A developer’s bid to create customized zoning in Sugar House to build a boxy 14-story apartment tower has drawn an adamant thumbs-down from Salt Lake City leaders.
Though city planners backed the idea of adding the new zone to allow more height and density on a key intersection of that growing east-side neighborhood, after two hours of testimony and debate, the planning commission unanimously urged Thursday that the City Council turn it down.
“In the 30 years since I’ve been reviewing land use projects,” said Judi Short with the Sugar House Community Council, “this is the first time I’ve ever seen a developer write their own zone and then ask you to approve it so they could build what they want to build.”
(Harbor Bay Ventures) A screen-captured rendering of an apartment tower proposed by developer Harbor Bay Ventures for the corner of Highland Drive and 2100 South in Salt Lake City's Sugar House neighborhood.
Officials with Illinois-based Harbor Bay Ventures told the commission their proposed new flavor of mixed-use zoning would let them go taller, add more dwellings and streamline parking requirements at that corner of Highland Drive and 2100 South, where a former Wells Fargo drive-thru bank now sits vacant.
More importantly, Harbor Bay said, a tailor-made district for that 1.22-acre spot would foster sustainable construction of its residential tower using mass timber — a promising approach for layering premade wood panels into strong, eco-friendly structures that lowers carbon emissions, build times and labor costs.
City policy lacks a framework for encouraging this method of sustainable building, said Jason Boal, an urban planner working for the firm, “so that’s really what we’re looking to do ... to build a project that makes sense and adds value to the community and is a benefit to the city.”
‘Density helps those things’
In addition to promoting sustainability, adding the tower to Sugar House, Boal said, would boost struggling nearby businesses, reduce the space devoted on parking stalls and increase mass transit use, relieving traffic congestion.
“Density helps those things,” Boal, a planner with the Salt Lake City business law firm Snell & Wilmer, said. “You have to have residents there. It’s plain and simple.”
It’s unclear how many apartments its zoning plan would yield — or how many of them, if any, Harbor Bay planned to make available with more affordable rents. Under its existing Central Sugar House Business District zoning, roughly 229 apartments would be allowed.
(Harbor Bay Ventures) A screen-captured rendering of an apartment tower proposed by developer Harbor Bay Ventures for the corner of Highland Drive and 2100 South in Salt Lake City's Sugar House neighborhood.
The requested MU-15 zoning would also include key bonuses and rewards for the developer. Not least of those is an allowance on building heights of 155 feet — or up to 185 feet, or roughly 17 stories, if all of the new zone’s proposed incentives were used.
Harbor Bay officials said Thursday the company was shooting for 14 stories.
That is far lower than what the company suggested in February, when its tentative idea for a tower up to 305 feet high brought howls of opposition from community members and business owners who feared it might wreck the distinct vintage feel of what is sometimes called the city’s second downtown.
Harbor Bay, which purchased the property in early 2023, then spent months revamping its plans in collaboration with city staffers.
To a few guffaws from the audience, Steve Willobee, Harbor Bay’s vice president of government and public relations, retreated Thursday evening from the notion the company ever actually sought to go 305 feet high, calling that “a placeholder.”
“Naively on my part,” Willobee acknowledged. “That number was incredibly high.”
Still, 14 stories is much taller than many of the buildings and homes immediately surrounding that fringe between Sugar House’s growing commercial district and residential areas to the north.
‘Not financially viable’
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Sugar House businesses are pictured near 2100 South along Highland Drive in March 2024.
Willobee called the added height the company was seeking with its new MU-15 zoning proposal “pure economics.”
Mass timber and the new zoning allowance, he said, would let the firm go above what’s known as podium construction possible with concrete and steel, letting it build more dwellings on the property, using better and more efficient designs.
The proposal got battered in public testimony, with about a dozen neighbors and members of the Sugar House Community Council decrying its potential negative impacts.
Michael Rubin, a 25-year resident, said the proposal was a major departure from Sugar House’s own master plan and threatened to substantially change the area’s character. Tweaking zoning just to make the project more financially tenable, he said, wasn’t a valid argument.
“If buildings that use sustainable practices are not financially viable at current height allowances,” Rubin said, “then the appropriate conclusion is that those buildings aren’t financially viable in Sugar House.”
Short, who guides land use review for the community council, said the developer’s vision for luring mixed-income residents to its apartment tower who then would commute via TRAX and the nearby S-Line streetcar or work in Sugar House was “a neat pipe dream.”
“Maybe,” she said, “all the rich people will live in this building.”
Devon Zander, a Sugar House resident, was the lone public speaker in favor. As a renter, he said it was in the city’s interest to approve the zoning to make more housing options available in the neighborhood and emphasize walkability.
‘Spot zoning’
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Wells Fargo Bank on 2100 South 1100 East in Sugar House in 2022.
Another community council trustee, Lynn Schwarz, called Harbor Bay’s proposal an example of “spot zoning at its finest, which is not acceptable in any zoning plan.”
Others noted that the city has a separate initiative underway to simplify and consolidate its long list of mixed-use zoning types into a half-dozen or so streamlined zones, with a view to making its planning and property rules easier to navigate.
Bim Oliver, a historic preservationist, said adding another zoning type now “flies in the face” of that goal. “More to the point,” Oliver said, “the proposed subdistrict is self-serving, and it sets a problematic precedent.”
Planning Commissioner Amy Barry’s motions urging denial of Harbor Bay’s requests to change the city’s zoning text as well as the Sugar House community master plan pointed to traffic congestion, exceeding utility capacity, the project being out of scale with its surroundings — and its perceived lack of overall community benefits — as reasons to reject it.
The seven members present all then voted to recommend the City Council deny the requests.
Before her vote, Commissioner Aimee Burrows nonetheless encouraged Harbor Bay to bring another proposal forward in the future. “I hope that you build a huge, beautiful, mass-timber building right there,” she said, “with tons of residents and no parking.”