CEDAR CITY — The chill music and warm night make it easy to think that all is well in this Cedar City neighborhood. But many of the students attending Southern Utah University have serious concerns about finding and paying for housing.
“We’re building more houses now, but there was a moment there, where you weren’t sure you would have a place to live,” one college student told KSL-TV.
Utahns all over the state share the same anxiety.
The Utah Foundation conducted its Priorities Project, where every four years it surveys a few thousand residents to identify the top issues in the state. Based on this year’s priorities, the report is titled, “Priced out and fed up.”
Two of the top five issues involve the cost of housing (No. 1) and the cost of everything else (No. 3). The rest of the top five deal with politicians: ignoring voters (No. 2), overreaching (No. 4 ), and partisanship (No. 5).
“It’s a big surprise,” Utah Foundation President Shawn Teigen said.
What does this say to politicians? He responded, “I don’t know if it’s a wake-up call, or exactly what it is, but it shows maybe we need to start thinking about these issues.”
Another big surprise in the findings is the issue that didn’t even make the list — health care. It ranked No.1 in 2016 and in 2020.
“2024, nobody cares, it’s not even on the list of 17,” Teigen said.
Utah is not alone in ranking affordable housing as the top concern. Many states in the region and across the country are seeing home prices skyrocket in recent years.
“It’s a very big deal in Colorado, it’s a very big deal in Arizona, Nevada, in Idaho. It’s a big deal in most places right now,” he said.
That may do little to comfort students in Cedar City, some of who are just in their first semester of living on their own.
“Right now, my parents help with a lot, but next semester, I’m going to be basically on my own, and it’s going to be really hard I think,” a freshman at the university said.
While many of these students struggle to find higher-paying jobs, Teigen hopes policymakers and voters will work together to find policies that will address the problem.
“So our kids and grandkids can live in this state when they’re going to buy homes. Otherwise, they’ll have to live in Iowa or Ohio, they won’t be able to live here, unless they live in our basements,” he said.
The Utah Foundation hopes its Priorities Project sparks debate ahead of the election.
At the same time, KSL is launching a statewide listening campaign called “Roads to Understanding.” The station launched the project in Cedar City and will travel statewide in the coming weeks to hear the top issues in several Utah communities. The goal is to better understand each other and the challenges we all face, during this divisive political environment.
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