The Heber City Council is getting schooled on affordable housing in a series of informative presentations that began on May 19.
The City Council’s professor is Jason Glidden, executive director of Mountainlands Community Housing Trust, who has put together a curriculum including lessons ranging from state legislation to federal funding tools.
The nine lessons will be taught at City Council meetings about once per month through January 2027 by instructors from the governor’s office, the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, the Utah Housing Corporation, development companies and more.
The City Council established an “Affordable Housing 101” as a top priority for 2026 during its annual retreat in January. The goal of the course is to give the City Council knowledge to facilitate more effective discussions around affordable housing.
The city will also be completing a housing needs assessment — which might also include Midway and the county — taking stock of population growth, the number of workforce members who are commuting and how many families are cost burdened.
“Add(ing) those three together is really how your needs are going to be determined,” Glidden explained.
That data will help determine how many affordable housing units the city needs at certain percentages of the area median income, or AMI. The AMI for a family of four in Wasatch County is $136,200. The federal government considers affordable housing to be affordable to a household making 80% AMI or less, Glidden explained.
In general, no more than 30% of a household’s income should be spent on housing, Glidden said.
The final project, so to speak, will be identifying the city’s goals around affordable housing and creating a strategic housing plan detailing ways to reach those goals.
For the City Council’s first lesson, Glidden provided background on Utah’s affordable housing shortage.
He said it all goes back to population growth.
Utah has grown from a population of nearly 2.8 million in 2010 to over 3.5 million in 2025, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Governor’s Office of Economic Development refers to Utah as the fastest-growing state in the nation “for the past two-plus decades.”
“This was forced by a really healthy job market, obviously, a beautiful place to live, high quality of life, and so we saw a pretty large population growth going all the way back to the early 2000s and even before that,” Glidden said.
The population growth and increased housing demand drove up housing prices and filled out much of the land left to build, Glidden explained, leading municipalities to become more restrictive around zoning and land use policy.
“Their zoning really restricted the ability to build affordable,” he said. “It promoted a lot of these larger lots and larger homes that were not necessarily affordable and prevented a lot of … density in areas that really needed it.”
Shellie Barrus, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Summit and Wasatch Counties, said in February that Heber City’s restrictive zoning requirements were a major reason the nonprofit had been unable to build a home in its latter area of service in the past decade.
Heber City has, however, made strides around zoning and density, the most notable being the adoption of the downtown Central Heber Overlay Zone last September. The zone allows for the development of small lots of underutilized land and allows property owners to build additional residential units on their properties.
Glidden said community members’ concerns about the density of affordable housing developments stonewall many projects.
This could be seen in the City Council’s negotiations with Garbett Homes in late 2025 and early this year. The developer initially proposed a community of 40 townhomes with five units priced at 80% AMI, but the affordable townhomes were eventually removed from the plan as neighbors raised concerns around density and the City Council whittled down the number of units, necessitating the developer to raise the price of each individual unit to cover development costs.
And those development costs, Glidden said, are an important factor in the equation. He said “everything across the board,” from costs of labor and materials to interest rates, has increased.
That includes impact fees, one-time fees levied by the city on new developments. Heber City increased its impact fees in February. According to city engineer Russ Funk, a developer now pays over $19,000 in impact fees per residential unit built, while they previously paid under $14,000.
Land, too, has become more expensive as it has become scarcer in Heber City.
“We’ve done an amazing job in this area of protecting open space, which is extremely important and really helps to preserve a lot of the character of this area and provide great recreational opportunities for everybody,” Glidden said. “At the same time, that reduced the amount of buildable space that we actually had.”
The final piece of the puzzle of why Heber City and the Wasatch Back as a whole have a housing shortage is changing demographics.
According to data from Mountainlands Community Housing Trust, Wasatch Back households making $75,000 or less annually have decreased by 17% since 2010, while households making $200,000 or more annually have increased by a whopping 291%.
“Folks that are not making that amount of money get driven out of the area,” Glidden said.
While total employment in the Wasatch Back has increased 46% since 2010, commuters account for 70% of that growth, Glidden said.
As the income of the average homebuyer in the Wasatch Back has increased, so has the AMI and the price of homes in the area. The market demand in the Wasatch Back is for luxury housing, not entry-level housing, Glidden said.
“I think the largest reason (Utah has an affordable housing shortage) is that we started to build too big, to be honest with you,” Glidden said. “We got away from building affordable units.”
City Councilor Mike Johnston agreed.
“We sure did. I mean, you look at what your grandparents lived in, and parents, and then me?” he said. “My kids have gone backwards. They live in basement apartments now.”
The next “Affordable Housing 101” lesson will be about financial modeling, or how a developer makes an affordable housing project pencil. That lesson will be taught by Glidden as well as Ryan Davis, an affordable housing consultant with Wayfinder Strategies, and Tony Tyler from Wasatch Back development company Columbus Pacific. The lesson will likely be during the June 16 City Council meeting.