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SALT LAKE CITY — For Shane Pinneo, the separation between work and home used to be just one flight of stairs.
With that, the bike lanes, Utah Transit Authority's TRAX line and having other businesses close by made living and working in downtown Salt Lake City convenient.
"That downtown exposure is awesome," Pinneo said. "When I lived out here, you kind of get out of the habit of cooking and everything. I'll just walk across the street or hop on TRAX and I'm downtown. It was a really nice thing."
Since then, he's kept his business there, but now he lives in a condo not far away. As an insurance agent, living and working in the same building got almost too convenient.
"Sometimes people don't respect your hours on the door when you live here," he said. "If I were any other type of business, I would live here, just because it's nice to have that closeness. It's a great concept. It's a great use of space."
Two doors down, Charles Wong watches TRAX go by through the front window while he unstitches the hem on a pair of pants. It's only a seven-mile commute to and from his dry cleaning and alteration business each day, and he enjoys the almost-daily conversation with the tenants upstairs.
"I see them all the time," Wong said. "We talk to each other, day and night. Either 'good morning' or 'good evening.'"
More Utahns like Pinneo and Wong are putting a high priority on having a variety of affordable housing options available that are close to where they work and to other amenities, according to new data released by Envision Utah.
The data is part of a larger survey that asked some 53,000 Utahns how they would prioritize elements like housing, transportation, water use, economic development, education and other factors affecting their quality of life.
Options wanted
The survey reveals that those respondents consider transportation and housing as critical future investments as Utah's population is expected to nearly double by 2050, reaching 5.4 million. And what they want is clear:
"They want a variety of housing types that match the market and what people can afford, and they want those included throughout our communities," said Ari Bruening, chief operating officer for Envision Utah, a nonprofit public-private partnership focused on sustaining current and future communities.
"And they also want our communities designed so it's convenient to get around in a variety of ways," he said.
While preparing the "Your Utah, Your Future" survey, Envision Utah collaborated with 400 local experts to model different scenarios for Utah's future. Survey respondents identified elements that are important to them and areas where they're willing to make tradeoffs.
For example, 72 percent of respondents said they were unwilling to convert more farmland into space for houses, but 76 percent said they were willing in some degree to change their landscaping practices to have smaller yards.
Eighty-two percent of respondents said they want communities to be designed for a variety of options for convenient travel and housing choices. To have that, more Utahns are willing to build or restore mixed-use centers, like the one where Pinneo and Wong work, and concentrate housing, shopping and recreation facilities in urban areas.
Just over 1 in 4 Utahns prioritized having a full mix of housing types, and almost the same proportion of people said improvement was needed in allowing those with lower incomes to live in more desirable neighborhoods. More than 4 in 5 respondents were at least somewhat willing to allow a variety of housing types other than large homes in their communities.
Eighty-two percent said they were at least somewhat willing to design roads, shopping areas and other businesses to be more convenient for pedestrians and cyclists, knowing that it might make them less convenient for cars.
While most respondents were from the Wasatch Front, Bruening said rural Utahns also place a high priority on having a wide range of affordable places to live.
"They're less concerned about traffic congestion, but they are concerned about housing options," he said. "In some rural places, incomes are lower, so they want to make sure the housing matches the incomes. Transportation is important in a different way. They're concerned about access, and access for them is longer distances."
Accommodating growth
Andrew Gruber is executive director of the Wasatch Front Regional Council, an association of governments that focuses on long-term transportation planning for six counties in the region. He said Utahns are recognizing how the state's needs are shifting with its changing demographic landscape.
"The key issue for Utah is growth," Gruber said. "Growth is a good thing in that it means we have a desirable state to live in, we have great access to the outdoors, a strong economy and great quality of life. But growth also presents challenges. As our population comes close to doubling between now and 2050, the way we grow will have a significant impact on our transportation, our air quality, our economy and our quality of life."
Today's housing mix is still predominately single-family homes, but that's shifting to include smaller lots, townhouses and other options. Utah's average family lot size peaked in 1980 at 13,153 square feet. With a steady decline since then, 2010's average lot size for the state was 6,122 square feet, less than half of what it was 30 years ago, according to the Envision Utah study.
Since 1998, Utah has been on track to developing less than 50 percent of the land it was projected to convert into homes and businesses by 2020, the report states.
Transportation options have also gained speed. In the past 15 years, Utah has built 140 miles of passenger rail lines with 70 stations, a rate faster than anywhere else in the country, according to Envision Utah.
Almost 3 in 4 people were supportive in some degree of exploring new high-speed transportation possibilities to better connect the Wasatch Front to other large cities in the West.
"What's clear is Utahns want choices in how they travel and the types of neighborhoods and housing that are available. There's no one-size-fits-all," Gruber said. "When it comes to transportation, the majority of people drive and will continue to do so. But more and more people are interested in having options other than driving, including taking the train or bus, riding their bike or walking for trips to work, to church or to the store."
Bruening said he hopes the survey will help residents, businesses and policymakers see how transportation and housing are "interconnected" with other elements critical to quality of life in Utah.
"For the average person, the level of government they're closest to is probably their city government," he said. "I think some of the concepts that people said they were supportive of are the same kinds of things that they can go share with their city counselor, their planning commission or their mayor, talking about a variety of housing options and making sure destinations are close to home and pointing out some of the benefits of that to everybody." Email: mjacobsen@deseretnews.com Twitter: MorganEJacobsen
