A major move to expand smaller housing options across Salt Lake City’s residential neighborhoods is now in the hands of the deciders.

After months of vetting, community outreach and several lively public hearings, the city’s planning commission gave a unanimous thumbs up on Wednesday to zoning changes that would allow small dwellings to be built in the yards of many existing homes.

The package of reforms now moves to the City Council — the very body that originally sought the draft changes more than a year ago with hopes of spurring more housing.

New mailer headed to homeowners

With the commission’s endorsement of the changes in hand, the council plans to embark on a $70,000 mailer campaign to reach to tens of thousands of property owners whose generic residential lots might be affected.

That’s an effort, council members have said, to widen public engagement on what has emerged as a controversial topic at City Hall and citywide.

This latest housing strategy is aimed at encouraging “gentle infill” and layered density in established neighborhoods. It could open up to three-quarters of existing residential lots citywide to backyard dwellings as small as 1,200 square feet, on land footprints of 2,000 square feet.

The new rules to change what are the city’s most common residential zones would, among other things, modestly boost permitted building heights, reduce some required setbacks from other properties and tweak how much of a lot a home might actually cover.

The new options provide additional latitude to all properties currently zoned with traditional single-family zoning — although planners say only about a third of those nearly 40,000 such parcels citywide are expected to have enough contiguous backyard space to qualify.

After the mailer to affected property owners goes out, the council is eventually going to take up its own public debate on the proposed changes.

That’ll likely involve more hearings on the ordinance and a potential vote as 2026 winds down.

Big battle over smaller homes?

The policy shift is viewed by several council members and planners alike as a way of fostering a wider mix of available homes in the city. Over time, they and other backers say, the changes could also infuse more equity into who can afford to buy or rent in Utah’s increasingly expensive capital.

Some on the council, such as Chair Alejandro Puy, representing the city’s west side, don’t think it goes far enough.

Others, including the council member for Avenues-centered District 3 representative Chris Wharton, are tentatively tamping the brakes, wary of its potential compounding effects, especially as planners continue to monitor the effects of recent changes to other city rules that incentivize affordable homes and allow accessory dwellings.

Residents seem equally divided, ranging from highly enthusiastic to wary themselves, judging from months of testimony and written public comment. Ahead of its 5-0 vote Wednesday, the planning commission heard another hour or more of public feedback.

Some are heartily endorsing the changes as a breakthrough in promoting additional density in the form of small homes, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and town homes in neighborhoods across many corners of the city that are today solely reserved for single-family homes.

Timothy James Jackson II, a young intern for Wasatch Advocates for Livable Communities, a nonprofit group organizing in support of the ordinance, framed the potential future effects succinctly late Wednesday.

“The choice this commission makes now will shape whether Salt Lake City remains a place someone can afford to call home 10 or 20 years from now, and not just today,” Jackson said. The city, he added, “has committed to being a sustainable city and to infill development, building within existing footprints instead of consuming land and water at the edge.”

Others — many of them longtime homeowners who tend to be older — are warning the changes could bring a range of unintended consequences for the character and livability of the very neighborhoods that now draw families and newcomers to the city.

“It is a dubious and unproven assumption that young and growing families with children will be attracted to 1,200-square-foot rental units on 2,000-square-foot lots with little yard space for family activity or child play,” said Janet Hemming, a resident of east-bench Yalecrest.

Parking and insisting some homes are owner-occupied

After scores of residents testified on the issue two weeks ago, the commission postponed its vote over an error in public noticing. When the talking resumed Wednesday, more than a dozen more folks weighed in, with testimony running mostly in support.

After months of wide-ranging discussion like this, Wednesday night’s final debate among planning commissioners boiled down to two issues featured prominently among concerns of residents:

• Whether to mandate more than one off-street parking stall per new dwelling built under the zoning changes, in particular, for developments of five homes or more.

• Whether to require that at least some of these new smaller homes be occupied by their owners.

That last reservation has stemmed from concerns the housing incentivized by this ordinance will skew toward demolishing existing homes as a way to build new rental properties and that it might all favor developers intent on building new homes for profit.

But after taking such testimony and debating it, the planning commission ultimately opted not to alter the ordinance’s current ratio of one stall of off-street parking required per new dwelling.

Along with leaving parking untouched, the panel also left out any changes to require that at least some new homes be owner-occupied by rule, although commission members suggested the council take a closer look at both ideas.