What Utah lawmakers did — and didn’t — do for housing in 2025

A mix of housing including townhomes, apartments and single family homes in North Salt Lake are pictured on Monday, July 15, 2024. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)

Heading into the Utah Legislature’s 2025 session, a big question was whether lawmakers would take more aggressive actions to tackle the state’s affordable housing crisis and whether they would preempt city powers to do it. 

The potential was there. At least two bills would have had major implications, aimed at requiring urban cities to allow smaller home types and smaller lots. 

But in the end, those bills didn’t advance. They came nowhere near the finish line. 

And another controversial bill to create a mighty new state agency called the Beehive Development Agency that would “coordinate” major economic development projects, including housing projects, was smothered in a cloud of controversy, leading lawmakers to abandon it for the time being. 

For a session underscored by a theme of control — of legislators exerting their power in a variety of policy areas, housing was not one of them. That’s even though housing affordability has ranked as a top concern among Utah voters, according to a report last year by the nonprofit Utah Foundation. 

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and legislative leaders have also listed Utah’s housing crisis as a top priority. But notably, rather than using a hammer (or aggressive statewide policies meant to force cities to allow more homes to be built), lawmakers in recent years have taken a gentler “collaborative” approach. They’ve focused on providing a variety of planning tools to incentivize cities and builders to build more owner-occupied, more affordable “starter homes.” 

This year was no different, when it came to the bills that actually became law.

However, impatience with Utah’s stubbornly high housing prices did fuel frustrations for some lawmakers, indicating that if the state doesn’t start seeing some significant movement on the issue soon, legislators may be more willing to take more drastic action in the future. 

Cities ‘jealously guard’ land use authority

Rep. Ray Ward, R-Bountiful, the lawmaker who sponsored the two preemptive bills that his colleagues rejected, put it this way when he knew his bills were about to fail in a House committee. He said the state is at a crossroads — it could either “find some way to allow more homes to be built for our children if we want them to still be here” or live with the expensive consequences.

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Ward wasn’t alone. Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, R-South Jordan, who co-sponsored Ward’s bill, had some frank comments for reporters during a Senate media availability on Feb. 27, as the 2025 session was coming to a close. 

“I do confess to this year being a little bit disappointed in what I felt like we were able to get done,” Fillmore said. “We’re getting some good policy in, but a lot of the proposals that really would have made a big difference in increasing supply have not passed, have not made it in the consensus bills that are (progressing).” 

Fillmore pointed specifically to Ward’s legislation as “good bills” that he would have liked to see pass. He boiled their failure down to local officials fighting against legislation that would preempt local planning authority. 

“I would say, cities very jealousy guard their ability to restrict the supply of housing,” Fillmore said, “and that is a challenge for people who want to build homes, for people who want to buy  homes, for people like us who are really interested in increasing the supply of housing.” 

Fillmore added that some cities, like his hometown of South Jordan, and Salt Lake City are “doing really great work” to increase affordable housing stock, but he said generally, “it’s been a little bit frustrating this year that really meaningful policies that (would) make a big difference in increasing the supply of (starter) homes just not have been able to move because of the roadblocks created by local governments.” 

The Utah League of Cities and Towns — which represents Utah’s local governments on Capital Hill — successfully warded off or watered down numerous bills this session that could have usurped local powers in one way or another. 

Cameron Diehl, executive director of the League, continually emphasized “partnership, not preemption.” And that message resonated with a majority of lawmakers. 

“While we certainly had disagreements on bills, we were always able to come back to those principles, and we felt like the final outcomes on most bills reflected more of a spirit of partnership,” Diehl said. 

In response to brewing frustrations showing at least some lawmakers have an appetite to take more aggressive actions, Diehl said when taken holistically, legislators’ efforts in recent years have amounted to significant progress on the issue — it just takes time to see the results. 

“Over the last few years we have passed a lot of important legislation in the spirit of partnership that we are actively implementing,” Diehl said, pointing to legislation passed in 2022 that required some cities to develop “station area plans” with housing projects oriented around transit hubs. 

“That is now starting to bear fruit, with a lot of housing units planned for near transit that otherwise may not have existed,” Diehl said. 

Diehl added that the League’s members — city officials — are, like lawmakers, concerned about the housing crisis. 

“But keep in mind that a lot of the causes of the housing crisis are outside of what the government can control,” he said. “We can’t control interest rates, can’t control inflation, can’t control tariffs, can’t control material costs, can’t control the labor shortage, and the cost of infrastructure has exploded in recent years.”

What local governments are responsible for, he said, are the “infrastructure and services that make communities desirable and livable,” and “that’s why, to us, it comes back to partnership, not preemption.” 

 “We’ve done some big things,” Diehl said. “We’ve just done it from the spirit of partnership.” 

While the slate of legislation this year was technical and wonky in nature, Diehl said it’ll still have an impact that will help streamline planning processes, create consistency for both cities and developers and, in the end, help increase the number of homes. 

“All the bills this session were focused to some degree on affordability, ownership, sustainable infrastructure, efficient land use processes and quality of life,” he said. “So I think long term, we will see benefits from these bills, improving housing affordability, particularly for owner-occupied housing.”

‘Hard discussions’ coming as statewide housing plan takes shape

Steve Waldrip, the governor’s senior housing adviser, acknowledged to Utah News Dispatch in a post-session interview that 2025 was sort of a “non-sexy” session when it came to housing bills. 

There were no big “signature policy pushes,” he said, though he added “part of that was intentional.” 

That’s because state leaders are in the process of developing and implementing a statewide housing plan, meant to set goals and metrics in order to accomplish Cox’s ambitious goal to facilitate the creation of 35,000 new starter homes by the end of 2028, as well as close a “gap” of homes the state is forecasted to have over the next decade. 

The state, according to an executive summary for the first phase of the plan, is projected to need 274,000 additional homes to meet demand over the next 10 years. However, the market is currently on pace to produce only 220,000 in that time frame. 

While the 2025 session produced some wonky housing bills, Waldrip said they’re still “really important” to create consistency for housing developers seeking approval for projects in varying cities. 

Waldrip also specifically pointed to HB360, which allows state funds to finance affordable “starter condos.” 

“That one will probably make the biggest difference long term,” he said. 

However, Waldrip said it will take time — likely years — for those new policies to result in actual homes.

“Housing is a slow burn issue,” he said. “We say, ‘OK, here’s a new tool, developers. And it takes them six months to digest it.” 

While lawmakers ultimately didn’t pass legislation that preempted cities, an appetite for that may be growing among some legislators. 

“Yeah, definitely,” Waldrip acknowledged. “There’s frustration in different corners.” 

There’s a hard reality that state and local leaders need to confront, he said. Local leaders often face “political blowback if they approve, for instance, any additional density. That’s just a reality in our structure.” 

“So that’s probably where the frustration comes to the forefront the most, that even the best actors feel like their hands are tied because their residents and their voters are very set against certain outcomes,” he said. “And that just creates a tension that is really difficult for state lawmakers who are looking at this issue from a state standpoint … saying this is our job to address this.” 

As state leaders work to develop the state housing plan, Waldrip said the goal is to “push those issues to the forefront.” He hopes that as all stakeholders (cities, counties, builders, lawmakers, and others) come to agree on shared goals, that the debate isn’t so focused on state versus cities, but rather what needs to be done to increase the number of homes in Utah. 

“That will drive some of the discussion so that it’s not frustrated lawmakers, you know, punching the League in the mouth and seeing if they win versus, ‘Hey, everybody recognizes that we need more starter homes,’” Waldrip said, as well as small-lot subdivisions and streamlined processes. “By setting that up as the lead-in to the rest of the discussion, you can’t ignore the fact that’s going to require some really, really hard things to have to happen.” 

So Waldrip said as state leaders draft the housing plan, they’ll be working to put together policy recommendations for lawmakers to consider ahead of the 2026 session that’s slated to begin in January. 

That debate didn’t happen during this year’s session to allow time during the interim “so we could really tee up those hard discussions out of the legislative session, where it’s not quite so heated, there’s not the time crunch, we can take some time to be deliberative about how we approach these issues,” Waldrip said. 

It remains to be seen what the statewide housing plan will entail, but that’s likely what could set off or at least preface some of the more significant housing policy changes next year or following years. 

Will Beehive Development Agency help implement statewide housing goals?

Waldrip was among those speaking in favor of the controversial bill to create the Beehive Development Agency as a tool to help Utah fix its housing crisis by creating a “consolidated spot for all of our housing policy to be decided as a state.” 

Though lawmakers abandoned that bill this year amid controversy that it would create too powerful of an agency, they told reporters they expect to continue to work on the bill and bring it back for consideration later on. 

Waldrip told Utah News Dispatch that something like Beehive Development Agency could be “a component” to implement a statewide housing plan, though he added “I don’t know that it’s necessary for success.”

“But it would be helpful to have the ability to manage regional projects like we manage other regionally significant economic development projects,” Waldrip said. 

Beehive Development Agency, he said, was “part of this larger discussion” of planning for “regionally significant projects” in order to meet the state’s need of 274,000 homes in the next 10 years. 

“Given that, what do we need to do to make that happen?” he said. “From a housing standpoint, do we have a structure in place that we can make good decisions, or do we have a structure that’s encouraging poor decisions?”

Additionally, something like the Beehive Development Agency could help address “frustration” from Utahns over a rapidly growing state that’s attracting plenty of jobs, but not factoring in housing needs as part of economic development strategies. 

“So putting housing into economic development and having it be a critical component of those economic development discussions, I don’t know anybody that would disagree with that as the policy goal,” he said. 

Waldrip said “unfortunately that got wrapped up” with controversy over the rest of the bill, but he added “that’s a critical thing that we have to address going forward.” 

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