More than 250 professionals descended on the Union Event Center in Salt Lake City to attend ULI Utah’s First Housing Summit. Cathe Dykstra from Kentucky-based Family Scholar House (FSH) provided an inspirational keynote on how their nonprofit creates comprehensive solutions to the housing crisis. The nationally recognized nonprofit sees housing as a way out of poverty and provides single parent households many services beyond homes, including academic and mentoring programs for the entire family. As a result of this “wrap-around” work, they have seen parents and children become upwardly mobile.

The Summit featured brief presentations on ULI’s interactive Home Attainability Index, the Utah Housing Preservation Fund, and Ivory Innovations’ 2022 Ivory Prize Winners. The index is a high level snapshot of housing attainability nationally. It shows that home ownership is becoming more and more out of reach for more Utahns. Less than 25% of the housing stock being affordable to a household earning 80% of the area median income for the Salt Lake MSA.

The first panel focused on Creating New Housing Opportunities through Adaptive Reuse. Four regional developers described their respective housing adaptive reuse projects ranging from a former school house to an extended stay hotel to urban historic structures. They discussed the benefits and challenges of working with existing structures including material costs, system upgrades, leveraging the existing design, and “working with the building, not against it.” While all noted the difficulty of staying on budget for these projects, they concluded that not only is this work the right thing to do, but it’s often work no one else will do.

The final diverse panel representing the academic, government, nonprofit, and private sectors tied up the Summit’s theme of “Working Together Toward Housing for All” with a conversation on Public and Private Sector Collaboration. Panelists agreed that the best projects are predicated on time-intensive trust and relationship building. Furthermore, engaging in an array of solutions on all sides of the deal is necessary for success.

Click here to see the full agenda.

Many have requested copies of the PowerPoint Presentations from the Housing Summit. To access the PowerPoint slides, please visit the links below.

Keynote Speaker: Cathe Dykstra, Chief Possibility Officer/President & CEO, Family Scholar House

ULI Home Attainability Index: Michael Spotts, Senior Visiting Research Fellow | ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing, Urban Land Institute

Utah Housing Preservation Fund: Doug Harris, Vice President, Preservation Fund Manager at Utah Housing Preservation Fund

Ivory Innovations: Michael Parker, Vice President of Strategy, Ivory Homes