S.L. housing debated

As the Salt Lake City Council has revised its housing policy — the guiding document for projects that request city money — it has faced criticism from low-income housing advocates who say the document does not do enough to protect their clients.

Yet council members counter that the draft policy protects Salt Lake City's neighborhoods and actually encourages more low-income development. The council will consider the proposed policy during a meeting in January.

The council wants to avoid creating pockets of low-income housing that would give a neighborhood a bad reputation and scare away retailers and other developers. To balance, council members favor including market-rate housing within developments that also have income-restricted housing.

"We're concerned as a council that just having that one type of housing concentrated in a particular area will tend to not be sustainable," said Eric Jergensen, who sat on the subcommittee that redrafted the housing policy over the past several months. "The city needs to focus on providing opportunities for housing that would allow for people of all demographies to be able to afford housing."

Functionally, that means encouraging more development such as the Jefferson School Apartments at 1011 S. West Temple. The project has 84 low-income rental units interspersed with 84 market-rate rentals. Rosemary Kappes, the executive director of the Salt Lake City Housing Authority, said that project has jump-started a forgotten neighborhood and spurred further growth, including 24 new condominiums a block away.

"With mixed-income . . . your curb appeal has to be good, and your management has to be good," Kappes said. "Folks won't come and rent from you if not."

To Nancy Saxton, another member of the council subcommittee, this housing policy will better manage neighborhood reputations by putting the city on record as supporting the mixed-income development, which will then rub off on developers.

"If we can help with that, meaning that if we can create a climate that is desirable for everybody to come into, that suddenly makes their jobs easier," Saxton said. Builders can "not look at an area and say, 'This is a low-income area.' They can find areas that they want to come into."

Including market-rate housing in projects may revitalize areas, but low-income housing advocates want to make sure that their work doesn't get overlooked in the push for mixed-income projects.