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Park City Council To Discuss Affordable Housing Rentals, Lottery System

The Park City Council will receive an update on the city’s affordable housing efforts at its meeting Thursday, including the affordable housing lottery, rentals and more. 

One of the items that Park City Housing Development Manager Jason Glidden will put to the Council is whether the city should give special consideration to Park City Municipal employees, emergency workers and teachers in the affordable housing lottery. In the past, some units have been set aside for city employees. If the Council wants to pursue that route again, the housing lottery would be adjusted for the Woodside Park Phase 1 units, which are scheduled to be completed in May.

“We have the proposed qualifications for the next lottery coming up, and they can choose to prioritize essential employees that include teachers, firefighters, policemen and such, and it does give them a little bit more of an advantage to be selected for these," Glidden said. "We’d do a separate lottery for a certain amount of these units for those essential employees, and then those that weren’t selected as part of that would go into the larger lottery to then be chosen for the remainder of those units.”

The lottery proposal by the Housing Department also suggests starting a waitlist for Woodside Park Phase 2, to assess demand.

Glidden will also present the pricing for the Woodside Park units, ranging from $180,000 for a studio apartment to $576,000 for a three-bedroom home. Pricing is calculated based on federal data for the area median income, with qualifying household incomes ranging from $45,000 to nearly $86,000 for homes marked as affordable and $90,000 to nearly $129,000 for attainably priced homes.

“We don’t want to exceed the 30%," Glidden said. "That’s the general rule of you should be spending 30% of your income on housing, so those are the figures we use to calculate this pricing.”

All the Woodside units are for sale—though four of the townhomes have accessory dwelling units that owners can rent out to long-term residents. The city is exploring affordable rental options, and Glidden says the Homestake project is being targeted as one. The Council will also consider a model for funding rentals, where the Council, acting as the housing authority, would bond against future rental revenue.

“On top of that, the city would have to subsidize a portion of that construction cost to make sure that we could actually bring the rental rates down to the AMI levels that Council would want to see,” Glidden said.

Since setting its goal of developing 800 affordable or attainable housing units by 2026, 39 units have been completed. Four hundred sixty-four are in the pipeline.

Emily Means hadn’t intended to be a journalist, but after two years of studying chemistry at the University of Utah, she found her fit in the school’s communication program. Diving headfirst into student media opportunities, Means worked as a host, producer and programming director for K-UTE Radio as well as a news writer and copy editor at The Daily Utah Chronicle.