Staff updated the Summit County Council Sept. 24 on their progress planning how to implement the council’s affordable housing goal.
In the spring, councilmembers said their target was to greenlight 1,500 affordable units in the next 10 years.
“Through the formation of our housing authority, as well as the drafted strategic plan 2035 we have clearly identified a need for affordable housing. And so the next question after that becomes, where do we put the housing?” Summit County Housing Authority Executive Director Maddy McDonough said at the meeting. “So we decided to start by creating a tool.”
That tool is a “land prioritization map” created by county GIS specialist Trey Olson. It hasn’t been released to the public, but staff demonstrated a beta version for the council and at the Utah Housing Coalition’s Housing Matters Conference Sept. 8.
It’s akin to the county’s interactive property, zoning, road and voter maps, but with specific filters to identify suitable sites for affordable housing development.
Those filters can toggle publicly- and privately-owned land, as well as vacant and developed land.
“We'll be adding a filter for underdeveloped land as well, based on a calculation of assessed land value compared to assessed building value,” McDonough told councilmembers. “The purpose of this is to help us to identify sites that might be most suitable for redevelopment or infill development.”
The map displays a specific lot’s zoning, special restrictions, utilities access and distance to groceries and schools.
It awards each property an “accessibility score” based on the availability of those and other amenities, such as transit, gas, health care or cultural institutions. One version of the map allows users to weight those factors according to what’s most important to them.
Various political jurisdictions are noted.
The council discussed, but did not decide, whether the tool should be available to the public or not because McDonough noted it could be helpful, but also affect the perception of different areas of the county.
Councilmembers Canice Harte and Megan McKenna suggested it could go on the housing authority’s website dashboard.
Council Chair Tonja Hanson asked for staff to consider adding a feature that could factor in future development that has already been approved.
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