Summit County is seeking applicants for its annual Community Planning Lab, an 11-week program designed to teach residents about local land use decisions while fostering community engagement.

“It’s going to go through everything from the history of planning to housing affordability, recreation, open space and transportation, which includes cars, walking trails and all of those things,” said Elizabeth Williams, the county planner organizing this year’s classes. “We’re also talking about how to have more meaningful engagement in our public hearings.”

The group will meet for an hour and a half every Monday from Feb. 23 to May 4. Guest speakers, such as Park City Planning Director Rebecca Ward and Summit County Community Planning Development Director Peter Barnes, will lead classes and facilitate conversations with participants for the first nine weeks.

The tenth scheduled meeting is a panel discussion, and the final day of the program is dedicated to students’ project presentations.

“All of the participants of the Planning Lab will be presenting their own projects of what they’ve learned and what changes they would like to make,” Williams said. “Some of these projects in the past have actually become code changes, so it is a chance to have an impact on our community.”

Williams said the classes will cover a variety of land use topics, including the history of planning and zoning, sustainable development, private-public partnerships and affordable housing.

“Hopefully, we’ll give people tools to then become more involved, whether they want to run for public office or just want a greater understanding when they come to public hearings,” she said.

The program is beneficial for all Summit County residents, though, even if they don’t have time to be civically engaged in their typical day-to-day life, Williams said. Planning and zoning laws affect everyone in the county, determining where grocery stores are located, whether an area has sidewalks or the proximity of parks to residential neighborhoods.

“These are all issues that impact us individually,” Williams said. “It’s worth getting involved in because that’s how you change things. That’s how we can get more affordable places to live or create spaces where you actually want to spend time on your day off. We can help people see that they have the power to be able to create a better life for themselves by becoming involved in planning.”

The application to join this year’s Community Planning Lab is available online and closes on Feb. 4. Williams said the questions largely focus on the applicant’s interests rather than prior qualifications or experience.

“We’re trying to get a sense of why people want to take the class because we can tailor it more if we know their reasoning,” Williams said. “We’re trying to get to know the applicants through this process. What is it that’s driving your interest in planning? Then we can find out if there are things we can focus our classes on a little bit more.”

Williams said the program is also helpful for county staff because it increases the community’s understanding of land use decisions, which leads to more productive conversations during public hearings.

“Transparency makes things better, and it makes me better as a planner when people understand my job,” she said. “I don’t want it to be like we’re behind the curtain orchestrating things that don’t make sense to people. I want it to be a transparent process where they can be engaged and ask insightful questions that might make me look at an issue from a different point of view.”

Information on the Community Planning Lab, including the syllabus and examples of reading assignments, is available online by visiting summitcountyutah.gov/2329/Community-Planning-Lab-Classroom.

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What does affordable housing realistically look like in Summit County?

It’s a big question plaguing officials from Park City to Henefer to the County Courthouse. It pops up in almost every municipal city council meeting, county council meeting and issue of The Park Record. Is it possible to cater to tourists who desire second homes and a plethora of short-term rentals while still allowing locals to live and work in the area without bending over backward for a multi-million dollar home?

Officials and organizations across the county are still working on finding an answer, but two members of this year’s Community Planning Lab cohort have some new suggestions: intentional communal housing and pre-fabricated structures.

The Community Planning Lab, an annual program led by the Summit County Planning Department, teaches interested community members about planning decisions and the behind-the-scenes of local government. The 11-week class culminates in a final project related to planning and development based on participants’ interest.

This year’s projects included proposals to install more visible crosswalks in the Kimball Junction area and a recreational trail connecting the Salt Lake Valley to Park City, but more than one participant decided to focus on affordable housing solutions — a theme that reflects the County Courthouse’s and local community’s commitment to and concern regarding the lack of accessible housing for locals in lower tax brackets.

“I’ve always been interested in communal housing or intentional communities,” explained Alix Suter, a Park City Chamber of Commerce employee and Community Planning Lab student. “I visited one in Australia when I was studying abroad in 2015, and the concept just seemed like an easy yes to me. It helps alleviate so many pinchpoints that we currently have in our society, including in Park City, especially when it relates to loneliness, lack of childcare, lack of elder care, lack of communal resources and sharing despite everyone liking to do all these similar activities.”

Communal housing refers to the practice of sharing labor, whether physical or emotional, with one’s neighbors. People living in communal housing projects share common spaces, such as libraries, childcare facilities and storage areas, while still having their own room, albeit with a much smaller square footage.

Suter described the idea as a built-in support system.

“Maybe you’re a parent, and you’re so much more flexible with how you get to work and organize your day and your life because there are people there to help you with childcare and dogsitting,” she said. “Maybe someone in the community can help you repair your bike rather than having to pay to take it to the shop, or maybe you’re an older person and you don’t need to live in your three-bedroom apartment anymore, but perhaps you could move into a studio and still be alongside the community that you’ve lived in for your whole life.”

The responsibilities of each individual would depend on the specific community and the person’s own set of skills, but in the Summit County area, an easy example of someone’s “sweat labor,” as Suter called it, would be shoveling snow.

“That in and of itself is radical because you’re reducing your cost to an external landscaping company, so you’ve got your cost savings there, but you’re also doing something physical, and it’s team building because you’re with your neighbors working to do this task,” Suter said.

The 30-acre Cline Dahle property in Jeremy Ranch is an ideal spot for a communal housing project in Summit County, Suter added. She said she envisioned a private-public partnership between the County Courthouse and a developer interested in encouraging and building an affordable housing neighborhood with a community-centered philosophy.

The hypothetical housing in Suter’s project included a mix of apartments and townhomes, ranging from studios to three-bedroom units, but no traditional single-family houses.

“The location is really unique because you’re right next to the Jeremy Ranch Elementary School. You’re right next to the Jeremy Ranch park and ride. You’re really close to all of the resources of the Pinebrook Macy’s shopping development and the hardware store and food and beverage options just across the way there,” Suter said. “You also have great access to a paved bike trail right there, so the site itself is a really cool opportunity because of how connected it is already to these external resources. If you lived there, you wouldn’t have to travel far necessarily to meet all of your needs in a single day.”

Troy Rushton, another Community Planning Lab student who works in financial services, took a slightly different approach than Suter for his final project. He focused on the cost of building a home and explored the idea of pre-fabricated and modular structures as a method to decrease prices for families who want to purchase land to build a single-family residence.

“I started thinking, ‘Well, is there some opportunity for the county and even some of the cities to think about how to incorporate more of these newer types of manufactured homes if they really are cheaper? And if they are cheaper, could that help increase the affordability of some of the housing in the county?’” Rushton explained. “We’ve got pretty high land costs, and there’s not a lot we can do about that, but for the house itself, if you can have any sort of cost savings at all, it might help.”

There are two different types of pre-fabricated homes: manufactured and modular.

Rushton said manufactured homes are essentially what people think of when imagining a traditional mobile home, although advancements in technology and design allow companies to add more components like garages. The structure is manufactured in a factory and then transported to a specific plot of land.

“Those probably had the biggest savings. You might be able to save up to 50% versus the traditional on-site, stick-built house of a similar square footage, so they have the greatest savings, but they’re still not anywhere near a custom home,” Rushton said. “You have to consider whether they’d fit into the local environment and things like that, too.”

Modular homes, meanwhile, are built in sections and are much more customizable in terms of size and materials, which means they range in price more than manufactured homes. Rushton estimated a modular home allows owners to save 15% to 20% compared to homes built on-site with a similar square footage.

Rushton said he wanted to research the logistics of creating an entire neighborhood with pre-fabricated homes, but the profitability doesn’t appear monumental enough for developers who would prefer to build affordable housing apartments with more units instead.

“I think anything you can do to help bring down the cost and still build a high-quality structure would be worth considering,” he added. “You’ve got to provide some incentive to do that because a developer’s incentive currently is to build the biggest, most profitable house possible, and there seems to be no end to the demand for that in western Summit County.”

As an alternative, Rushton suggested placing a few different pre-fabricated homes on small plots of land owned by the county. That approach would allow the government to regulate the homes’ affordability and help low-income families qualify for housing.

“I did notice one other interesting thing while I was researching, and that’s that there are homes available on Amazon, Walmart and Home Depot,” Rushton said. “They look like modular homes, and the one on Amazon didn’t have much information, but it was a house you could buy that was anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 square feet. It started out at $50,000 for 1,200 square feet, which is $42 a square foot, so that was by far the cheapest home per square foot that I found.”

The website didn’t provide any details on how the home would be delivered or if a contractor was needed to help set it up, but Rushton said it was an interesting idea to explore for people who want to become homeowners at a lower cost.

This isn’t the first year housing has been a popular topic for Community Planning Lab students.

The newly established Summit County Housing Authority started as a Community Planning Lab final project, and the Summit County Council recently finalized the organization’s inaugural board of commissioners.

The housing authority’s goal is to provide medium- to low-income residents with resources to find housing within their price range in addition to tracking housing trends throughout the county and incentivizing moderate-income housing.

The organization will serve mostly as a resource to the County Courthouse and Summit County residents, or potential residents, as the area navigates development and growth. It will not necessarily be in charge of land use decisions or authorizing development projects. Instead, the housing authority will work with other nonprofits, developers and landlords to provide and incentivize the creation of affordable housing units.

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The Community Planning Lab, an 11-week class facilitated by the Summit County Planning Department, returns for a fourth year this spring. The county is accepting applications from community members interested in learning more about planning decisions and how local government works.

“We want to be able to give community members the chance to learn more about what’s happening so that they can feel empowered to have a voice in the process, participate throughout and be able to make more of an impact on the future of their community based on this deeper knowledge of what it is that is happening behind the scenes,” said county planner Maddy McDonough.

McDonough, who helped create and design the course, said participants don’t need to be a resident of the county as long as they’re a community stakeholder in some way, such as an employee, volunteer, property owner or business owner. Planning Lab graduates have gone on to join the Snyderville Basin and eastern Summit County planning commissions, advisory boards and the Summit County Council.

“This will be the fourth cohort of Planning Lab students,” McDonough said. “We started in 2023, and the reason behind this is we were getting a lot of feedback from the community that there was a lack of understanding of how the processes worked, how people could be involved, and our hope was to build a deeper understanding, as well as building trust between the community and county staff, through this process.”

Inspired by similar community courses throughout the country, McDonough worked on developing a curriculum in 2022 with a University of Utah student.

“We’ve been modifying the class based on feedback ever since,” McDonough said. “We’ve also been really fortunate to have community leaders and staff members who have been willing to present to the class on topics that they are experts on. That’s been really helpful to make sure that the class is really robust and that folks are hearing from a lot of different voices.”

The class starts with an overview of the history of planning in the United States before going into the specifics of planning and zoning in Summit County.

“Then we talk about the differences between land-use planning and zoning and different zoning districts within Summit County so that community members can understand the long-term goals, as well as what’s immediately applicable to their community,” McDonough explained.

The Community Planning Lab also covers transportation planning, affordable housing and sustainable development. 

Sustainable development is important to understanding the landscape of Summit County planning and zoning because of the community and local government’s focus on natural resources and recreation in the area, according to McDonough.

“We have a panel discussion towards the end of the class where community members can ask questions,” she said. “In the past, we’ve had the deputy county manager on the panel, a member of the County Council, members of the Planning Commission, as well as staff. They can ask questions about what’s coming up and how they can be involved and get some deeper perspective on the county.”

The class will meet every Monday night from 6 to 8:30 beginning March 3 and ending May 19. Depending on the agenda for the session, the class will either meet online or in-person at various locations throughout Summit County, typically in Coalville or Kimball Junction.

The time commitment outside of class includes 30 to 60 minutes of preparation with suggested readings, videos or podcasts to help deepen class discussions, McDonough said.

The Planning Lab ends with a final project, based on participants’ interests, that will be presented to the community.

“We’ve had projects that have been really specific. We had one community member who wanted to change the definition of a steep slope in the development code. We’ve also had projects that were a little more broad, one of which is now coming to fruition. We had a few members of the Planning Lab present on the need for a housing authority in Summit County, and that’s actually now starting to come together, so that’s really exciting,” McDonough explained.

The class is free, and anyone who is interested can submit an application online at summitcounty.info/planninglab. The window to apply closes on Jan. 27 at 5 p.m.

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