The typical home in the town of Ivins costs more than $800,000 — not exactly first-time-homebuyer-friendly.
Jordan Wall hopes that adding more condos and townhomes in this corner of southwest Utah might open the door to the starter home crowd.
At a patch of red dirt near Old Highway 91, he pointed out the features of a four-unit townhome being built by his company, Wall 2 Wall Construction. It’s one of several similar projects he’s doing in Ivins, a town west of St. George. The three- and four-bedroom homes will be priced around $400,000.
“We're able to put four families on a lot that could be one single-family home,” Wall said.
In a county projected to add 40,000 residents in the next decade, that’s a big deal.
“The biggest thing when it comes to attainable housing in the state of Utah is just land. God isn't making any more of it, so we have to be smart with what we have,” Wall said. “It all just boils down to density.”
Condos and townhomes have advantages. They offer buyers a lower price point. They add supply to the market quickly. And because they have smaller yards, they help conserve water.
They could also help Utah inch closer to Gov. Spencer Cox’s goal of building 35,000 starter homes by the end of 2028.
But in Washington County at least, projects like Wall’s townhome development are less common than they were two years ago.
In 2023, 42% of all new homes built in Washington County were condos and townhomes. Now, it’s just 20%.
At the same time, the share of new residences that are single-family homes has risen.
Still, there’s plenty of unmet demand for smaller, less expensive homes, said Stacy Young, government affairs director with the Southern Utah Home Builders Association.
Just under a quarter of Washington County households are two-parent with kids, he said. So more than three-quarters of households are single individuals, single parents or couples without kids — groups that might prefer a condo or townhome to a palatial estate.
“If nothing else, it's a business opportunity,” Young said. “If you're able to solve for that, we know that there's a need.”
A variety of factors could be behind the recent drop in townhome development, Young said.
Inflation and material costs spiked in the wake of the pandemic, but have since fallen, so there’s less incentive for developers to build cheaper, connected units.
In a relatively small market like Washington County, one or two large projects might also throw some noise into the data. Ivins’ Black Desert Resort built lots of condos and townhomes starting in 2022, he said, so that could explain some of the 2023 bump.
On top of that, some cities have loosened rules to allow smaller detached houses, such as the Desert Color development on the south side of St. George. So, some of the single-family homes under construction may be closer to the size and price of previous years’ townhomes.
Overall, however, Young said housing in Washington County remains deeply unaffordable for a large slice of the population. Home prices are more than six times the median income, he said, when a healthy market should be just three times the median income.
And many city zoning rules still create hurdles for developers who would like to build cheaper attached residences.
“Especially if you use the ‘D word’ of density, people really lose it,” Young said. “That is a big impediment. Politically, it's very difficult for policymakers to approve the kinds of housing that we desperately need.”
One example of how this plays out, Wall said, is that some of these strict single-family regulations push denser, more affordable housing onto less desirable land. It may have bad soil or sloped terrain. The utilities may need to cover a long distance to connect. But doing that is counterproductive, he said, because the extra work required raises the cost to develop it and therefore the cost to buy a future home built on it.
There have been some positive changes in recent years, Wall said, such as St. George permitting accessory dwelling units and Hurricane allowing some smaller lot sizes.
But there’s still a vocal slice of the public that opposes the idea, often referred to as NIMBYs — those already living in an area who say ‘not in my backyard’ to potential apartments or condos.
“They have this misconception of these lesser-than people are going to be moving into these houses because they're more affordable,” Wall said. “And it's like, no, it's probably more like your kids and grandkids is who's moving in there.”
So, if we want them to have homes someday, he said, the time for both local leaders and developers to act is now.
