IVINS — Between Kayenta, the Palisades and the reservation lands, Ivins has become known more recently as a place for someone to buy a million-dollar home as opposed to a place where a young family can build a starter home.
The mayor of Ivins hopes a grand experiment the city is about to undertake will give those who make a working wage a fighting chance.
As part of his State of the City address last week, Ivins Mayor Chris Hart announced the city will be one of two or three test locations statewide where people will be able to purchase a home without having to pay for the cost of the land.
The idea is a community land trust paid for with funds from the state’s School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, also known as SITLA, and either city funds or a municipal bond. The trust will own land in Ivins on which houses – mostly lower square footage and starter homes – will be built. People can then buy the house and lease the land from the trust with a pathway to potentially gain equity.
The plan is to mainly limit the homes to families with members who work in essential services like public safety, education and utilities.
“We will work with SITLA to develop a land trust that will hold the land so the land is not included in the cost of the home,” Hart said during his April 25 State of the City at Ivins City Hall. “Through a housing authority, they will, by application, develop homes that can be sold in a range where the payments can be made by essential service workers and other service workers.”
Community land trusts are nothing new, according to a Harvard University study on the subject, stretching back to the creation of the Jewish National Fund in 1901 in what was then Ottoman Syria and is now Israel. The Jewish National Fund has been credited with keeping homes affordable for Jewish settlers and, to this day, owns about 15% of residential land in Israel.
Only in the last few decades have such trusts started in the U.S., starting as a way for Black families to attain housing in the South just after the Civil Rights Movement and are now seen as a way to create permanent affordable housing.
One of the nation’s largest municipal community land trusts, and one of the oldest, started in 1984, is in Burlington, Vermont. Right now, according to its website, a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home can be purchased through the trust for $185,000 in an area where the average home price is $373,750, according to Redfin.com.
In Utah, a community land trust in Moab has been active since 2012 and one is being developed in Provo. For the last two years, the Washington County Housing Action coalition has been trying to develop a countrywide land trust.
Even so, Hart admitted that Ivins is going to be a guinea pig of sorts.
“It’s going to be … a bit of an experiment,” Hart said. “Although it’s been tried in other places across the country, we think that this is something that will actually turn out to be a solution.”
One official already applauding the experiment planned for Ivins is the governor of Utah.
Earlier this week in an address to the Southern Utah Home Builders Association in St. George, Gov. Spencer Cox pushed cities to create plans to build more homes with an emphasis on starter homes in the next year. Speaking with St. George News after the speech, Cox said he was well aware of the plan in Ivins.
“Anything we can do to increase supply and to keep that supply in the chain is going to be better off for our kids,” Cox said.
The challenge of affordable housing
When he got to the affordable housing portion of his State of the City, Hart took a pause.
“Affordable housing? What a challenge,” Hart said.
He then gave some figures he said he received that day from the Washington County Board of Realtors.
What is the average cost of a home now in Utah? $506,702. And in Ivins? $852,544.
“How do you, with land values like that, produce affordable housing?” Hart said.
He noted that the city had just formed an affordable housing committee, and the land trust was seen as another answer.
But there’s another challenge: the will of those who already have a place to live in Ivins and the prevailing view against more growth and more density.
“The question that’s on the mind of our residents is, ‘All right, we’re growing. We came here, we helped it grow. We kind of like it the way it is. What are you going to do to keep it this way?’” Hart said. “And isn’t that the challenge in growth, right? It’s how do you keep the flavor, the personality, the image of the city intact as you grow?”
An additional complication: a citywide survey conducted in 2022, 79% of residents said they preferred new residential development to be single-family homes on large lots.
“Well, that’s not only not practical, but it’s not the market anymore, is it? Folks are … looking for smaller, easier-to-maintain lots and the generations coming up are not looking for the same kind of home that we own or that our parents own,” Hart said. “Our people want the city to stay wide open and high-end. But there aren’t many people who can afford these days to move into a home on a half-acre or acre lot. When we have a need to hire a police officer, a firefighter, EMT or if a school requires some additional teachers, they can’t live here.”
The city is in the process of finalizing a new general plan – a process that has taken more than two years – that will shape Ivins policy going forward.
And Hart said ultimately the City Council will have to decide what direction the city takes as far as housing its residents.
“The choice that the council has to make is do we go with what our residents tell us they want us to do, or do we look carefully at what we want the city to be?” Hart said. “Is it essentially a big retirement community? Maybe not. Maybe we need families. Maybe we need children running around. We haven’t had that before. And my goodness, they just enhance the flavor of the city.”
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