Why Salt Lake City is seeking to drastically change its zoning map

SALT LAKE CITY — Nick Norris has seen the T-shirt a Salt Lake City resident created with 54 blocks shaded in an array of colors.

It looks like a color palette posted in the paint aisle of a hardware store, but Norris, the city's planning director, gets the reference. The shirt is poking fun at Salt Lake City's zoning options, which are so vast, some hues appear identical.

"To me, it exemplifies the issue that we have so many different zones," he told KSL.com.

While he chuckles thinking about it, he says serious consequences are tied to the city's current zoning structure. It's become difficult for developers and homeowners to use — and for the city to manage.

City, state and national housing experts say zoning policies can also impact housing prices, a key issue in Salt Lake City. It also may have factored in the school district's recent decision to close four elementary schools.

That's why Salt Lake City is looking to completely rewrite its zoning map, trimming 26 existing mixed-use and commercial zones, differentiated by height, into six more distinctive zones. Residential zones will remain, but city planners are proposing that rules be simplified and modified to allow for more units per lot as the city grows.

City leaders hope that it can make a difference.

A national phenomenon

What Salt Lake City is proposing isn't revolutionary. Norris points out that the city once allowed "all kinds of housing types," in the 1920s, but those were "chipped away at" over the next century as codes were changed to reduce heights and density.

"Part of this is going back to what helped create (a mix of housing types) back when we had housing abundance in the city and there was more supply than demand," he said.

It's also not unique in today's age. It's an emerging trend playing out across the country as housing costs rise, says Alex Horowitz, director of the nonpartisan Housing Policy Initiative for Pew Charitable Trusts.

Pew estimates the nation's housing shortage has risen to 4-7 million units. He explained to KSL.com that "restrictive zoning," a term to describe tight regulations for land uses, is believed to be a big reason for this. It's made homeownership difficult and driven up rents, which has spilled over into rising homelessness numbers.

But cities that have rewritten zoning laws have yielded promising results.

Horowitz co-authored a paper last year that dove into the aftermath of a series of zoning changes Minneapolis enacted to improve building measures beginning in 2009. His team found from 2017 to 2022, the city's housing output tripled the rate of housing production for the rest of Minnesota.

The increase in supply helped improve affordability. Rents increased just 1% over those five years, compared to 14% for the rest of the state, helping homelessness to decline in the city even if it increased in the state. Allowing for housing in commercial corridors and reducing or eliminating parking requirements were two key aspects that drove growth in that case. That's also been the case for a handful of other cities he's studied.

This could explain the rising interest in zoning changes. Pew researchers found that from 2011 to 2016, only about one law addressing ways to make it easier to build housing was passed each year across the country. However, that rate jumped to 18 per year from 2017 to 2022 before skyrocketing to 48 laws a year the last two years.

Salt Lake City's turn

Utah, Horowitz says, has passed "a couple of changes" to encourage more building. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox has also supported new construction to combat rising housing costs, but nothing has cooled Salt Lake City's and Utah's housing markets, yet.

Zillow named Salt Lake City the 10th hottest market for 2025 despite having an average home value near $550,000. The state's average housing value has also doubled since 2017, while Pew found rents are up 38% during the same time.

"Even as there's a desire to buy homes, people are simply priced out because housing is just so scarce," Horowitz said.

Norris says "big apartment buildings" account for nearly all the affordability options the city has constructed so far, but household sizes continue to shrink in residential neighborhoods where changes haven't been implemented.

He hopes reworking zones can improve the situation.

His staff is recommending setback and height changes while removing flag lot restrictions and allowing single, duplex, triplex and fourplex structures or townhomes up to four units per lot. That could spark new starter homes to "broaden" affordability across the city, he said, which could help bring families back and reverse a decline in student enrollment.

Mixed-used measures aim to remove "conflicted and outdated" regulations and remove barriers to larger projects in more commercial areas. Planners said the city is also reviewing options for more mixed-used zones.

Salt Lake is also closely monitoring what other cities are doing as it forms a new zoning policy, hoping to avoid pitfalls as it makes a zoning map that is easier to read.

The next steps

The new zoning wouldn't force residents to make any changes. It just opens up new possibilities in neighborhoods.

Salt Lake City's zoning changes also remain a work in progress. City planners reported mixed-use and residential zoning recommendations to the Salt Lake City Council in recent weeks, following a series of public feedback events before that. The City Council provided positive feedback to work on the formal language for a legislative intent to adopt changes, but it has yet to formally launch the process to implement them.

Salt Lake City Councilwoman Sarah Young, who represents Sugar House — one of the city's widest-ranging residential zoning neighborhoods — said she's heard mixed feedback from residents. Some, especially younger residents priced out of the market, want to move the needle faster. Others are concerned the city is moving too quickly with a "one-size-fits-all" approach instead of looking at neighborhoods individually.

For instance, resident Anne Isaacson approached the council on Feb. 4 to request that the city consider historic buildings in Central City when building mixed-used projects around them. Setbacks and building heights, she cautioned, could impact the residents living next door.

The council has also questioned if it could overstep the city's new affordable housing incentives before it can see if they're working.

While those are sorted out, city leaders agree that "location matters" when it comes to planning out these projects, Young said. High density will continue in commercial areas and not in residential cores.

It's unclear when the zoning change process will begin, but the measure will eventually be picked up either as one zoning measure or bits and pieces of it. That's when it will go through a more traditional public process.

"(Residents) are not too late to leave feedback," Young said. "This is one where we will continue to host public comment sessions. I'd invite all residents of Salt Lake to (participate) ... so we arrive at a solution that's representative of the full city."

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