435 Podcast: Southern Utah
Explore the heartbeat of Southern Utah with the 435 Podcast, your go-to source for all things local in Washington County. Stay ahead of the curve with our in-depth coverage, expert analysis, and captivating interviews. Whether you're a resident or visitor, our podcast is your key to unlocking the latest happenings and trends in St. George and the surrounding areas. Tune in now to stay informed and connected with our thriving community!
435 Podcast: Southern Utah
Strategic Growth: Designing the Future of Southern Utah
Special Episode! From the live podcast at RISE with Stacy Young, Rob and Stacy break down how the addition of 100,000 people since 2004 has reshaped the region's economy, housing, and community planning. Together, we'll explore the balance between population growth and the quest for stability, examining the broader implications on local businesses and community well-being.
We'll take you through the dramatic contrasts between modest income growth and soaring home values, shedding light on the pressing issues of affordable housing and wage stagnation. Learn about key developments understand the pivotal role of tourism in shaping local infrastructure. Don't miss our deep dive into the critical issue of water resource management and its future impacts on the region.
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[00:00:00] Intro clip.
[00:03:23] Understanding Southern Utah's Economic Landscape.
[00:11:07] Navigating Community Ambivalence in Growth.
[00:23:08] Impact of Vacation Rental Market.
[00:27:33] Addressing Housing Scarcity and Growth.
[00:33:38] Revamping Land Use Policies for Growth.
#southernutah #podcast #urbanplanning #affordablehousing #economy #435podcast #podcast #sustainablegrowth #stgeorgeutah #suhba #blueformmedia
As humans, I think we both kind of seek change and growth and progress and also like stability and comfort as well at times, and so I think it's natural for that to kind of show up in survey data, even that ambivalence. As you know, my beat is land use and housing in particular, and so I tend to see a lot of those uh, a lot of those issues through that lens and um and I and I think that probably is a reflection of uh, of that survey outcome- Thanks for being here, thanks for being on time.
Speaker 2:I am typically late, so I appreciate all those people that are always on time, but as people come in, if you want to just remind them, we're going to actually record a live podcast today. This Chamber of Commerce asked me to do a master class, and I'm not really a master at. Uh. Really, anything I probably know a little bit about a lot of things is what I tell my wife all the time just sitting right over there Um, but I'm not a master. But Stacy young, who I'm going to sit down and have a conversation with, is a master and, uh, I want to. I want you guys to see what he sees, so that we can look at growth in Southern Utah a little bit differently. Take a second to look backwards and see where we've been, and so we can start making strategies, moving forward, because it's not a this is a one size fits all solution, right? The economy is growing and ever moving and we want to talk about what are some strategies and ways that we can do that in a better way. So, if you want to get out your phones, if you don't follow the podcast already, whether it's Apple, so if you want to get out your phones if you don't follow the podcast already, whether it's Apple, itunes, spotify, youtube whatever you listen to or watch online, find us. It's 435 podcast. You can find us anywhere and subscribe and follow. We're going to talk about southern Utah things, whether it's politics, business, real estate, the ideas that we're going to educate through long format conversations with really smart people that are littered throughout our county that know a lot about a lot of different things that we deal with on a day-to-day basis. So we're going to talk to Stacey Young today. I'm going to get you guys up to date with the brief history of what we kind of already know going into the conversation and then from that point we're going to start recording and you'll hear the conversation that we're going to post in about two weeks. So this is kind of like a backstage pass is to the conversation we're already having on the podcast and throughout the series. So we hope you enjoy it. Please remember to stay quiet so that way the recording sounds good. So when people are listening to it while they're vacuuming, they have good sound and audio and can understand. So 435 podcast here's the brief history.
Speaker 2:Strategic growth we want to keep that in mind is what's the strategic way that we're going to grow? So what are the things that we should be looking back, looking at? We're going to focus on three things population, macro, economics and business health. We're going to briefly talk about where St George and Southern Utah, washington County, has been and going public health and safety and education. A lot of good things there, but we're going to mainly focus on the first three. So the first one is population growth. So from 2004 to 2024, 20 years, looking back we've grown by roughly 100,000 people.
Speaker 2:Okay, the function of that means a lot of different things. One of the key focus I want to draw your attention to is the second home ownership ratios. What's what's the percentage of homes that are in Washington County that are second home owners? They're not primary residents. They're not contributors to the economy on a regular basis, though occasionally, which we like and we still need. But in 2004, we were 13% of our housing inventory was second home ownership. Today it's 31%. Additionally, I want you to think about the demographic of our area Since 2010,.
Speaker 2:Over the 10-year timeframe, we went from roughly 32% of our population being over the age of 50 to we're pushing the 40% mark. So we're at 37.6% of? Uh, is that 37? Yeah, 37%, uh, I was. Yeah, you know numbers um. 37% of our population is 50 years and over and, additionally, our youth is shrinking. So the ages 19 and younger uh, we went from 24%, from five to 19, to 21% of our mix, and the zero to four year olds were down to just five percent. 5.8 percent of our demographic is kids, and that's the future of southern Utah. Right, and the idea. Just like any contributing member of the community, we want to invest in where we live and give it to the next generation. This is the image you can't see right. Here is an economic breakdown of southern Utah. So, what are the industries? We're going to look at the macroeconomics of this. What are the industries that make up our GDP, the production, the actual economic output of the community in 2004. The diversification is really important for our future as well, because that's going to give us that stability to be able to take on the next challenges over the next decade.
Speaker 2:Household, median income, taxable sales just some fun facts here that people don't quite understand or look at all the time. But median household income I think this is important. We've gone in 2008,. $50,000 is a combined household income. And today, just in January, it was $75,000 if you round up, right, if we're generous. So that's not a big income jump. However, the median home value has gone from the median. The middle number of the sale in the year of 2008 was $229,000. And today it's 520. And you couple that with interest rates, you can understand hey, we're having an issue. There's real issues with housing.
Speaker 2:Okay, business health. You know what are actual private businesses doing in Southern Utah 2007,? The weekly wages oh, I didn't fix this, it's not $575,000 a week. That wouldn't make any sense, right? Because if that was true, we wouldn't, none of us would be here doing this thing. Okay, it's actually $575 period, right? Just $575 per week is what private companies are paying their employees on average In 2007,. We've added three I laugh because I think three hundred and thirty six dollars. I just think of like car payments and just eggs, like that. Three hundred dollars is gone, right. So for us to make that small progress on the private side, I think is important, but I do know that that number is also changing fairly rapidly, that that there's a long tail in there of an economic recession that we had to weather through and we're out of that. So, looking towards the future, how are we going to continue to drive wages, because that's the other part of affordable housing. Unemployment we've gone up, we've gone down. They've changed the rules. It's a hard number to really track and really have a strong understanding of because of the current economy, but it's something we look at.
Speaker 2:Workforce We've added 51,000 humans giving work at, working and contributing to the local economy, uh, in the last 20 plus years, which is good. Uh County personal income we won't talk about that. Trt, so transient room tax, is the tax revenue that they're getting from um vacationers, tourism, right. So in 2004 is 1.4 million and 2023, 15.2 million. It was a hockey stick. We started making more money than I think they really thought was going to happen in Washington County and this is a direct impact on our economy. This is to those businesses, but it's also there's a cost to that right Is is roads and traffic and and those tourists. There is a toll and what can we use that money for is a totally separate topic, but I want you to be thinking about that as well and we're gonna briefly talk.
Speaker 2:St George Regional used to be Dixie Regional. Massive hospital been great over the last 20 years. Revere Health. We have competition in the marketplace, which is great. Rocky Vista University. We have education and medical all in our county. Huge leaps over the last 20 years, very notable. And then education we have a very unique education setup.
Speaker 2:That blank one is this is Dixie Tech. Obviously, you would never know that. Okay. So Career Tech, high School right. So from high school to the technical school, to the university over the last 20 years, this is a massive leap for our economy when you look back from 20 years, even after that. So if you were in 1980 thinking about St George, this thing was like oh, I wonder if we could ever have this thing right. This is a great opportunity for that young population that's not coming here. So we got to figure out a way to get there.
Speaker 2:Okay, so, with that being said, stacey Young, governmental affairs director with Southern Utah Home Builders Association, land use attorney, a real technical, like a tactician, somebody who puts this into practice. How does all this stuff connect, looking at it from a 30,000-foot view? He also sits on the Southern Advisory Council to the Colorado River Authority. This is a massive topic and one that's not really heavily covered at the moment, but there's negotiations for how much water we're going to be able to get from the Colorado River, and not just Utah, but it's the entire compact. And having an advisor on that council to me says that you're super smart and I'll listen to whatever you tell me, man. So, with that being said, we're going to, we're going to jump into a conversation, we're going to connect this rapid growth to housing and figure out how do we understand it. So, without further ado, stacey Young, thank you for coming in. All right, was that a better setup for round two? It was good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was good. I can't live up to that introduction, but we'll have a good chat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can, man, it's so easy. You just don't know. It's imposter syndrome, just like me. Man, yeah, maybe, okay. So anybody in the crowd just before we start, if I raise a hand I know some people are shy who learned something in that quick history update? Who learned something? Who did not learn something? It's okay. If you didn't learn something, you're like I already knew this guy. Okay, cool.
Speaker 2:So I think that's a helpful way of setting up the conversation we're about to have and because I will talk, I will go off track so quickly. I have to have notes, so I'm going to pull up my notes and start with the first question. Okay, so one of the things we've talked about this before and I know your answers. That's always the hard part of this conversation. So the the survey 400 voters in southern utah during the city council election last year were surveyed about their thoughts on southern utah. Um, there's a lot of interesting perspectives that can be drawn for that, because if you think of somebody who's willing to do a political survey brandon disharm, my partner. He got a call to do a political survey. He's like like no way and he just hung up on him. I was like dude, it would take like 10 minutes.
Speaker 2:You could give your opinion, and then somebody is going to actually use that information. So the type of person to actually answer that is somebody with an opinion, and I think it's valuable to hear those people, because some of those people don't get up to city council you. They, they are comfortable sharing their thoughts in that setting, but they're not in other ways. And there's two, two big takeaways I got from a big list of survey questions, but one was when the question was asked do you feel like, uh, the community is headed in the right direction or the wrong direction? Uh, 57 of the community says we're headed in the right direction.
Speaker 2:And in just just following you know uh questions a few questions later in how St George city is managing, um, the growth, uh, of a vast majority of them said they're not doing a very great job at it, right, and so we're going in the right direction and, at the same time, we're not doing a good job at it. So it's an interesting thought. And so, to open time, we're not doing a good job at it, so it's an interesting thought. And so, to open up the conversation is what are your thoughts on that? And how do we talk about bridging the gap between expectations of people and where we're at right now with the economy and growth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a kind of an astute thing to tease out of that survey that ambivalence that I think shows up in the answers to those two questions, and I think that's pretty normal. I think, you know, as humans, I think we both kind of seek change and growth and progress and also like stability and comfort as well at times, and so I think it's natural, as you know, for that to kind of show up in a in in survey data. Even that, that ambivalence, as you know, my, my beat is land use and housing in particular, and so I I tend to see a lot of those, a lot of those issues through that lens and and I and I think that probably is a reflection of of that survey outcome.
Speaker 2:So when, when making decisions right, if, if, if the community right, if, like St George, whether it's a city council member or it's one of the city leadership, right, who has some control over this but not a ton of control over this, does it seem like people they're going to default to the ones that are upset? Do you think it changes because there's that ambivalence and it's like no matter what I do, it's going to be right or wrong? Do you think that affects the way they make decisions and planning and zoning and stuff like that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's a couple of elements to it. I think the first is kind of what is kind of the state of play. What does the chessboard look like when you kind of start this and any given city council, any given set of permanent staff, they sort of already inherit I sometimes refer to it as the operating system of a city, the land use ordinances and the land use patterns and practices that have been sort of passed down through generations, and so that's their starting point. You know they're already sort of constrained by that set of rules and that game that has been established that they now have to play. Then, within that context, we've set all sorts of different expectations about what's reasonable and unreasonable in the way our cities evolve. And so when that starts to change and we experience growth and we go sort of one say zoning application, at a time that's going to get a reaction from folks and we know that empirically has been studied at length.
Speaker 1:The sort of opinions that are expressed in those hearings are not really representative of the whole community. I've yet to present to a renderer, for example, as a planning commissioner or a city council member. You rarely have renders show up. You know that constituency, you know, those folks that are working two jobs or the single parent. They can't make it to a hearing on a Thursday night at 7 PM and it's unreasonable for us to expect them to to to do that. But that's the again, that's the game that we've established, and so that also plays out in some pretty predictable ways.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's interesting Cause we didn't talk about this last time but trying to think about, okay, if I'm getting elected, first I get elected and I potentially have no idea what the job actually requires of me. And if I'm on the planning commission, or that even might be true of going work for the cities, where, like well, I just I saw a job at the city and I figured I'm just going to apply and see what it is. And then they're like okay, here's your onboarding and here's your, your classes that you need to take no-transcript. But at the same time there's a whole nother set of dynamics at play. Right, it's like deciding to present this plan at the city is also fraught with a bunch of you know, issues. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think I think to kind of backtrack a little bit to your introduction to the larger kind of economic forces that we're in the middle of. We can't, we can't really individually really affect those and in most respects those are really positive, positive things the fact that our, our, our sort of local GDP has grown fourfold over a generation, less than a generation.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. I was like I was staggered by that. I had no idea. I wouldn't have guessed that that's what it would be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's, that's success you know, and I think it would be uh, uh unfortunate if we characterize this success as a as a failure. But what that brings with it is is the growth pressure and, as we've talked about when you, when you were on the, uh, in that kind of mode you can either and again I'm going to take it back to housing you can either build enough homes for, for for folks, or your prices are going to increase. There's not really a third option and so, um, and that happens, sort of one zoning application at a time, one project at a time, and so it's sometimes easy to kind of lose the forest for the trees on a given night.
Speaker 2:Would you limit that, though, to just the result is higher prices? Would you limit it to just that, like, the result of this is just higher prices, or is there other unintended consequences that fall from that there?
Speaker 1:are a bunch of other consequences.
Speaker 2:Like is that the worst one?
Speaker 1:Which one do you think is the worst one? No, I don't think. It actually is probably even the very worst one. I mean, we have lots of examples of places that are much further along into their housing crisis than we are and we can see what happens to them, and California is the poster child. There's no reason. There's no, there's no reason to pretend it isn't, and they are shedding their middle class and have been for a long time. One guy that I one has an economist. I like he has a. He has a a U-Haul index, so he periodically he'll look at the the price to rent a U-Haul from LA to Phoenix versus from Phoenix to.
Speaker 1:LA and during the pandemic the U-Haul basically pay you to drive it back from Phoenix to LA and it was thousands of dollars in reverse because of the.
Speaker 1:The migratory pattern was in that direction and so you know those cities are largely basket cases you you end up with you know, significant problems ultimately with homelessness, and and when you hollow out your, your middle, significant problems ultimately with homelessness, and and when you hollow out your your middle-class and you're not, you're not able to, uh, create a pathway for the kids that grow up there to, to find a way to, to, to to live and work and raise their own families there. Yeah, you end up with a lot of really big problems beyond just the sticker price of the home.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so and you touched on something too we were talking about, uh, um, you know, the migratory patterns of what we're in. You know, in the middle of Utah, people are flocking to Utah for a lot of different reasons, not just St George. So you know, we're kind of it's hard. We uh, I think there's some uh, what is it Uniqu? It uniqueness, terminal uniqueness or something like that, where everybody thinks that we're unlike anybody else, right, and St George is unlike anybody else.
Speaker 2:And also, you know, there's this reverberation effect of this migratory patterns that are happening and so we can't think that the population is going to slow down, it's going to continue to move and it's going to move in the direction to where they have a home to live in, right, it's all kind of anchored into that. So that's why rethinking that housing. So then, if we, if we were to take that thought line and we look at what are the underlying, underlying dynamics of like houses a financial asset, it's like that second home number, right, 31% of our inventory is a second home. Now that that doesn't necessarily just mean it's a house that nobody lives in half of the year, it just means that it's an investment property of some kind.
Speaker 1:Typically is that a reasonable thing to assume from that Is that that's, that's potentially an investment property at some capacity, although I think, you know, you know, I think I think even that market has sub markets to it. So I think there's a range of of purposes and uses and and and so on. But yeah, I mean, I think it's fair to say that those are going to be characterized as as a more discretionary investment on the part of somebody compared to the necessity of having a roof for sure All the vacation rentals fall into that category, because those vacation rentals cannot be qualified as primary residences, right?
Speaker 2:The assumption is, unless they just happen to be living in a vacation rental community, which around this town probably doesn't happen all that much, it would be a really small percentage, so that that's kind of like. What I'm thinking about is that financial asset. And then so if, if we know that the housing inventory is growing towards that direction, do you see that slowing down?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do. I mean, I think I think that's the thing I I cause you're building a hotel, so that's why you're building a hotel, right.
Speaker 1:So I'm thinking of, like you're I think you kind of understand that sub market yeah, and I direct development to the ledges and we have a vacation rental component up there and as well as a whole range of things. So for me it's, it's like I've told you before, I think I think the supply is going to go where it can, where it can go where projects work, where where the economics pencil, that's what you'll see happen, and where they don't, they won't. It would be healthier if we were creating abundance across that entire spectrum as opposed to just in these one areas. So I think part of it is we see the parts of the housing market that are functioning well and we think that that's costing us at the low end, but in reality they're, they're, they really don't there's, they're not really crowding that out. It's that we just can't. We, for a number of reasons, we have impediments to, to delivering homes in in the, the lower income segments of the market.
Speaker 2:But to me, I, I, I still think those, even those, even those homes are I, I my argument, though, is that that vacation rental, there's only so much labor, there's only so much time, energy and expertise to go build a property in Southern Utah, right, you know that for sure, because of that vacation rental boom that we kind of have gone through, that has kind of been a part of the it pencils. Better than this thing over here, right. And so there, I think there is some connection to the issue we're having because of something that nobody could have anticipated, that, and the developers are just doing the thing that made sense for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think, and I think this is all fair. I think just to go further into the nuance of it. I think this is all fair, I think just to go further into the nuance of it, I think a lot of those projects, it's not that they penciled better, they wouldn't have penciled at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, fair enough. Some pencil better, some don't, just wouldn't have done anything.
Speaker 1:And part of what has happened in that segment of the market was that, you know, even before Airbnb, I've always had a second home on my street next door the entire time I've lived here. Um, and so you know, even when we were, uh, a less lesser percentage than we are now, it was still pretty common, um, back then folks would have to treat them almost like a, a, a houseboat or something. So the family would kind of go in together, some Northern Utah family, and they'd yeah, we kind of pioneered.
Speaker 2:we probably kind of pioneered a little bit of that vacation yeah.
Speaker 1:So the fact that now you can do that with a lot less friction, I think again, I think it's no matter how you feel about it, you kind of can't go backwards in terms of the evolution of the sharing economy and all that sort of stuff. But I think in the short term also, I think you're right for sure that there's a limited capacity and so some of that would have gone to that product segment, that asset class. That could have gone elsewhere. Longer term, that's more elastic. So I think if you could operate at it you can grow that labor force, you can kind of expand to meet that need. But to your answer more directly, your initial question I was looking at I happened to be looking at this just the other day and so I track this on a fairly regular basis on at least the legal approved projects. As you know, there's also kind of a distinction between the legal short-term rental category and the sort of illegal ad hoc.
Speaker 2:Don't tell anybody you're doing it and trying to get caught.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so you can kind of track that on AirDNA or I can track the new stuff through a market research service. So I was looking at those large projects that are doing the volume of new purpose-built short-term rental stuff and I'm sure I missed a few in my catalog but there were two starts in the second quarter of this year and I think there were 30-something in the past year and the listings on 30.
Speaker 2:the listings are going nuts. The absorption rate on vacation rentals. It's painful out there if you're wanting to sell it.
Speaker 1:So again, it's the it's back to to me. At the end of the day, you can't scrape the gravity of supply and demand. It was a gold rush and you know, frankly, it was petering out when the pandemic hit. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then that that's a good point.
Speaker 1:It just kind of that used it again.
Speaker 2:So the trajectory was already headed south. Covid fired it up again, but now we're kind of coming off that residual, so the market forces are going to balance it out. So, to your point, nothing else would have penciled right Aside if we were to just say vacation rentals are the problem. It's like no, it's not really the problem. It's just saying the market is going to go to what makes sense. And I think you and I have been talking about how the development market has really responded to the affordability piece over the last 18, 24 months. Is that fair enough? Yeah, and I think even was doing it fast, like we shifted enough. Yeah, and I think even was doing fast, like we shifted quickly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if, and if you actually track it further back, we were making that shift either. Even before any of this really hit the fan, even before the pandemic, you started to see some of the shift in in, uh, sort of lot sizes and so on. Um, but yeah, so so it's a. It's a completely legitimate topic. I think it's an interesting one. I guess my take to boil it down is that back to the market part of this. By the time you sort of respond in a really targeted way with some sort of policy change, the issue's moved on. You've got to go back to the entire abundance agenda as opposed to like figuring out how you're going to.
Speaker 2:And you said that last time, and I think that's an important point to reiterate. So what do you mean by having an abundance mindset in housing, rather than what I just did boil it down to some financial, you know, penciling. It is the reason why we've gotten to where we are. There's no reason to do that because we're playing a defensive game kind of in a way. Right, so maybe expand on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think this is a really natural impulse that we have when we've lived under— we being communities yeah, across the country anymore.
Speaker 2:Cities, like just in general, just like collective in this country.
Speaker 1:We we have have been living with housing scarcity since, at least at least the great recession, at least for that amount of time, and I think over time it has started to warp our expectations around that and we we've come to think that all we all we're getting is all we could have and so, and so we tend to start to then go into the, the housing types or the, the pricing or so forth that we that we don't like and start to figure out, well, who's deserving of a house and at what price, and who's not.
Speaker 1:Well, that second, second homeowner, I don't know that they're deserving, you know that's. And so you start to get into that, that, that mindset where you're almost playing a game of musical chairs and like, oh man, I better get my chair and I don't think that guy deserves a chair. And how can we better distribute these chairs as opposed to figuring out how can we get some more chairs? And so you know, I think we just have built impediments for a hundred years. We've slowly built impediments to to building what sometimes called the missing middle types of housing that are usually the first rung on kind of the housing ladder.
Speaker 2:So, okay, we know housing's connected to that growth in a really impactful way, negatively, positively, all of that. So that missing middle understanding that there's the financial incentive for developers to build new but we can't necessarily build fully, build our way out of this in just brand new construction and new develops new land right redevelopment is an aspect of kind of the the strategy. Is that a fair way to describe?
Speaker 1:it. Yeah, so quick data point on that. So, uh, the median new home price now is about fifty thousand dollars less than the median used price, and that's unheard of.
Speaker 2:Wait, say that again. So a median of a brand new construction is $50,000 less than an existing home.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like a resale, a resale.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would never have guessed that. Yeah, you wouldn't guess it. Would anybody else have guessed that you would have? These guys are builders, right here.
Speaker 1:They're like yeah, I knew that already. I had no idea. So you know, builders try to try to meet that market. That the the highest selling projects in the in the county are not short-term rentals, they're, they're, at that actually below that median home price. They're relatively humble homes. Uh, they're, you know, under 2000 square feet.
Speaker 2:They look different. What's that? They look different than they have in the past.
Speaker 1:Yeah, our land's a lot more expensive and, frankly, preferences are not exactly the same either. You know, even compared to my parents, I don't, you know, I I hold weeds every Saturday growing up. So I don't want a big yard, I want a low maintenance yard, and it seems like the generation's younger than me, or even further, on that direction. So, yeah, it's the starter home of today is not going to necessarily look the same as it did 20 or 30 years ago, but we can't. We can do it.
Speaker 2:We can do it, we can do it. So then, what about that redevelopment? So going back to that as new construction and new development is an aspect to kind of tackling some of these challenges. What about the redevelopment side? How do we? How do we kind of adjust around this framework? We talked about that? Cities got back in the 40s, right late 40s, cities were given this zoning, ordinance, uh, map, because we're going to put everybody, everybody's going to have a house and a car, and you know the American dream and suburbia started rolling out across the country. And that roadmap, that operating system, has evolved in every city and every county across the country and now none of them look the same. So maybe help me build off of that and kind of explain where we're headed.
Speaker 1:Brought that up. That operating system is is really built for kind of a greenfield suburban growth pattern and so you know you can go to the edge of the city and do a master plan project and and, uh, that works pretty well.
Speaker 2:It's still time intensive, very, very capital intensive desert colors like a prime example of it is now you've got to bring infrastructure to it and and so and so.
Speaker 1:That has a different set of challenges. It's somewhat um, uh, again, still there are regulatory challenges, but it's but they're more predictable. Um, but historically cities grew both at the edges and more intensively within, within their footprint, and that's where I think we have a lot of opportunity. And it ties into, I think, to the survey thing that you teased out in the beginning. You know, when you only grow extensively, your traffic is going to get worse. It's going to be much harder to make neighborhoods complete. Neighborhoods meaning having a whole variety of housing types as well as civic uses like churches and little schools and so forth, and small-scale commercial parks, etc.
Speaker 1:And so you're having to get in your car to drive everywhere. And so now everybody, is.
Speaker 2:You know, everybody wanted a car, so everybody's gonna have we are traffic right.
Speaker 1:So we talk about traffic, we are traffic, but you know one of the ways you can address that and it goes into the water conversation. So some of the hottest topics for us are improved if we Would allow our areas that are already built to incrementally become denser and more intense in use.
Speaker 2:Naturally, naturally, not naturally, not in a forced way, yeah, so how do you bridge that gap then? Because I mean I watched the city of St George, you know they kind of I'm not saying anything negative about the process, negative about the process. I just watched how hard it really is to get the city council, the planning commission, to look at a zoning plan, a progressive zoning plan, and say that works and that that's the good one to go with. And it kind of stalls and it has fits and starts and takes really a long period of time. I think they worked on that for two or three years or something like that, which is, you know, as buildings already slow, like that part of it has to, we have to figure out how to get there faster. How do we? How do we balance that? How do we do that differently?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think. I think, ultimately, where you, where it would be healthy to land, is if you, if you talk about sort of what your, what your zoned capacity is within an area, I think it would be healthy if that was just raised in a coherent way, in a broad way, as opposed to today, you know, and the councils and their staff, again, they're kind of in the straight jacket of the, of the working with the operating system.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so changing those is incredibly labor intensive. Their staff is buried just administering that thing. And so, you know, there's not just a political challenge but even just a technical and a human resource challenge of how do you do this while operating a city, a city. But ultimately, if you could, you know, go from a system where today you kind of slug it out one parcel at a time with one zone, change application at a time, that's very challenging for everybody involved, to one where you have a little bit more certainty and you have a little bit more ability to do, on a on a much quicker, by right basis, some degree of intensification around your, around your core, so that adding, adding beds right, adding rooms, adding, adding whether it's taking a mobile home off a property that nobody really wanted a mobile home there anyway but it's stuck there because nothing else can go there.
Speaker 2:Right Upzoning is you can't upzone, you have to go through the whole process of changing the zoning and so, especially financially, because there's lending. That's a whole nother element to this, which I was talking to a couple that work for US Bank and they watched it happen in California and it's just after the session and they were talking about. We can have great plans and all that, but then the consumer has to then actually go execute on it and they pass the rules that financing doesn't work. So you're just running into a dead end. So you have to have this thoughtful approach from end to end and be thinking about all those tools. It's tough to do so. The expectation of the cities wouldn't be able to do that. That's why they got the template in the first place.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it kind of goes to the the appraiser speak right, when something has to be legally uh, was it legally permissible, physically possible and, uh, financially feasible. Yeah, I'm getting them wrong, but you get the yeah. Yeah, so it's not enough just to say something is illegal. It also has to be physically possible in terms of the geometry of the lot, what you're trying to do there, yeah, and eventually, eventually, that has to. The numbers have to make, have to work, have to work have to work, have to work, have to work.
Speaker 2:Well, what else did we miss in this conversation? I feel like we were able to compact it a little bit more in the time that we have. Do we miss anything? Yeah, I think. What are we doing on time 13. So we've got 13 minutes. Do you want to maybe open it up, see if anybody has any questions, or is there something you want to leave with? Maybe?
Speaker 1:one thing I'd tease is the is that initiative that we've been trying to get stood up over the last few years so that? So once I got more involved a few years ago on the policy side of this, I reached out to some of some of my counterparts in the cities, so the city attorneys, planning directors and so forth and we put together a public-private body of land use practitioners that we call the Southern Utah Land Use Task Force.
Speaker 2:Task Force. Everybody loves the task force.
Speaker 1:Figure out better branding.
Speaker 2:You've got to have them.
Speaker 1:You've got to do something. It was actually modeled off a statewide body, but anyway, the gist of that was to get together and at least start to harmonize these operating systems a little bit, so that you know the zoning in Hurricane isn't radically different from St George and so on. And as those conversations evolved and the housing situation has gotten worse, we've started to think more aggressively about how we might more fundamentally reform the way we do housing and land use here, and so in the next few months some of that is going to start to either get traction you know, get traction or we'll go back to the, to the drawing board.
Speaker 2:But but just to, and that's the thing that I mean. I think the thing that cause it's something that you and I know, but not everybody listening knows is is that going back to the drawing board. We have to stop going back to the drawing board. Let's I, I, I think the idea that we have about testing some things out, right, you have almost a it's, it's such a 21st century thing, right, like an incubator of ideas and saying, okay, let's try this thing.
Speaker 2:We're not fully committed, we don't know if it's going to a hundred percent work, but can we try this, knowing all the stuff that we know? We've watched California do it right and then do it wrong, and then do it right again and then do it wrong what you? Do it right and then do it wrong and then do it right again and then do it wrong what you know. What can we use to be able to not keep going back drawing board until we know where we failed? So we failed. Then we go back to the drawing board, but if we don't try something and keep trying something new, it's it's not going to help us, because once we build it one of the city councilmen, members and ivan said this and it's. It's interesting coming from that person because Ivan's does not want anything new except for a house, and a really beautiful, expensive house, like if it's not a really beautiful, expensive house?
Speaker 2:they don't want anything else there, and that's not. I'm not saying a negative. I live there and I actually love Ivan's because of that thing. But Ivan's is connected to Santa Clara, is connected to St George and Washington. Right, it is a greater community that we have to, you know, collectively decide what is our future look like. And once we build it, that's what we get, until a really long time from now, when redevelopment actually financially makes sense, right. And so we want to get get it right. Moving forward, we want to continue to get it right, because we've got it right in a lot of ways. But housing, we haven't quite figured out the perfect mix yet, I think.
Speaker 1:Do you agree? Yeah, yeah. I respond with a couple of things. I think one. I think exactly what we're trying to do. There's economists will talk about sustaining innovations and disruptive innovations, and so the most of the energy around zoning reform has been sustaining innovations. Let's go back to the drawing board and tweak. We're saying no. What we actually need to do is start with a blank sheet of paper and quickly build something that's much more flexible, that we can take for a test drive, see how it works, without necessarily abandoning the existing structure that you've built.
Speaker 2:That's good. I appreciate you clarifying that. Let's build another channel.
Speaker 1:Let's build an incubator, a sandbox, for us to try out and see if we can open some things up that way. I think the second thing I'd respond to is that part of the reason we get so anxious about taking a misstep is because so much of what we do is done at a really large scale. So if you think about a 200-unit apartment complex, yeah, you're going to really wring your hands about that because it's going to be there for a long time. What we're trying to do is allow for much more granular, small scale development, and in that case I say relax a little bit and let and let people figure it out.
Speaker 1:Let the market figure your best design control committee is going to be competition. You know Toyota is going to do a great job, because if they don't, GM is going to eat their lunch. And it's the same thing for home builders. If, if more of our energy went into designing great homes and less into just navigating the regulatory maze, everybody wins.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good point. I think that's a sweet place to end on that Cause. I think that was brilliant. You said cool. Thanks, I hope you guys enjoyed this. Um, if you want to come up and ask questions later, uh, we'd be happy to talk, but uh, we'll see you out there guys. Thanks for listening in. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe. Make sure you're following us on all the social media websites. We love your support. We love the dialogue. We want to continue that going. Find us at realestate435.com.
Speaker 1:We'd love to help you find a house here in town or help you get wherever you're going.