Studio Crossing completed a bookend to Mayor Nann Worel’s political service in Park City last week as she cut the ribbon for the development’s first phase.
She began on the Planning Commission that handled the then-Utah Film Studios in 2013, one of those Legislature decrees not entirely unlike Dakota Pacific overruling local control, voted against an early hotel project on the site and eventually was delighted with the project she was blessing now.
Eventually there will be 208 homes, ranging from studios to three-bedroom apartments, for people who work in Park City.
“Everybody talks about how we can’t have our workforce live here because of the high cost of living and scarcity of affordable units,” she said. “And so this is super exciting for me today to think that we have 104 units ready to go, almost ready to have people move in, and then I heard about 200 people on the waiting list.”
Gary Crandall, head of Crandall Capital Development, looked about the three-story buildings forming a sort of triangle around a plaza that will be surrounded with restaurants and stores with a lot of glass on the ground level and apartments on the next two floors, as he thanked a host of city councilors, planning commissioners, city staff, builders, architects, bankers and Police Chief Wade Carpenter, who he called very helpful and told a story about the chief being interested in having a substation at Studio Crossing.
The look is modern, clean. The apartments are bright and clean in that brand new, no-furniture-yet way.
Police, firefighters, teachers and other frontline workers can find pleasant homes in the city where they work. That is the aim, anyway, and with costs tied to percentages of average median income to help make them affordable.
This is the largest affordable housing development in Park City’s history, and a key chunk of the city’s goal for 800 units by 2026. It’s also the least controversial of recent projects — EngineHouse in Bonanza Park and the current proposal for the 10 acres of Clark Ranch excluded from long-term open space protection in favor of affordable housing.
It’s also the least expensive for the city considering it’s a private development on private land.
Crandall rattled off some statistics when the development is complete: It will have 60,000 square feet of commercial space on the ground floors to with the affordable units as well as 100 market-rate townhomes and condiminiums.
He runs the company along with sons Ryan and Matthew.
“My colleague on the City Council, Steve Joyce, and I met with the Crandalls over Zoom during COVID and kind of came up with an idea of what might be built here that would be really valuable for Park City,” Worel said.
She called out the sons in the crowd, along with current council members Jeremy Rubell and Ed Parigian, who she and Gary Crandall credited for helping make the project come together, and relatively quickly since the ground-breaking in October 2023.
“I can’t tell you how exciting it is for me to be standing here today as someone in elected office,” she said at the beginning of her speech. “It’s really unusual to be part of a project all the way through.”
