The Full Story

Expanding Housing Options

The Neighborhood Housing Alliance urges the Salt Lake City Council to abandon its pursuit of Expanding Housing Options. December 1 the SLC Council will vote. Tell them "Just say no."

Attend City Council

Nov. 10 and Nov. 17

7:00 pm
415 South State, 3rd Floor

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Send your opinions to housingoptions@slc.gov

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The Salt Lake City planning division verified these two videos represent potential outcomes allowed under the EHO.

The EHO is not an experiment. Utah law makes it binding.

City officials told NHA if the EHO passes "...there is no going back."

10 more reasons to oppose the EHO...

It won't attract young and growing families with children - Salt Lake's greatest housing need.

1,200 SF dwellings on 2,000 SF lots in a denser urban
setting with almost no room for outside play will have little appeal to families with children.

Only single-family homes in single family neighorhoods will be targeted for new EHO housing.

Practical sites like closed schools, vacant warehouses
and commercial buildings, former city facilities, publicly-owned and underused land, and brownfield sites are completely ignored and not even considered in the
plan.

The premise is flawed.

To build EHO-recommended housing on smaller lots, a developer would first have to demolish an existing, livable single-family home. Why would Salt Lake City encourage the removal of existing, family-friendly housing?

There is no owner occupancy provision.

Even if one were added, these EHO dwellings do not have the same long-term equity-building potential as a conventional single-family home. Affordability at purchase and financial security over a lifetime are not the same thing.

Allowances for duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and townhomes is another tool to continue SLC's overwhelming preference for bigger, multiple, dense dwellings.

Permits for 51,645 apartments and multi-family units were approved in SLC during the past decade. The EHO would grant SLC the power to spread this lot-density philosophy to all residential homes – 40,000 or 77% of all residentially-owned land in SLC.

It could harm property values.

Residents who have invested their life savings to buy and maintain a home could see those assets compromised or devalued when bigger units – duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and townhomes – are permitted “by right” next door.

Westside single family homes will see the greatest impact.

City council members have publicly acknowledged in work sessions, town halls and community council meetings that westside neighborhoods like Rose Park,
Guadalupe, Fairpark, Poplar Grove and Glendale will be the first to lose single family homes for bigger development.

Who are the potential tenants of EHO housing?

If the last decade is a harbinger – Salt Lake will attract more young professionals, singles, empty nesters and couples without children to EHO housing – groups already amply served by the tens of thousands of rental properties built since 2015. Left out: families with children. This contradicts the city’s own pursuit of housing equity.

Fewer families = fewer children = more school closures.

Salt Lake City schools have seen a drop of nearly 10,000 children in just over a decade necessitating the closure of four elementary schools in 2024. According to the SLCSD board report in June 2026, four more school closures are now under consideration.

Three in one.

The EHO would also permit a homeowner in a single-family neighborhood to build a new home dwelling on the front yard of the property and another housing unit on the back yard - for a total of three dwelling places on the same lot.