Governor, officials assemble to celebrate starter home construction in Plain City neighborhood | News, Sports, Jobs

PLAIN CITY — If increasing the stock of starter homes is the right thing to do, the JDC Ranch development on the west side of Plain City is well on its way to doing the right thing.

On Thursday, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and other local officials held a groundbreaking ceremony in the neighborhood to celebrate the construction of 275 starter homes as part of the expansive 1,000-home neighborhood. The starter homes will be single-family detached homes with base prices below $400,000. The properties will come fully landscaped and fenced.

Jed Nilson, owner and president of Nilson Homes — the company developing the neighborhood — said adding to the housing stock is an element important to restoring the American dream in Utah.

“We’ve all grown up with the desire to achieve the American dream, and for many in this young generation, the American dream is slipping away and is especially not available in Utah,” he said. “Many are having to leave the state to achieve that American dream. We want to bring that American dream back to Utah so that Utahns can continue to live in Utah and stay close to their family and friends.”

Nilson was joined in speaking by Cox, Weber County Commissioner Jim Harvey and Steve Waldrip, the state’s senior advisor for housing strategy and innovation.

Waldrip said Cox’s goal of building 35,000 starter homes in the state over five years is no simple task.

“That’s 0.8 (houses) per hour for five straight years — that’ a lot,” he said. “In the economy we’re in right now, it’s a difficult interest rate environment and there are challenges in the construction industry with labor and pricing. We all know what’s happening.”

He added that challenges also extend to the perception of additional housing coming to an area.

“Density is a bad word in Utah right now,” he said. “This density is going to be wonderful and beautiful, but it’s tough to convince your neighbors of that when everybody is afraid of the impacts of growth. The Planning Commission for West Weber stood up and said, ‘This is the right thing to do. We need homes for our children, for our grandchildren. We’re willing to stand up and do the right thing here.’ And they viewed it as their moral obligation.”

Harvey noted that, as time goes on, the area will be adjusted for the growth.

“The traffic’s tough out here,” he said. “That road’s wide and it’s going to get busier, but it’ll get fixed. There will be more people out here. There will be more infrastructure out here, but it’ll get fixed. It’s coming. The studies have been done, they’ve done it the right way.”

Cox said he’s not deterred from taking on the housing crisis.

“This is an existential crisis. It is the crisis of our time and we have to do something,” he said. “I had people close to me say, ‘Don’t take this on. It’s too complicated. Every governor’s trying to figure this out. Nobody has figured this out. Canada, the UK — it’s not just a U.S. problem; it’s a global problem. Nobody’s figured it out, and you’re not going to be able to solve it and you’re just going to look bad four years from now when you’re done.’ … We can’t look away.”

Following the ceremony, Nilson told the Standard-Examiner that these starter homes will be move-in ready very soon.

“We’ve got some of these homes framed up already,” he said. “We’ll for sure have people moving in in the first quarter of next year, probably January or February.”

He said Nilson Homes is taking a direct approach to help keep the new homes affordable for families.

“We’ve basically agreed to take on the risk of continuing to build these homes at a below-market rate,” he said. “On these 275 homes, they will not fluctuate with the market, so if the market goes up 20%, these homes don’t. They will always be more fixed to what the costs are of the home. That’s mainly the way that they’ll stay at this starter home pricing — because they don’t fluctuate with the market pricing.”

Nilson called projects like this extraordinarily important at the present time.

“There’s an extreme housing shortage in the state of Utah, and that’s caused home pricing to skyrocket,” he said. “It’s made it so 80% of Utahans can’t afford a median-priced home in the state of Utah. We felt like, as a builder/developer, I had an opportunity to make a difference. So we took this concept to the governor’s team, and then we took it to the county here and they all agreed with the concept.

“I feel like it’s important because we have to fix the housing crisis in order for our state to continue to flourish. If our own Utah children and grandchildren can’t afford to stay in Utah, that will ruin the fabric of our state — families are the fabric of our state.”