There is a quiet crisis in affordable housing that rarely makes headlines. It does not announce itself with fire or flood. It happens when a subsidy expires, a mortgage matures, and a property that housed working families for thirty years quietly leaves the affordable inventory forever. No ceremony. No headlines. Just a family with nowhere affordable to go.
Utah has decided it will not accept that as inevitable.
Our 2025 Impact Report tells the story of how — and what’s happening inside the homes we’ve preserved. This post is a guided tour through what we learned this year, organized around three questions: Who are we serving? What is preservation actually producing in residents’ lives? And how is the model holding up?
Before the details, the topline numbers from 2025:
Each of those numbers represents a household that did not have to move, a senior who did not lose proximity to family, a child who did not have to switch schools mid-year.
Utah leads the nation in economic growth. It has experienced 33 of the past 35 years of net in-migration, GDP growth running at 4.6% (versus 2.8% nationally), and a projected increase of more than 240,000 households by 2033.
That growth has consequences. Utah has already lost 42% of its rentals under $1,000 over the past decade. Forty percent of Utah renters are now cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing. For low-income renters, the squeeze is more severe: 81% spend over half their income on rent. The state faces a current shortage of more than 37,000 units.
And the next wave is approaching. Hundreds of Utah’s Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) properties face subsidy expiration by 2029. When that happens, owners face a choice: keep the units affordable or sell into a hot market. Without a preservation buyer at the table, the math almost always wins.
The Utah Housing Preservation Fund exists to be that buyer.
The Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute has identified preservation as a best practice for addressing Utah’s housing crisis, and the reasoning is straightforward:
Fixing and maintaining existing affordable units costs, on average, 40% less than new construction. Preservation protects the affordable supply we already have, avoiding the years-long delays of zoning and permitting. It protects public investment that would otherwise vanish when subsidized properties convert to market rate. It revitalizes older buildings rather than letting them deteriorate. And — unlike new development, which often faces neighborhood opposition — preservation is welcomed by communities and policymakers alike.
In short: it’s faster, cheaper, and politically achievable.
This is where the 2025 report goes deeper than any prior year. Through a portfolio-wide resident survey, we examined a central question: how does housing preservation translate into real opportunities for residents? The results pointed to three measurable areas of impact — what we call Opportunity Indicators.
Residents across our portfolio save a weighted average of $270 per month on rent. That figure may not sound dramatic, but its effect on tenure is striking: our residents stay in their homes 87% longer than the national renter average — 4.3 years versus 2.3.
More than half of our residents report that prior to moving into a UHPF property, they experienced recurring housing insecurity and frequently worried about rent increases or losing their home. In West Valley communities, that number exceeds 50%. Today, 48% of our residents spend 30% or less of their income on rent — a benchmark of affordability that has become rare in the broader Utah market.
A property manager at Hidden Pointe put the stakes in plain terms:
“If they get an increase of $300–$400, it’d be a really bad impact for them. Not only would it be detrimental to their economy, but just trying to find a different unit is almost impossible.”
Housing affordability frees up capacity to manage everything else. 74% of residents said stable housing has increased their disposable income. And what are they doing with it?
Half of residents said their financial stress has decreased over the past year. That matters because 57% of residents indicated that their financial stress is tied to where they live — making housing not a sidebar to financial wellness, but the foundation of it.
We also know that 44% of residents experienced financial hardship in the past year. The story isn’t that preservation eliminates hardship. It’s that stable housing prevents hardship from escalating into crisis — and gives residents a foundation from which to recover.
Stable housing is a determinant of health. The well-being findings from our survey are not subtle:
Nearly half — 48% — said the cost of their housing strongly affects their health choices, including food, medical care, and insurance. When housing costs come down, those choices get easier.
One resident summed it up in a single sentence:
“Having a stable place has helped my mental health a lot.”
Preservation gets families through the door. Programming keeps them moving forward. In 2025, our partnerships did real work:
Esusu reports our residents’ on-time rent payments to credit bureaus, turning what they were already doing every month into financial mobility. The 2025 numbers: 172 residents became credit-visible for the first time, average credit scores increased by 40 points, 54% of enrolled residents improved their score, and the average new credit score landed at 656. Those gains translate directly into auto loans, lower interest rates, and small-business capital that wasn’t previously accessible.
Project Access at our Monaco property in Millcreek reached 316 residents in 2025, with each engaging on average 14 times throughout the year — across community-building activities (275 residents), after-school youth programs (92), health and wellness access (82), and economic stability resources (34). One Monaco resident, Godai, arrived in the U.S. as a refugee and had been trying to sell handmade jewelry in public parks. Project Access provided the language and procedural support she needed to obtain a small-business license and generate meaningful income at local markets.
Tiny Libraries, donated by the Clark and Christine Ivory Foundation, place free books at every property. Financial education workshops give residents tools for budgeting, saving, and debt management.
These partnerships are why we describe ourselves as more than housing.
In January 2026, new research from Raj Chetty and the Opportunity Insights team at Harvard examined what happens when communities are revitalized rather than torn down. The findings: each additional year a child spent growing up in a revitalized unit increased their adult earnings by 2.8%. Children who grew up in those neighborhoods from birth earned about 50% more across their lifetimes. The lifetime earnings gain — roughly $500K per child — far exceeded the public cost of revitalization.
Chetty’s team identified just 2% of the 70,000 U.S. neighborhoods they studied as having the strongest potential for this “connection-based revitalization.” Parts of West Valley City made the cut — the same neighborhoods where we have invested most heavily, preserving Hidden Pointe (216 units) and Aspen Village (90 units) in collaboration with the city and mission-aligned banks.
As Chetty himself wrote of the Fund:
“The Utah Housing Preservation Fund is an example of that evidence translated into durable, place-based action: preserving units, reinvesting in communities, and layering in social infrastructure in exactly the ZIP codes our analysis identifies as having the greatest potential to benefit from such efforts.”
None of the resident outcomes above happen without capital — and the way the Fund is capitalized is what allows the impact to compound over time.
The Fund did not start with a government program. It started with private conviction. The Clark and Christine Ivory Foundation committed $15 million. Intermountain Health committed $10 million. Zions Bank committed $25 million — the largest single equity CRA investment of its kind in their history. Industrial loan companies, foundations, cities, and counties followed. The Utah Legislature then committed $52.5 million in grant support to securitize the Fund. Governor Cox embedded UHPF as a cornerstone of Utah’s first-of-its-kind State Housing Plan.
The structure matters as much as the size. Because the Fund retains all proceeds beyond the minimal return owed to equity investors, every dollar stays in the system. It does not get spent. It compounds.
In 2025 alone, that structure delivered: $4M in new fundraising, $3.5M in resident savings, a $300K three-year grant from Intermountain Healthcare for Project Access services at Monaco, $625K from WCF Insurance and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines, a $3M commitment increase from Square Financial, and $2.3M directed into capital improvements across the portfolio.
The need is urgent and the model works. The gap between what we have done and what Utah needs is still wide.
To any bank with CRA obligations looking for a high-impact deployment — this is it. To any foundation seeking a permanent home for mission-aligned capital — this is it. To any city or county working toward its preservation obligations under Utah’s moderate income housing plans — this is it.
Every dollar committed to the Utah Housing Preservation Fund stays working. Forever.
Read the full 2025 Impact Report → https://simplebooklet.com/uhpfimpactreport2025
To learn more about partnering with the Utah Housing Preservation Fund, contact Lukas Ridd at lukas@utahpreservation.org