Parkites are undoubtedly worried about housing prices in the state’s most expensive real estate market, wondering whether they will be priced out.
And they also are leery of the traffic backups in the community as they inch along during the busiest times.
City Hall recently released a broad reading of the sentiments of Park City residents that delves into numerous topics, many of which have driven the community dialogue for years. The National Community Survey, which was conducted in late 2022 and early 2023, essentially confirms the long-running concerns in Park City about topics like housing, affordability and traffic.
In some cases, the survey shows, the concern has deepened in the last five years, while other results were effectively a free-fall over an 11-year period between the survey in 2011 and the one conducted recently. The drop has been gradual in other instances. The survey addressed certain topics for the first time, and some of those results were also poor.
The worst showing centered on the cost of living in Park City. The resort-driven real estate and rental markets have for decades pushed up Park City’s cost of living, and both have risen since the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. There has been a sense the affordability of Park City, a difficult topic even before the pandemic, has become even more grave since the community emerged from the coronavirus-forced shutdowns in the spring of 2020. Inflation likely played a part in the worry about cost of living, but there was concern about the topic as well during the many years when consumer-price increases were moderate.
The survey’s percent positive metric, indicating responses of excellent or good, cratered to 12% in response to a query about cost of living. The figure was a drop of 14 percentage points from the 26% tallied in 2013, itself a noticeably low showing. The number consistently dropped over the course of four surveys between 2013 and 2022.
The cost of living in Park City particularly impacts members of the rank-and-file workforce, who are more apt to struggle to afford housing inside the city limits. Even as City Hall and others have made progress over time on workforce or otherwise income-restricted housing, the real estate and rental markets remain extraordinarily tight.
The concern about the real estate and rental situation was expressed in another of the survey questions, which inquired about the availability of affordable quality housing. The percent positive figure was 13%, half of the 26% tallied in 2011 and the lowest of the five surveys since then. A question about the variety of housing options returned a 22% positive result, up slightly from 2017 but down sharply from earlier surveys.
Traffic-related questions also garnered poor responses from Parkites. Traffic is another frustrating issue for people who live in Park City, as backups on the entryways worsened and drivers overwhelmed parts of the city. One of the questions centered on the flow of traffic on major streets. It received a 25% positive result, the lowest of the five surveys since 2011 and down 43 percentage points since 2011. The figure, though, stabilized from the 27% in 2017.
The ease of travel by car received a 41% positive result, down 34 percentage points from the 75% in 2011. The ease of other means of transportation — public transit, bicycling and walking — all suffered drops in the percent positive ratings over time, though bicycling and walking remained strong.
The results are based on 972 responses, split nearly evenly between surveys in the mail and those taken online. The mailed responses have a 4.4% margin of error.