Does building more homes actually lower prices? New research from the Pew Charitable Trusts says yes.
With Utah staring down a potential housing deficit of 235,000 homes over the next 30 years, researchers say the state could learn a thing or two from Austin, Texas.
For starters, an analysis by Pew found the city managed to drop the median rent by 4% — or about $250 a month — over the last five years through big changes to zoning and permitting that caused a new housing surge.
According to the analysis, Austin’s explosive growth in the 2010s saw the city fall into a housing crisis where “too many people were competing for too few homes.” In that decade, rents rose by 93%, and home prices shot up 82%.
Pew Housing Policy Initiative Director Alex Horowitz sees similarities in Austin’s situation a decade ago to Utah’s housing landscape today, with high-paying tech jobs and the lure of the outdoors helping fuel the state’s historic growth and expensive housing market.
“Utah is a state that has added a lot of population and has added more housing than most states, but has not been able to keep up with the influx of residents,” Horowitz said. “We were able to learn a lot by looking at Austin's experience and studying how they added so much housing.”
Beginning in 2015, Horowitz said Austin implemented a series of changes. Reforms included zoning regulations that made it easier to build apartment buildings and a permitting process to allow for faster development and lower costs. What followed was an influx of new housing between 2015 and 2024 to the tune of 120,000 units — a 30% increase in the city’s total housing stock.
While housing affordability can sometimes feel like an unsolvable problem, “it's within reach if we make it easy enough to build,” Horowitz said.
“Builders are ready to build homes, but they're facing too many regulatory barriers, and so they only end up building for really the top end of the market or large apartment buildings.”
In short, he believes the biggest thing governments can do is get out of the way.
Salt Lake City passed sweeping zoning reform in 2023, but there still haven’t been significant changes on a statewide level. One bill in the 2026 legislative session that would have made it easier to build homes on small lots did not even make it out of committee.
For Utah League of Cities and Towns Policy Director Karson Eilers, it will take more than zoning changes to address the problem.
“For every house, you need to make sure you have adequate drinking water, adequate sewer supply, adequate transportation; all of these systems that are typically public systems,” he said. “We're rapidly growing, and that means that we have really significant infrastructure challenges to be able to keep accommodating that.”
Eilers pointed out that many of the permitted housing lots in the state are in areas where essential utilities such as sewer, water and electricity might be lacking.
“We have a lot of these high-growth areas that are sort of on the urban periphery,” he said. “You have a ton of entitlements, legal entitlements, that have been given there, but we're all trying to figure out how to make sure that there's water there.”
To address that very issue, there has been some movement on the policy front. This year, state lawmakers passed legislation aimed at making large infrastructure projects cheaper through low-cost loans. Over time, advocates say that could also increase housing supply and help drive down prices.
Statewide measures like incentivizing transit-oriented development and national factors like low interest rates during the early pandemic years led to a surge in new supply. Now, those tools are again resulting in some progress in Utah’s rental market. According to Zillow, rents in Utah have been on a slow decline since mid-2025.
When it comes to what type of housing is the best to build, experts like Horowitz say any new housing — even if it’s on the higher end of the market — helps drive down costs for everyone.
“When there's not enough housing, it's low-income renters who end up paying the steepest price, because high-income renters move into middle-income neighborhoods and middle-income renters move into low-income neighborhoods,” he said. “Even if new housing is expensive, adding a lot of it ends up benefiting low-income renters the most.”
Eilers urged a little patience to see how recent changes at the state and local levels play out before people start clamoring for more drastic adjustments.
“Cities don't build housing,” Eilers said. “We plan for housing, and many of these tools that we've created, these bites of the apple, have only really started to come into fruition relatively recently.”
