Miss: In the Zone
There’s no question that Salt Lake needs more housing. The issue is how, where and when. The latest is a 15-story midrise building across from Trolley Square. And when they say “midrise,” they mean something smaller than the Empire State Building. The building would house condos, which apparently has created great glee from the City Council. The problem is what exactly that means. One housing advocate, Cindy Cromer, was disgusted, partly because the city would have to change both zoning and the master plan. “There’s no sense to work on a master plan if the language is just completely ignored,” she said. An Instagram comment noted the “increasingly frequent habit of developers asking for zoning exemptions and master plan changes for individual owners and specific … parcel zoning.” And while the Council seems thrilled with the tower’s ownership component, for-sale units often go to buyers who then rent them out to other tenants. “The city is naïve,” Cromer said, adding that, in her opinion, there’s no predictability, no protection for view corridors and no assurance of affordability…