Congratulations to Tayler Allen, one of our City and Metropolitan planning master’s students at the U., for getting a thoughtful piece on an important issue, affordable housing, published in The Tribune. The op-ed is titled, “If The Point becomes Daybreak 2.0, we have failed.” I too have high hopes for The Point development on the former prison site in Draper. But I think Allen’s op-ed is a little hard on Daybreak, consistently one of the top selling master-planned communities in the U.S. It is obviously meeting the market test of financial success, appealing to a broad segment of the housing market.
Looking at Daybreak today, I would agree with Allen that the community is not helping with our critical shortage of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income households. I just wouldn’t declare this outstanding development a “failure.”
Most of the multifamily housing planned for Daybreak has not yet been built, and downtown Daybreak — with dense mixed-use development and affordable housing under SB84 (Housing and Transit Reinvestment Zone amendments of 2023) — is still in the planning and early development stage. Daybreak today isn’t equivalent to Daybreak at buildout.
Also, the downtown at least, with three TRAX stations and a walkable urban form, will allow residents to shed a car or two, adding to affordability. Affordability has to be judged in terms of both housing and transportation.
Third, housing affordability for low- and moderate-income households is critically important regionally, but it is not the only metric by which a master-planned community might be judged a success or, as Allen says of Daybreak, a failure.
My book published by the American Planning Association, “Best Development Practices: Doing the Right Thing and Making Money at the Same Time,” has 41 other measures of success or failure (43, including providing affordable low- and moderate-income housing).
Finally, if affordable housing is so important (which it is), why does state law in Utah ban inclusionary zoning, which could be used by cities to require a certain percentage of affordable units? Without incentives or regulations, bottom-line driven private developers cannot be expected to provide affordable units in master-planned communities. Allen should put her considerable talents into getting this provision of state law changed.
Reid Ewing, distinguished professor of City and Metropolitan Planning, University of Utah
