The Summit County Council got a presentation Wednesday from the Park City Community Foundation on their Social Equity Data Report.
The presentation prompted a couple of brief discussions, about such controversies as affordable housing and income equity for the city’s workers.
As we’ve reported, the plan prioritizes three areas within social equity—education, with a focus on early childhood; inclusion; and affordable housing.
On the last topic, County Council Member Glenn Wright said that this area—and in fact the whole state—has failed to build enough affordable housing to keep up with growth. He said to deal with it, they have to take on a couple of taboos.
“To build affordable housing, you got to build it cheap, which brings in a couple of issues,” Wright explained. “One of the big ones in our community is the opposition to height and density. If you’re advocating for affordable housing, that pretty much has to be part of your advocacy also. My opinion, we need to get away from the concept that we can’t build more than a two- or three-story building in this county.
There are places where we need to go higher on density. Whenever that subject is brought up, the torches and pitchforks come out.”
Wright said another issue is integration of affordable housing, which he said has brought out different opinions from County Council and the Snyderville Planning Commission.
“How much integration of affordable housing should we have,” Wright asked. “And does that create ghettoes. Or is it better to create good-looking affordable housing, efficient affordable housing, that gets more people in housing.”
Katie Wright from the Park City Community Foundation gave her take on the issue.
“Actually, we need density and we need to build neighborhoods,” Wright continued. “The idea that those neighborhoods are ghettoes, I think is something we need to really reframe….reframe. I mean I think, y’know, conceptually pointing out a group of people and saying because it’s affordable housing, it’s not going to be like a great neighborhood, when actually—in our communities, I think we’re losing neighborhoods because we have such a high rate of non-occupied houses into a mix with people who are occupying houses, having clusters of areas where people actually live there year-round is a way of building neighborhoods. And I think a lot of people in our community want more neighborhoods.”
Finally, Wright said he had a suggestion to increase worker income locally, though it might be unpopular with some. He mentioned attending a recent government convention in Las Vegas and talking to a waitress who came originally from Utah County.
“I asked her how she enjoyed working in Las Vegas,” Wright said. “She said it was great. What made it great? They had a very strong union that provided excellent wages and benefits. As a waitress, she had full health insurance. The culinary union on the Strip is a major operator in Las Vegas. And the people that are part of that union and are part of the Strip have good—living wages and full benefits. And I’m sure this will not be popular with the business community here. But encouraging workers to unionize here could be a major boost in income and benefits.”
