Salt Lake City unveils public affordable housing construction and preservation dashboard

Salt Lake City staff demonstrated a new public dashboard on April 8 that compiles the city’s record of affordable housing construction and preservation tied to city support.

Eric Holmes and Eric Bromberg described the “affordable housing construction and preservation” dashboard as a cross-departmental effort that aggregates units and funding tied to city support, including loans, grants, fee waivers, and land discounts. Staff said the dashboard is intended to make it easier for board members, council members and the public to see where city-supported units are located, the affordability levels, bedroom-size distributions, and funding types. The dashboard is live on the city website and was released publicly in conjunction with the State of the City presentation earlier in the year.

Staff explained the dashboard’s scope: it includes units where the city provided support (funding, fee waivers, land discounts or affordability agreements) and ties each unit to timing, geography and level of funding. It does not claim to include every affordable project in the metro area or privately funded affordable units that did not accept city incentives. Staff said they have attempted to capture non-city-funded projects when data are available, but those projects lack the same level of verifiable detail and are not included in the public dashboard.

Demonstrations showed interactive filters by district and neighborhood plan area, construction-date filters, and map views with project details (for example, City Lofts Apartments completed in 2023 with 237 affordable units). Staff said they will update the dashboard quarterly after a standard review/validation step and are working to add clearer funding-source breakdowns (CRA, city, federal) on the funding view. An example ad hoc analysis presented by staff showed that city-supported family-size affordable units completed in recent years had doubled and — if projects under development proceed as planned — would double again over the next five years.

Board members praised the effort and noted the dashboard makes more precise the city’s level of support for affordable housing. Staff cautioned that the dashboard is limited to city-supported units and that, where a developer accepted permit or impact-fee waivers, those projects are included because those waivers are treated as city investment.

Ending: Staff said the dashboard will be updated regularly and can be used for ad hoc analysis and public reporting; board members said they expect it to inform future policy and budget decisions.