Zoning votes don't usually make my reading list. This one did.
On Wednesday, September 23, the Salt Lake City Planning Commission voted unanimously to send the city's "Expanding Housing Options" proposal (everybody calls it EHO) to the City Council with a positive recommendation. KSL covered the vote and the fight around it.
This is the biggest change to Salt Lake City's single-family zoning rules in more than thirty years. If the Council passes it, tens of thousands of lots in this valley will be allowed to become something they can't be today.
What happened
EHO creates a new land use category called "small lot dwellings." According to Building Salt Lake, it would allow small single-family homes, duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and townhomes of up to four units, on lots with as little as 2,000 square feet of lot area per unit.
The size caps are stricter than "fourplex" makes it sound. A small single-family home can't exceed a 1,000-square-foot footprint. Other types are capped at 850 square feet per unit, or 1,200 for a ground-floor unit when units are stacked. Pitched roofs can go to 30 feet, flat roofs to 24. Every unit needs one off-street parking space, the same rule the city already applies to accessory dwelling units.
The zones affected are R-1/5,000, R-1/7,000, R-1/12,000, R-2, SR-1, and SR-1A. KSL counted roughly 33,000 properties, about three-quarters of all residentially zoned land in the city. Building Salt Lake counted more than 37,000. Either way, it's most of residential Salt Lake City.
Two things here matter more than the dimensions.
The first is that EHO doesn't require anybody to do anything. It gives permission. Nobody's bungalow gets bulldozed by a zoning text amendment.
The second is about who gets to build. Commissioner Anna Sullivan moved to require at least one owner-occupied unit per site, and her motion failed. So new units under these rules can be investor-owned rentals, and I think that's what decides who actually picks this up.
Commissioner Richard Leverett voted yes and told KSL, "I have no idea what the unintended consequences will be." I'll take that kind of honesty over a promise nobody can keep.
The Council started this process back in March 2025. It still has a briefing and a public hearing before it votes, possibly before the end of the year, according to Building Salt Lake. None of this is law yet.
Why a zoning vote is really a price story
Two weeks before the commission met, the University of Utah's Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute published its State of the State's Housing Market report, written by Dejan Eskic and Moira Dillow. KSL's summary has the clearest affordability numbers I've seen all year.
The statewide median sale price hit $520,000 in the first quarter of 2026 across all housing types, with an average monthly mortgage payment of $3,669. Roughly 91% of Utah renters can't afford to buy a median-priced home. Only 4.9% of homes sold in 2025 were affordable to a household earning the median renter income of $64,000.
The Wasatch Back is worse. KPCW reported from the same study that 97% of renters in Summit County and 99% in Wasatch County are priced out of a median home where they live, with first-quarter medians of $2.2 million and $1.2 million.
That's why zoning is suddenly front-page news in a state that spent thirty years ignoring it. We're short on housing, and no mortgage product fixes that.
What it actually changes, and what it doesn't
City staff figure about 35% of affected properties have enough open space for at least one small lot dwelling. Building Salt Lake points out the analysis left out trees, slopes, utilities, and fire access, so the real number is lower.
Staff's own projection is modest. At a 1% take-up rate over five years, you'd see 373 properties add a unit.
So nobody's street changes character next spring, and nobody's affordability problem gets fixed next spring either. What EHO really does is make small infill housing legal again, and that shows up over a decade or two. I think that's worth doing. I also think anybody telling you it moves the median price in 2027 is selling something.
One more thing: this only applies inside Salt Lake City limits. If you own in Draper or Lehi or Sandy, nothing about your lot changed last week. What did change is the odds your own city council sees a version of this in the next couple of years, because EHO is the template now.
What buyers should do
Don't wait on it. A proposal that hasn't passed, with a projected 1% take-up, is no reason to put off a purchase you're otherwise ready for. A year of waiting costs real money now, and the payoff here is slow and uncertain.
Do read the zoning on anything you buy in Salt Lake City this fall. A lot in an EHO zone with real open space behind the house gives you choices later: an ADU, a second unit, a rental that helps cover the payment. That's worth something even if you never build. Ask me to pull the zoning before you write the offer. It takes ten minutes.
Outside the city, builders are still the ones adding inventory, not planners. Look at what's listed in Draper and the south valley and you'll find more negotiating room than people expect.
What owners and sellers should do
If you own a big lot in a Salt Lake City single-family zone, you may be about to get development rights you never paid for. Understand them before you list, but don't price on them. Buyers pay for what's buildable and financeable today, and no appraiser will credit a hypothetical fourplex based on a text amendment that hasn't passed.
If you're an investor, watch that failed owner-occupancy motion. Four units on an 8,000-square-foot lot with nobody required to live there is a real development play in a city where 91% of renters can't buy, and money will find it if the Council leaves it alone. More on where the rental math pencils out in my post on investment properties in Utah.
Park City and Heber aren't touched by this, but they should be paying attention. Priced-out rates of 97% and 99% are what you get when a market runs on discretionary wealth and the people who work there have nowhere to live. Those towns are headed for the same argument.
My honest read
Take this as my opinion, not a forecast. I think EHO passes in some trimmed-down form, take-up comes in slow, and in five years the visible result is a few hundred infill units and a very different conversation in the suburbs about what you can build on a quarter acre.
The Gardner numbers are the ones I'd hang onto either way. When 91% of renters can't buy, that pressure doesn't disappear. It shows up in policy, in prices, or in where people give up and move.
If you want a straight read on what any of this means for your lot, your neighborhood, and your timeline, call me at (385) 338-0639 or book a consult. Happy to just talk through the numbers.