Park City is currently engaged in two disputes regarding potential workforce or otherwise income-restricted housing developments involving the municipal government.
One of them would be on land owned by the municipal government in Bonanza Park while the other would be built on other municipal acreage close to the S.R. 248 entryway known as Clark Ranch.
Both of them have encountered organized resistance, illustrating how difficult the development of workforce housing can become in Park City. The two efforts are just the most recent examples of strained discussions about housing projects in the city.
As officials begin an exercise designed to review the housing potential for various other tracts of municipal land, there could be lessons to be learned from the past nearly 30 years of housing work inside Park City. Progress was measured in some cases. The challenges in other instances proved to be insurmountable.
Scott Loomis was one of the figures heavily involved in the housing efforts for upward of 20 years. As the executive director of Mountainlands Community Housing Trust, a not-for-profit organization, Loomis aggressively pursued opportunities inside the Park City limits as well as surrounding Summit County. He retired in 2021, returned on a volunteer basis to lead the organization for eight months or so ending in 2024 and then went back to his retirement.
Two projects in Park City during his tenure were especially notable and highlight the complexity of developing workforce housing in the community. One was scrapped amid resistance while the other was ultimately constructed.
“I’ve got mine. We don’t want anything around it,” Loomis said in an interview on Monday as he described the thinking of opponents to housing projects.
A dispute that unfolded in 2002, in the months after the Winter Olympics, centered on land in the area of Chatham Crossing, on the edge of Prospector. That concept included 15 townhomes and lots for two houses on five acres. The townhomes were designed to be income-restricted units, and the lots would have been sold at market rates, with the proceeds to be put toward the construction of the project.
There was bitter opposition, especially from people who lived or had places nearby. Mountainlands Community Housing Trust withdrew the application when it appeared a negative recommendation from the Park City Planning Commission for a necessary change in the underlying zoning on the land was nearly certain. Loomis at the time described some of the public comments as “elitist and racist” as well as “appalling.” Some of the concern from the neighborhood dealt with the possibility of falling property values should the project be built.
“They just equated that with ‘those people,’” Loomis said on Monday about the opposition to the project, recalling that Latino people began arriving in Park City in large numbers in the 1990s.
He said there was a perception that crime rates would rise and insurance premiums would increase as a result of a development.
Loomis, though, also said the anticipated buyers would have been teachers, firefighters and government employees.
But Mountainlands Community Housing Trust just a few years later successfully developed a project inside the Park City limits. The concept for the Line Condominiums on Deer Valley Drive encountered resistance, but the concerns did not influence major changes to the 22-unit project. The construction, though, eventually stretched far longer than anticipated. The delays pushed up the costs and the eventual sale prices, but the project has been occupied for 20 years.
Housing has been one of the overriding issues in Park City since the 1990s, when extraordinary growth created affordability pressures in the real estate and rental markets. Many rank-and-file members of the workforce were priced out of the community, leading to concerns about an increase in commuter traffic and a decrease in socioeconomic diversity. The municipal government itself sought opportunities for projects even as Mountainlands Community Housing Trust was also advancing the work. The concerns have essentially continued without interruption for the past three decades, but the worries seemed to become magnified during a pandemic-driven real estate boom.
The municipal government’s work is some of the highest profile that is underway in the period after the pandemic, as leaders attempt to provide options for the workforce. A Clark Ranch project would place more housing in the area of another significant bloc of income-restricted units in Park City Heights. A Bonanza Park project, stretching inward from the southwest corner of the intersection of Kearns Boulevard and Bonanza Drive, would have housing and other aspects like retailers, restaurants, cafes, art spaces for not-for-profit organizations, a childcare location and park space.
Both of the efforts have spurred organized opposition. Critics of a project at Clark Ranch want the land to be preserved as open space while those worried about a development in Bonanza Park are pressing leaders to instead create a park on the land.
Loomis, now living in Tucson, Arizona, in his comments on Monday offered advice to the municipal government after having experienced the uncertainties of developing housing in Park City.
“They need to keep doing what they’re doing,” he said. “Don’t give up. Do what you know is right.”