For the better part of a decade, southwestern Utah has seen its housing crisis only get worse, with high home prices and high rents outpacing wages and squeezing working-class residents into increasingly precarious positions.
In recent months, rising interest rates and inflation have put a dent in the number of home sales, making it even more difficult for first-time buyers and lower-income residents to entertain the idea of attaining home ownership.
And for local employers, including public ones like the City of St. George and the Washington County School District, the high cost of housing has made it hard to attract teachers, police officers and other key workforces.
“It’s probably the toughest part of moving here,” said Kolby Nelson, 24, a recent move-in from Ogden who said he has been living in a basement apartment in St George while he looks for more permanent accommodations elsewhere.
Like a lot of people looking to move to the area or hoping to find a better location, Nelson spends part of his days visiting Facebook pages and other social media sites where home seekers go to find a place to live, including several groups that have amassed thousands of members.
“It’s competitive, definitely,” Nelson said. “If you’re trying to rent, not really in the market to buy, there just aren’t a lot of options.”
Regardless of what happens with national interest rates and the broader housing market, southwestern Utah is expecting to feel the housing squeeze for the foreseeable future. One of the fastest-growing metro areas in the US — it ranked as the fastest in the latest US Census Bureau rankings — the demand for housing has long outstripped the supply. Always popular with retirees, St George has also become a hotbed for housing investors, with large-scale resort properties and short-term rentals having taken up a larger proportion of the housing supply in recent years.
In the most recent affordable housing plan published by Washington County, planners say the area would need to build nearly 900 new affordable housing units every year until 2030 to meet the anticipated demand — about four times as many as have actually been built in recent years.
Southern Utah Housing Coalition expo
St. George is far from the only part of the US facing major housing issues, but its fast-paced growth and unusual demographics do present some unique challenges.
The way forward will likely require some new ways of thinking and some new ideas about the role local governments can play, according to organizers of a new forum and expo on housing scheduled for Thursday by the Southern Utah Housing Action Coalition.
More:Overpriced and underdeveloped: How St. George’s housing market is squeezing out residents
The event, dubbed “Meeting the Attainable Housing Challenge: The Power of Multi-Sector Solutions for Our Community,” is scheduled for 11 am to 1:30 pm at the Dixie Convention Center and is scheduled to include a long roster of local politicians, government administrators and other policymakers.
The event will include findings of a new study into “housing personas” that aims to explain what types of people need housing in Washington County, along with two panels of local experts on the history of the local housing market and the ways it might close the attainable housing gap that has expanded in recent years.
“They’ll offer innovative, sometimes ground-breaking yet common-sense solutions to tackle the housing issue such as resource-sharing frameworks, a shared-equity-home-ownership model and collaborative partnerships,” according to a press release issued ahead of the event.
Among the scheduled presenters and panelists are Shirlayne Quayle, the director of Economic Vitality & Housing at the City of St George; Larry Bergeson, the superintendent of the Washington County School District; Rick Atkin, the research executive lead at the Atwood Innovation Plaza; and Carol Hollowell, the executive director of the Switchpoint Community Resource Center. More information on the event is available at www.eventbrite.com/e/hac-forum-expo-meeting-the-attainable-housing-challenge-tickets-427003738677
Organizers say the event will describe ways that local communities, including municipalities, school districts, homebuilders and others, can work together to develop better opportunities for affordable housing projects in the area.
Rising prices
The presenters will have their work cut out for them.
In the latest market report on multifamily housing report published by NAI Excel, a major St. George area commercial real estate firm, rents had risen to a median asking price of $160 per square foot midway through 2022, up 12.5% year-over-year and having nearly doubled over the last five years. The typical two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment was going for more than $1,200 per month.
And despite declining home sales in recent months, the price to buy a home was still too high for many workers, with the median price at $519,500 for Washington County as of September, up 24% year-over-year, according to a market report published by ERA Brokers Consolidated. That number had also nearly doubled in the last five years.
At the same time, the number of houses being sold had been dropping steeply in recent months, with potential buyers scared off by higher interest rates and broader worries about the national economy.
The Federal Reserve was expected to announce on Wednesday another increase in the benchmark interest rate, a move that analysts said could help to curb inflation but would likely have a direct impact on consumers’ wallets, making it more expensive to get a mortgage, pay off credit card debt and keep up with other interest payments.
The Fed has heard calls from US lawmakers and even representatives of the United Nations to stop hiking rates, arguing higher rates could ignite a painful recession. But Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has vowed to bring inflation closer to its 2% target, even if it causes job losses.
The US job market remained strong, with plentiful job openings and low unemployment. Through September, Utah’s unemployment rate was just 2.5%, and the state had grown its overall number of jobs by 2.5% over the previous 12 months, according to the Utah Department of Workforce Services.
David DeMille writes about southwestern Utah for The Spectrum & Daily News, a USA TODAY Network newsroom based in St. George. Follow him at @SpectrumDeMille or contact him at [email protected]. To support and sustain this work, please subscribe today.
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