Why Does Affordable Housing Take a Back Seat at Park City Heights?

Park City Heights is the residential housing development behind the movie studio. It is scheduled to have 211 single family homes, 78 of which will be in line with affordable housing requirements. There will also be 28 affordable town houses. According to the Park Record, on Monday the developer was to start selling 100 “market-priced” homes. These would be the “non-affordable” type. In a few months it will list 10 of it’s affordable houses/townhomes for sale.

Doing the math, they are listing 55% of their regular inventory for sale immediately. In a few months they say they will be listing 9.4% of the affordable properties for sale. I don’t know the business, so I don’t know why they would take this approach. I could speculate that they make more off the regular homes, so they opted to do those first, but I don’t know.

Yet, according to the Park Record article, they say they’ll sell 10-20 affordable homes each year depending on demand. At the low end of estimates, that would mean the affordable housing component would be sold over the next 10 years.

This makes me wonder whether there is any time frame in either the city or county affordable housing codes that specify a timeframe for completion. Do we have an affordable housing problem now? If so, it seems like solving the problem 10 homes at a time is better than nothing… but why not have 100 affordable houses come online with the 100 market rate houses at the same time?

Something just doesn’t seem quite right with all of this.