How many people do you want to pack into Park City?

I believe there is inherent guilt in living in the Park City area. We know how great it is and believe everyone should have the opportunity to live here. Somehow, and I’m not sure how, many of us have found a way to live in a place where homes cost $2 million dollars. My 20-something version of myself would have never dreamed that was possible.

Since we exited the financial crisis in 2012, housing prices went vertical, there has been a push to ensure there is affordable housing in the Snyderville Basin. The argument is that we need our teachers, law enforcement, firefighters, wait-staff and others to be able to afford to live here.

It makes sense. If you research the topic, there are stories about how teachers who live in their community have more time to spend with their students and their kids get better outcomes. We hear that law enforcement personnel who live in a community provide more protection. There is the argument that if people live in a locale, versus drive in, that they will take public transport and reduce traffic.

I don’t doubt this in many cases.

Yet, who wouldn’t want to live here? If you are living in the Salt Lake Valley and immersed in an inversion, wouldn’t you want to live above the pollution in Park City? Who wouldn’t want to be 10 minutes from a ski resort when the Cottonwoods are such a shit-show? We could literally fill every single inch of the Snyderville Basin with people.

I get why people want to live here.

Yet, do we who live here, really want more people to live here? Do we trust Summit County and Park City to solve trail issues? Do we believe UDOT will magically solve traffic through a traffic-study pushed by a developer. Will the health department find a way to stop the inversion from coming up I-80? Do I want to be more crowded?

Or do we believe that more traffic and more people lead to a worse experience for those people who have lived here for decades?

I tend to believe that affordable housing is used by developers to make money. It’s an end to the means for them. There is a rule in our General Plan that says that there is so much development that has already been OK’d but not yet built, that there has to be a reason to OK more development. So, developers trot out affordable housing as an incentive to get it approved. Do they do this because they want to make Park City and Summit County better? No, they want to make money.

The downside of this is that is fills our town with too many people. We don’t have the ability to support the traffic, people, and natural resources necessary.

We make Pa