Steve Waldrip, Gov. Spencer Cox’s senior adviser for housing strategy, said a recent poll showing that a significant number of Utahns have considered moving out of state because of high housing costs didn’t surprise him.
“I wish it did,” Waldrip told the Deseret News Monday. “It’s really not surprising. I think we’re seeing, particularly among the younger demographic that (pollsters) highlighted, that the ability to stay is really under threat.”
Utahns, he said, are “feeling that from our kids and our grandchildren, this struggle that they’re having to feel like they can start their life the way that they had always planned to, by getting a home and getting stability.”
In the poll released last Friday by Phoenix-based Noble Predictive Insights, 58% of Utah voters under 30 agreed with the statement, “Housing is so expensive that I’ve considered moving out of state.”
Even among Utah voters overall, a third shared that sentiment, while 56% agreed that housing was expensive but hadn’t thought about packing up for a place where homes are cheaper. Just 6% labeled housing affordable in Utah.
The Utah Public Opinion Pulse Poll results surveyed a total of 609 Utah registered voters March 11-13 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points, according to the nonpartisan public opinion polling, market research and data analytics firm.
Utah leaders have been trying to address housing affordability, with the governor remaining committed to seeing 35,000 starter homes built in the state within the next five years to help keep young families from leaving.
But some questioned just how much the 2025 Legislature helped would-be homebuyers. A number of bills aimed at improving affordability stalled, including efforts to increase housing density in urban municipalities.
“That’s really the dilemma that we’re facing. We do have a very strong fence of local control here in Utah. That lends itself to a lot of the ’nimby-ism’ we’re seeing across the state,” Waldrip said, referring to the anti-development acronym for “Not In My Back Yard.”
Still, he didn’t dismiss the reaction.
“People are understandably concerned about their quality of life. They’re understandably concerned about traffic impacts and density impacts,” Waldrip said, concerns he believes can be better countered by the governor’s starter homes initiative.
“One of the reasons that we’re focusing so intently on home ownership is because that does go towards appropriate density, I think, and density that people are less afraid of,” Waldrip said, since homeowners “have more of a stake in the community.”
There needs to be a shift in how Utahns view growth, from something that needs “to be avoided and is scary and terrible to, ‘We can do this right,‘” he said, repeating a message the governor delivered in his State of the State address in January.
Then, Cox told Utahns, they must reject what he called the false choice between “building thousands of new homes and maintaining our quality of life,” saying housing attainability “will surely be the defining issue of the next several decades.”
Waldrip said the poll can help the public see building more housing as an opportunity.
Utahns aren’t choosing “a diminished quality of life” when they provide housing that young buyers can afford, he said, acknowledging that getting Utahns on board means “changing a massive public perception that has been around for a very long time.”