The Utah Housing Coalition is a membership-based organization that provides education, advocacy and community building around affordable housing. It also hosts the state's largest housing conference, which brings together housing innovators from across the country.
Project Manager Zoe Newmann said the coalition sees itself as a connector to help increase the state’s affordable housing stock. She said they aren’t affordable housing developers, but develop strategic partnerships to get it built.
The most challenging affordable housing to build, she said, is for those living at or below the 30% area median income (AMI).
“We have a 44,000-unit deficit in our state of deeply affordable housing that’s 30% AMI or below,” Newmann said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” April 20. “That’s our workforce. Those are people that support our economy, which is why it's important to celebrate when people are able to make these projects pencil and do innovative stuff, kind of like what they're doing in Park City, and why we're celebrating two different projects in Park City at our awards dinner.”
This year, Mountain Mediation Center will receive the coalition’s first Housing Stability and Solutions award.
Newmann said the organization helps people stay in their community, connects them to local resources and educates residents on how to be good tenants.
“They provide bilingual education on tenant issues,” she said. “They help mediate situations and help really underserved populations be able to stay stable in their housing. And they also have provided and created a lot of like housing stability education, and they're really getting out in community and helping folks get connected to resources right in their community.”
Park City Municipal and developer J. Fisher will be honored with the Green Project of the Year for the public private partnership development off of Kearns Boulevard, Engine House.
“This is a very fun project,” she said. “They built it in a way where not only is it energy efficient, but it is affordable," she said. "It includes 99 affordable units inside of it. It's a great affordable housing project that was built with energy efficiency in mind. It has solar features and other features that not only contribute to energy efficiency, but also to people's cost in their homes, and so it allows utility costs to be reduced for residents. So that's supporting longtime environmental and economic sustainability.”
The sold-out awards dinner is April 29 in Salt Lake City.
