Seeking to increase the supply of housing in the city’s current footprint, the City Council has recently approved, on single-family-detached R-1 zoning, density bonuses for providing affordable homes or reusing an existing primary structure. In addition, it has approved ADUs citywide–as long as owner-occupants are in place.

Now, City Hall is considering a nascent proposal for a small-scale housing option that would allow the subdivision of existing single-family lots while limiting the size of dwellings that could be built there.

Smaller homes on smaller lots equal lower prices, and provide the “starter homes,” priced between $300,000 and $500,000, that are largely missing in the current urban market.

A recent City Council briefing from the Planning Division found a Council in apparent agreement about providing more housing, but mainly housing that is more affordable than current market rates in demand-heavy Utah. 

The tension between allowing more density in the R-1 single-family-detached zones to create more supply and the unintended consequence of stimulating corporate investors to maximize square footage by demolishing existing housing to build McMansions, has sat squarely at the forefront of the Council’s attempts at reaching consensus on single-family zoning reform.  

The stakes are not insignificant: R-1 zoning covers a majority of the area in the city zoned for housing.  

Let’s take a look at the latest ideas being considered at City Hall to stimulate missing-middle housing through zoning reform. 

First, some history of local zoning

While neighborhood preservationists may like to think that single-family-detached zoning is a natural, original condition of the city, history teaches us otherwise.

In his presentation to the City Council, Planning Director Nick Norris shared the fruits of his staff’s research into the history of 20th-century land use rules in the residential zones of the city.

Strikingly, there was no exclusively residential zone until 1948. Up to then, the city’s first residential zone, created in 1927 as part of the first city-wide zoning code (creating six zones in all), was called Residential “A”. It allowed single-family detached, duplexes, boarding houses, and student dorms.

That 1948 first single-family-only residential zone, termed “AA,” was created for Federal Heights, at that time the city’s most exclusive neighborhood. “AA” was refined and renamed R-1 in 1958.

In 1994, R-1 was expanded to Capitol Hill, west of Redwood Road, some of Glendale and East of Foothill Boulevard.

Then, in the great downzone of 1995, almost all of the city’s R-2 zoning, which allows duplexes (i.e. 2-family homes) was changed to R-1 (single-family-detached). According to Director Norris, that included “most of the Poplar Grove, Glendale, Fairpark, and Rose Park neighborhoods, including most of the Central City neighborhoods up to the East Bench, and including south into Sugar House.”

As stated in staff materials from April 2024, “the 1995 Zoning Rewrite downzoned a significant amount of land within the city by rezoning mostly R-2 land to one of the new R-1 zones. After the zoning rewrite, most residential areas were rezoned to one of six single- family zoning classifications: R-1/5,000, R-1/7,000, R-1/12,000, FR-1/43,560, FR-2/21,780 and FR-3/12,000.” 

The latest idea

Planning staff presented the positives and negatives of a variety of reforms previously suggested by the council, like lowering requirements for lot sizes and widths, as well as allowing attached single-family housing (townhomes, row houses) in R-1 zones, from which those missing-middle types are currently banned.

Staffers concluded that the analysis showed little potential for reaching the Council’s affordability and housing supply goals.

But research into recent changes made in Durham, NC surfaced an option that intrigued both staff and electeds. 

Durham, home to Duke University and historical color-line residential segregation and related inequities, has undergone significant reinvestment and gentrification in recent decades.

There, a small-lot infill ordinance that allows subdivision of single-family lots to permit homes with a maximum of a 800 sf footprint and total floor area of 1200 sf on lots that previously allowed only one primary structure, the single-family detached house.

Depending on the size of the existing primary structure and the lot, that would likely enable one or at the most two additional structures.

Parking and access issues, not addressed in the briefing, would need to be addressed. The city currently requires one off-street space per unit in R-1. In addition, many new lots would be “flag lots,” not having frontage on a street.

But if the City can figure it out, the number of housing units to be added doesn’t look insignificant.

Durham’s changes, adopted in 2019, created over 200 new small-lot homes over a four-year period.

Senior Planner Aaron Barlow told the Council that demolitions in Durham peaked in 2019, the year the changes were implemented, and have been declining since.

In addition, the Durham example may be able to assuage the Council’s worries about affordability and equity. Planners report that of the 215 new small-scale homes that were built between 2019 and 2023, “four times as many were built in lower wealth areas versus higher wealth areas.”

Prices in Durham for the typical single-family home averaged $605,000, while the new small lot homes averaged $348,000 in sales price.

Council reception

Darin Mano (D5) has been a central advocate for extending pro-housing zoning to the city’s single-family residential zones. 

“Unti today,” he told his colleagues, “I was going to recommend that we go to FB-UN-1,” meaning swapping out R-1 zoning for the formed-based code common in Central 9th. 

It allows structures up to 30 feet and a variety of housing types, including urban houses, 2-flats, cottages and row houses.

“But now,” Council Member Mano stated, “[I see that] we can keep the R-1 zones, and give an owner the choice to build a larger, single home or multiple homes of a smaller size.”

“So, if we say, ‘Stick with the old rules, if you want to build anything of X square footage, but if you’re willing to do smaller houses, here’s a whole new set of rules (which aren’t’ new, because they exist in Central 9th and Central City)’…I think that might accomplish a lot,” Mano concluded.

Mano’s not alone in the quest for more housing and affordability. But he’s met skeptics among his colleagues, and not just from the single-family bastions of the Avenues (D3), East Bench (D6), and Sugar House (D7). 

West side council members, especially D1’s Victoria Petro, have supported pro-housing zoning reform while questioning whether it was providing affordability or adding to displacement.

Petro, Council Chair, audibly breathed “YES” into her microphone when Mano affirmed the potential of the small-lot infill Durham example, proposing “If we can, with whatever change we agree on, can say ‘more housing, but more housing that is actually affordable’.”

Petro followed, “The free market has taken care of people who are living at 150% of the AMI and above. But the teachers living at 80% of AMI have been left behind. Whatever gets us to the missing middle.”

Addressing some councilors’ worries about institutional investors overrunning the city’s single-family zones, Planner Norris tried to assuage fears.

“The small lot, small home type of approach opens up individual property owners, who might have had no intention of building a second home on their property, but they have this big lot where they could easily fit something, to find someone with the capital to do it.”

Several council members asked for more details on that figure–individual versus corporate investors–and displacement numbers. But the potential of the small-lot, small-house option seemed enticing to nearly all. 

A future briefing, likely in the new year, will hopefully bring more clarity to the Council, enough to vote for what would be a significant improvement in infill zoning policy. 

Email Luke Garrott