If you’re a renter in Salt Lake City and fearful of losing your home, there’s a new lifeline.
More than two years after a shocking study found widespread displacement among residents who are tenants — especially families of color and those making working-class incomes — the city is offering a hub for accessing new tools and resources to support renters and, in some cases, give them cash assistance.
Mayor Erin Mendenhall and other partners celebrated the launch of a Tenant Resource Center on Wednesday, billing it as a one-stop shop connecting struggling renters with a handful of friendly navigators to guide them through their challenges.
What the city is calling an “action-oriented” portal linking to loads of information, services and applications for financial aid can be reached online at www.slc.gov/renters or via a hotline staffed during regular business hours at 801-893-3779.
You can also connect in person at 501 E. 1700 South, where the city’s nonprofit partner in running the center, Community Development Corporation of Utah, keeps its offices.
Under a second program called RAFT — short for relocation assistance fund for tenants — Utah’s capital has set aside $180,000 for direct aid to renters being displaced under certain circumstances to help them cover items such as rental application fees, security deposits, first and last months’ rents, and moving expenses.
The center and RAFT are cornerstones of Thriving in Place, a wide-ranging suite of policies adopted a year ago in hopes of stabilizing renters and increasing the construction and preservation of affordable housing across the city.
Thanks to copious input from residents, Mendenhall said, Thriving in Place had produced a kind of master plan for “all of the ways that a city can possibly engage to keep people in housing.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall speaks at a 2022 news conference at City Hall on transitional housing.
“And when we can’t,” the mayor said, “how do we help you be in a community you want to be in, and that’s affordable for you and your family?”
She and City Council Chair Victoria Petro said the center and pool of RAFT money was part of City Hall’s sharpened focus on supporting the needs of those renting their homes, who now make up a slight majority of all city residents.
Petro called the intertwined strategies “a meaningful grassroots intervention” and said they put proper attention on supporting residents vital to the workforce:
“The people who are Salt Lake City,” she said. “The people who have always been the engine that makes the city great. ... The people who show up for us day after day after day — and are struggling.”
New renter focus ‘really positive’
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rental signs are pictured in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024. Salt Lake City is launching new resources and limited rental assistance to help the city's struggling renters.
A longtime advocate for unsheltered Utahns, Bill Tibbetts with Urban Crossroads Center, said the new programs were something housing advocates had urged the city for decades to create.
He said it was “really, really positive that this is happening.”
According to Todd Reeder, CEO of the Community Development Corporation of Utah, the resource center would put renters of all stripes in touch with trained housing counselors and “a personalized, high-touch experience” in navigating a host of resources that might lead them to new housing.
“The community navigator,” Reeder said, “is a great listener, very resourceful, empathetic to a client’s needs — and a champion for them. Someone’s on their side. This is a human element of what they need out there.”
Renters don’t have to be on the precipice, Reeder said, to reach out and access the center’s resources. The portal, for example, will have places to learn best practices in renting and dealing with landlords or to file complaints over housing conditions or unfair evictions. His agency will offer special office hours, a series of community outreach efforts and resource fairs to connect regular renters to the center.
“We plan to get into the neighborhoods,” Reeder said. “We want to meet tenants where they are.”
Rental aid is limited
For now, the cash payments through RAFT will be available only to tenants living in the city and earning 80% or less of the area’s median income.
Rental aid will also be limited to those who must relocate because their rental homes are set for demolition, major renovations or a change in use, or when existing rent or income restrictions on their dwellings are going away.
People who are forced to move simply because their rent is going up and they can’t afford it will not, at this point, qualify for the cash subsidies.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Apartments under construction on North Temple in Salt Lake City in September 2024.
“We really have no clue how many people will take advantage or how,” said Ruedigar Matthes, policy manager with the city’s Department of Community and Neighborhoods, who referred to the center’s launch as “a pilot program.”
Using city rules and federal Department of Housing and Urban Development guidelines, RAFT will be limited to paying up to about $6,990 to qualifying renters, depending on their current monthly rents and household size.
By one estimate offered Wednesday, the year’s current RAFT budget could help up to 25 displaced families pay for costs in transitioning to new rental digs.
Depending on data gathered in the center’s early stages, the mayor and council could choose to allocate the same $180,000 per year for RAFT — or boost that amount and potentially widen the criteria for who qualifies.
Widespread gentrification
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) People gather at Madsen Park in the Poplar Grove neighborhood near downtown Salt Lake City to protest gentrification in 2022.
Nearly 51% of Salt Lake City residents rent their homes, and studies show their incomes have not kept pace with rising costs. Increasing numbers of them struggle financially, with an estimated 50% of tenants or more needing to spend at least a third of their paychecks on housing expenses.
Under Mendenhall, the city conducted an in-depth study and survey in 2021 and 2022 that found widespread gentrification had virtually wiped out affordable neighborhoods, leaving lower-income renters with little choice but to move away.
About 1 in 5 residents had relocated recently due to rent hikes and 40% knew people who’d been squeezed out of their homes over financial hardships or new development.
Computer-modeling analysis and maps produced through Thriving in Place also showed neighborhoods experiencing some the highest displacement risks due to gentrification were also among its most diverse in terms of ethnicity and incomes.
Families of color, in particular, were being compelled to move out by rent pressures, the study noted, pushing them to find homes in other cities and take on longer commutes, live with relatives, or face being homeless.
