Draper’s housing plan counts a need its programs are not priced for

Draper does not say no to housing, and its paperwork is better than most. Its housing element prints the shortfall in income bands instead of burying it, and has been amended three times since 2022 1. It adopted four station area plans in 2025 1 and loosened its ADU code on 12 November 2024, cutting the lot threshold for internal-unit deviations to 6,000 square feet; applications rose from three to eight 2. State law asks for “a reasonable opportunity,” not a quota 1.

The arithmetic is blunt: the housing chapter puts 2022 area median income for a family of four at $81,900, then counts what Draper has in each band: 2,059 homes affordable at 80 per cent of that median, 217 at 50 per cent, none below 30 per cent 1. By 2027 it projects a shortfall of 488 units at 50 per cent and 1,046 at 30 per cent 1. The gap is at the bottom, and the plan says so.

The instruments the plan counts on for volume sit above that line. Draper counts 38 ADUs and five permits in the year to July 2025, and its general plan says the 2021 ADU changes achieved “very little to increase the overall supply” of moderate income housing 12. The station area plans carry the volume, and say townhomes and middle housing “can be market rate,” which “is often affordable to households at 80 to 120 percent of AMI” 3. The deepest product there, apartments reserved at 60 per cent of median income for 30 to 60 years, is something “the City and UTA should consider including,” not a condition of approval 3.

The largest approval in two years shows the ratio. On 17 June 2025 the City Council passed Ordinances 1655 and 1656, rezoning 20 acres at 600 East Kimballs Lane to 25 to 27 units an acre, 500 to 540 homes, under an agreement the city’s community development director described as having no concept site plan and no design standards 4. Thirty of them are reserved for workforce buyers 24. The Planning Commission had asked the council to “consider allocating more units beyond 30 to workforce housing”; the council approved both unanimously 4.

The test of a housing program is the price of what it sells. The Ivory Homes agreement produced seven homes for buyers between 80 and 120 per cent of median income, deed-restricted for 50 years with appreciation capped at 4 per cent, priced $390,000 to $475,000 2. Three of the second phase’s four were recorded as reserved last year; three now sit unsold at about $429,000 and $459,000, the Draper Herald reported 25. Thirty per cent of $81,900 is $2,048 a month; by our arithmetic a $429,000 unit with 10 per cent down carries $2,579 in principal and interest at the 7.04 per cent rate the city cites for January 2025 12. The bottom of the band cannot carry the price the band is tied to.

On 20 October the council considered its answer: opening the three units to part-time staff past probation, school district employees, National Guard members, charter school staff 5. Prices were not part of it, and the income limits need Community Reinvestment Agency action 5. “Interest rates are a killer,” a member said 5. If nobody buys, Ivory may take the units back and sell them to anyone 5.

Our judgement concerns the decision, not anyone’s purpose. Widening who may buy a $429,000 house does nothing for a household at half the median income; it moves three houses to buyers who can already afford them. The choice on 20 October was to leave the price alone and change the list of names. The choice on 17 June 2025 was to approve 540 homes with thirty workforce units and no site plan 4. The instrument that would attach affordability to those zones is unwritten, and the city’s own timetable puts the incentives in 2027 12.

Four things would change our mind. Publish, for each deed-restricted home, the sale price and the income that carried it, and report sales rather than reservations. Decide at the Community Reinvestment Agency whether to put money into the gap below 50 per cent instead of widening eligibility above it. Write an affordable share into the station area zoning when the council adopts it. Say what the thirty Kimballs Lane units are restricted to, and for how long, under an agreement running to 31 December 2032 4.

On 12 November the Planning Commission hears four lots at Concord Farm Lane and five at 12430 S. 700 East, lot-size reductions on a few acres, neither carrying a deed restriction 67.

This page argued the housing records of South Jordan, Riverton and Herriman this month, and each has a defence 8. Draper’s is strongest on paper and weakest at the point of sale, because it wrote the number down. A city that counts 1,046 missing homes for its poorest households and then sells three townhomes nobody in that band can buy has not failed for want of arithmetic. It has failed at the decision arithmetic cannot make for it.