Impending housing crisis could push working class out of Salt Lake City amid pandemic

(KUTV) — Job loss and COVID-19 is economically devastating Salt Lake City's west side, reports Salt Lake City Council Member Andrew Johnston. He anticipates a wave of foreclosures in the next year.

Johnston told 2News he's concerned his constituents could experience homelessness or move out of the Salt Lake City permanently. Experts told 2News working-class people got priced out and displaced farther away from urban centers during the 2008 financial crisis and this trend is happening again during the pandemic.

"This is where it’s affordable, this is where you can have a house and a yard, and your kids can play in parks like this,” Johnston said as he sits in the International Peace Gardens.

“We have a lot of minority families here who have lived here for a long time,” Johnston added.

Johnston, a social worker by trade, lives with his family on the city’s west side. He represents District 2, encompassing the neighborhoods of Popular Grove, Glendale, and Fair Park.

According to the Salt Lake County Health Department data, which determines COVID-19 infection rates by zip code, this area has one of the highest COVID infection rates in the county.

The two zip codes that cover District 2, 84104 and 84116, have crude rates of 1,299 COVID-19 infections per 100,000 people and 1,481 infections per 100,000 respectively. Only West Valley City and downtown Salt Lake City have rates that are higher.

Johnston says one of the reasons his district has high COVID-19 numbers is the types of jobs people work.

“We have a lot of folks that work jobs that aren’t necessarily built for social distancing or working from home,” he points out.

He also said west side neighborhoods are “socioeconomically a little bit lower” than other parts of Salt Lake City and Utah.

Like many working-class people around the country, the residents of Salt Lake City’s west side have been furloughed or laid off.

Budgets are tightening; bills accumulating.

Johnston expressed concern that this financial crunch could cause many people on the west side, where homeownership is prevalent, to lose their homes and become displaced.

The whole experience for a family changes when you uproot them, Johnston says.

“For folks who have a mortgage and lose their housing, obviously homelessness is an immediate issue,” he adds.

Marshall Steinbaum, an assistant economics professor at the University of Utah, said after the 2008 financial crisis, people got priced out of urban areas and into the suburbs.

He calls this trend “the sprawlification of poverty.”

People who lose their living situations in core downtown areas, move to the periphery of metropolitan area, and that paves the way for urban redevelopment and gentrification, Steinbaum explains.

Now he’s concerned the same trend is happening again, gentrifying Salt Lake City’s downtown and its surrounding neighborhoods; but this time, the virus and its economic devastation are the driving force.

“In the sense of geographic disparities, racial disparities end up being disparities in both the prevalence of the illness and the economic devastation that is caused by the illness,” Steinbaum says.

He says there’s a great deal of geographic inequality in metropolitan areas, and Salt Lake is no exception.

“Some towns, some zip codes, some neighborhoods are where the poor people live and some neighborhoods are where the rich people live,” he explained.

In Salt Lake City, Zillow estimates the average home costs $419,987.

Fairpark homes average $296,684; in Popular Grove, $270,266. The average home in Glendale costs $275,245.

For people near the bottom of the income distribution, going to work means necessarily going to a place and interacting with others, Steinbaum points out.

The ability to work without putting yourself at risk, he notes, suggests a level of privilege in this economy.

That’s resulting in different levels of COVID-19 exposure and economic stability for people who live on the east side of Salt Lake City versus people who live on the west side.

We do know with high-paying jobs coming in from out of state, often times they’re buying homes over here because it’s affordable on this side of town,” Johnston says, “but you worry about folks who are moving out and we’re going to lose the fabric of our neighborhood in that way.

He claims gentrification is already happening on the west side, pushing minority families out of the city and into more affordable areas.

A demographic shift, he says, is irreversible.

“The diversity of our neighborhoods is one of our calling cards and it makes us strong over here,” he said

Eighty percent of the children on Salt Lake City’s west side are minorities, Johnston says, adding that’s a diversity you don’t find in other parts of Utah.

This is where these kids are being raised, this is where their parents were raised, often times their grandparents,” he says. “There’s a history here and I hate to see people displaced from where they find their roots.

The KUTV Investigative Team asked Johnston what needs to happen to stem the tide of economic devastation in his district.

His answer was simple: "They need cash."

His constituents need aid to offset household costs to they’re not choosing between paying their mortgage or paying for food and health care, he said.