Salt Lake City faces two housing affordability challenges: The first, housing people with insufficient income to house themselves, is common to many U.S. cities. The second, ensuring that market-rate housing remains affordable to middle-income residents, is restricted to cities where desirable amenities and plentiful job opportunities drive strong growth in housing demand. Though these different challenges require different policy solutions, they share a common starting point: building more housing.
Housing is most affordable where housing is abundant, and right now Salt Lake simply isn’t adding enough of it. To their credit, most of the candidates competing in Tuesday’s mayoral primary support modest efforts to change that.