What killed the State Street Master Plan?

For being the main road of Family City USA, Orem’s State Street is quite an eyesore.

Tour the thoroughfare and you’ll be greeted with aging architecture, a hodgepodge of business signage, and half a dozen traffic lanes snarled with commuters.

State Street’s already groaning infrastructure has come under pressure from Orem’s explosive growth that shows no sign of abating. The Mountainland Association of Governments (MAG) recently estimated that the city could see an influx of 35,000 new residents over the next 40 years.

To address these issues, Orem City Council drafted the State Street Master plan.

Unveiled four years ago, the Master Plan proposed expanding residential development along State Street while revitalizing and beautifying the corridor. The plan called for over 9,000 new units of high-density housing, five new special city zones including an arts district and civic center, and expanded infrastructure to accommodate pedestrians and public transit.

Initially, Orem residents were largely supportive of the project.

“The public outreach has been unprecedented,” Steve Downs, a city spokesperson, said after the announcement. “Literally thousands of residents and landowners were talked to and their opinions helped shape the ordinance.”

But as the City Council set the early stages of the Master Plan in motion, residents became increasingly concerned that the ordinance would threaten their neighborhoods.

“I would hope they listen to us and recognize that we have a quality of life that we’re trying to maintain,” one resident said.

With controversy building around the plan, several city council candidates came to view last year’s local elections as a referendum on State Street development.

“I was reelected with a mandate for change,” David Spencer, a city council member, said recently. “I promised to keep the integrity of our neighborhoods and stave off commercial creep. We have listened, and continue to listen to the citizens of Orem.”

After Dave Young, one of the Master Plan’s most prominent critics, won the mayorship in an upset victory last November, the stage was set for a reversal. On February 22nd, the new City Council voted to repeal the plan’s major components. The mood among the residents attending the meeting was jubilant.

“We don’t need Orem to be a big city, we don’t want Orem to be a big city,” said Scott Swain, to enthusiastic applause. “We appreciate you, Mayor Young, for attempting to put a stop to it. Thank you very much for your efforts.”

“I’m 100 percent in support of the Mayor and the City Council changing the ordinance and the zoning on this,” added Allen Kreutzkamp.

So why did Oremites sour on the State Street Master Plan? The City Council approved the proposal by a 7-0 margin in 2018, only for it to be struck down by a unanimous vote last month. What happened in the intervening four years?

“The concern is high-density housing”

In some ways, the State Street saga mirrors the housing crisis unfolding across the rest of the country. Denizens of overpriced coastal hubs like New York and Los Angeles flee inland, forcing local governments to build more housing to keep up with demand. Some residents push back against the tide of newcomers, while others retreat to still more tranquil pastures, only perpetuating the cycle.

“The American housing market is caught in a vicious cycle of broken expectations that operates like a food chain,” wrote The New York Times. “[And] no matter how many times it happens, no matter how many cities and states try to blunt it with recommendations to build more housing … no next city, as of yet, seems better prepared than the last one was.”

In Orem, where developers have faced stiff opposition from neighborhood groups, that cycle seems to be playing out in real-time.

But Stephanie Visnaw, an Orem resident and informal advisor to the new City Council whom I spoke with last week, rejected cramming the city’s dilemma into a national framework.

“It’s a subjective number depending on the area where you live,” she told me. “Affordable housing shouldn’t be even involved in this debate. The concern is high-density housing.”

“Yes, we need affordable housing, that’s undeniable,” she continued. “But the State Street Master Plan doesn’t provide that.”

LaNae Millet, a newly elected member of City Council and friend of Ms. Visnaw’s, echoed her comments. “In my opinion, there are locations, other than State Street, that are better suited for high-density apartments,” she wrote to me via email. “And high-density apartments don’t always equate to affordable housing.”

Even some of the Master Plan’s most ardent defenders, like Cathy Ambrose–executive director of the suicide prevention non-profit Hope4Orem, agreed that high-density housing, not affordable housing, was the debate’s real point of contention.

“We’re not even looking at affordable housing,” Mrs. Ambrose told me over the phone. “We’re looking at sufficient housing.”

For her part, Ms. Visnaw saw the Master Plan as catering to luxury developers like the Ritchie Group, owner of the Midtown 360 complex.

“Midtown 360 has been a very negative example,” she said. “Though there is a possibility for housing [on State Street], it wouldn’t be affordable housing. The Midtown development is high density but it is clearly not affordable housing.”

Mrs. Ambrose was less convinced that State Street would have been consumed with inaccessible apartments under the original plan.

“I think that’s an overgeneralization,” she said when I asked her about Ms. Visnaw’s projections. “Meaning that people who need to live in apartments or townhomes, it is expensive but they’ll do it. They sublet rooms or they get some kind of assistance. It’s hard to make that assessment because we’re in a pandemic.”

Questions of housing accessibility aside, Ms. Visnaw emphasized that Orem residents were mainly concerned with the prospect of hulking developments looming over their neighborhoods.

“Without the appropriate building heights, the Master Plan was detrimental to the homes bordering State Street properties,” she said. “Some people feel that high-density housing will distract from family values and that the State Street Master Plan would have promoted urban growth rather than protecting Orem’s suburban character.”

“Having tall, high-density housing is not appropriate to protect and preserve existing Orem neighborhoods. Bringing zoning back down to pre-2018 protects the existing homes and the existing neighborhoods. I really appreciate Mayor Young for listening to residents.”

Mrs. Ambrose, however, worried that barring new apartments on State Street would exclude critical and underrepresented members of the community.

“I’m worried about displacement for those essential workers,” she told me. “They are our EMPs, our teachers, our firefighters.”

“I really appreciated how the State Street Master Plan addressed different demographics and different housing needs,” she said. “I want Hispanics and African Americans and Pacific Islanders to live in Orem too.”

What does this mean for Orem’s future?

It’s hard to see how Orem will escape the housing trap that has ensnared so many other formerly idyllic suburbias. The Pacific Northwest in particular offers a cautionary tale for both the State Street Master Plan’s skeptics and its defenders.

With the City Council’s efforts to protect neighborhoods by slashing high-density housing and development, Orem could be in danger of going the way of Berkeley. The college town recently made headlines for restraints on construction that have forced students to sleep in dorm room lobbies while exacerbating Berkeley’s housing crisis, which is bad even for California. In 2021, the median cost of a home in the city was nearly $1.5 million. While Orem has yet to approach those dire straits, the ballooning UVU student population and intensifying housing crunch don’t bode well for the community’s trajectory.

But the path of building towering apartment complexes to accommodate growth is fraught with peril as well. Look no further than ostensible bastions of inclusion like San Francisco and Seattle, which spent the last several decades lining their urban centers with high-rise residences. Rather than improving housing affordability, those new units attracted affluent professionals who contributed to the cities’ exclusivity. As the community publication Shelterforce pointed out, San Francisco has since been crippled by “mind-bogglingly high housing prices, a desperate shortage of affordable housing, and a metastasizing homeless problem.”

These are obviously extreme examples that have limited application for Orem’s current predicament. But they do raise a distressing question: must cities like Orem choose between giving way to overpriced two-bedroom ranch houses and overpriced unsightly penthouses?

There might be a middle way.

Research suggests that diversifying housing types, subsidizing high-density housing for middle-class tenants, and employing mixed-land use can cool red-hot housing markets. But doing so requires exceptional political willpower and some sacrifices from existing neighborhoods. It remains an open question whether the current City Council would consider enacting those kinds of changes going forward.

Stephanie Visnaw, for one, hopes that it will.

“I hope the council is going to add some housing back,” she told me when I asked her about the State Street Master Plan’s future. “I think it was wise for the Master Plan to be pulled back and looked at, but I hope that it won’t be this blanket, ‘no housing zone.’ There are areas of State Street where mid-density housing would be an appropriate transition from commercial property to existing single-family neighborhoods.”

But given the popularity of the Master Plan’s near wholesale repeal, the likelihood of that outcome is dubious. So if you’re looking for a scenic stroll this weekend, State Street, at least for now, is probably not the place for you.