-family homes.
- Office of Gov. Spencer Cox, Utah First Homes announcement, December 5, 2023, and Utah State Treasurer, Utah Homes Investment Program.
- CalHFA, Dream For All shared appreciation program, January 16, 2026.
- BatchData Investor Pulse, Salt Lake County, Q1 2026.
- U.S. GAO, institutional investors and single-family homes, March 24, 2026, and HousingWire on the ROAD Act cap.
- Bloomberg Tax, State Conformity to Federal Bonus Depreciation, May 2026.
- CBIZ, Pennsylvania conforms to Section 1031.
- Utah Code 57-1-46, transfer fee and reinvestment fee covenants.
- National Low Income Housing Coalition, 2026 Utah State Housing Profile; Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Utah homeownership rate; Rental Housing Association of Utah, 2025 apartment permits.
- Salt Lake Tribune, Olene Walker Housing Loan Fund appropriations, June 1, 2025.
- Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, federal land ownership in Utah, March 12, 2025.
