Ivins resident Lisa Rutherford has seen a lot of change since she moved to the southwest Utah city more than two decades ago.
For one, the typical home price has gone up 243% since 2000. The lack of affordable housing, she said, threatens to change the community for the worse. But even as Ivins grows beyond 10,000 residents, she continues to see pushback when it comes to building smaller, less expensive homes.
“I just think that there are too many people here who want to protect their little nest egg at the expense of others who need a place to live,” she said. “I want us to look like a friendly community, not just a high-end community.”
The median home price in Ivins is $808,150 according to Realtor.com Economic Research — well above the $610,012 average for downtown St. George and the countywide average of $698,750.
Such a high barrier for entering the market means essential workers, such as teachers, nurses and police officers, are often priced out of the area, said Ivins Mayor Chris Hart. In his view, a healthy community is one that’s home to a variety of ages and income brackets.
“If the average price of a home in Ivins city stays at $800,000 or more, at some point in time, we're probably going to be … a community of retired folks.”
That’s why he’s advocating for a community land trust, an idea that could potentially take the cost of land out of the equation.
“You can't find any other place in the cost of housing where you can remove enough of the cost for it to make enough of a difference to allow a first-time homebuyer or someone in a moderate income situation to be able to get into a home,” Hart said.
“I'm not saying that it is not without its problems and challenges, because it is, but it answers so many problems that I think it needs to be seriously looked at.”
Hart views the trust idea as a way for the state to get more directly involved in solving the housing affordability crisis, too — by opening up some of the land it already owns to development. He has been in discussions with the Utah Trust Lands Administration about exploring this idea for several years. He specifically has his eye on a 40-acre piece of trust land just southwest of Ivins.
This isn’t the only potential solution to the town’s housing crunch, he said. Zoning for smaller lot sizes and higher density could also help reduce housing costs — a change Salt Lake City made. Another option would be to require builders to construct a certain percentage of their homes at a starter home price point.
“What do you think the development community would say to that? They'd freak out.”
However, if a community land trust could get state land and remove the cost of a developed lot from the price of a home, he estimates that could save buyers up to 25%.
It would take some action from the state to make the Ivins idea a reality. First, the Legislature would need to expand the Trust Land Administration’s mission to include housing, he said, and then the agency would need to decide how to act on that mandate.
“It's a hope on my part that they'll want to do something in my own city that shows the state's interest in helping to solve this problem,” Hart said.
“I think that the pressure is on the state … to make sure that there's a housing inventory out there that's affordable to people moving in, for our children. So I think the state and the Legislature realizes they've got to do their share for any of this to work. The cities can't do it.”
Even though community land trusts aren’t common in Utah, one example on the other side of the state shows how such a development might look in Ivins.
The Moab Area Community Land Trust was founded in 2012 to offer a new option for residents as its real estate market heated up. The result is a subdivision called Arroyo Crossing. So far, 43 buyers have moved in to completed homes, with an average price under $350,000, said Executive Director Kaitlin Myers. That’s roughly half the price of the median $656,750 it takes to buy a typical home in Moab.
“On the open market, you can't find a vacant piece of land to develop homes for less than $150,000 [or] $200,000,” she said. “We're able to reduce that housing price for our developers, and they're able to pass on the cost savings and actually build a starter home for families that live here.”
Another 30 units are under construction at Arroyo Crossing right now, she said, most between 900 and 1,900 square feet. When it’s all done, the development will have around 300 homes ranging from cottages to townhomes to multifamily apartments.
One big difference between the Ivins idea and Arroyo Crossing is that the Moab version is not on state land. The development’s 43 acres were private land donated to the trust in 2018.
The idea does come with some trade-offs.
Buyers get the chance to own a home for less than the market rate, but they don’t own the ground it sits on. The land remains with the trust permanently and buyers purchase the chance to enter a long-term lease, while still having all the rights that typically come with land ownership. They also own the home and other improvements on top of the land.
In order to ensure the homes go to people in the target market, Myers said, buyers need to meet certain income limits. They can’t own other properties and must have someone in the household who’s employed locally, with exceptions for people who have retired from a local business or have a disability.
The Moab trust also caps the future price of the homes if they get resold, so that a home purchased for $300,000 today doesn’t become an $800,000 home the next time it goes on the market. That limits how much profit homeowners can make, and Myers acknowledged the model isn’t for everyone.
“It's not intended to be an investment property. It's intended to be a safe place to call home. There definitely is a big mindset change in that, and I think as Moab becomes more and more expensive, more and more people are buying into that.”
Her advice for other communities looking to pursue a similar project is to get early buy-in and prepare to spend a lot of time with legal and infrastructure work before a shovel breaks ground.
She’s also watching to see how potential plans for future trusts in Ivins or elsewhere might play out. Because one thing Moab, Ivins and other resort communities across Utah have plenty of is public land, she said. So figuring out how to expand this idea into a collaboration with the state could go a long way to opening home ownership to more Utahns.
“We're fortunate that we got private land donated to us, but I think for our next project, we would love to partner with another public entity and do a public-private partnership on public lands. And now, that's a conversation that's starting to get traction in the state.”
