Utah’s economy is booming, but drought and housing crisis are also being fueled |opinion

I appreciated a recent letter from Steven Jones: “Utah needs to stop prioritizing economic growth over its own people.”

For years, our leaders have encouraged new businesses to settle in our desert state, creating the nation’s best economy — but our developers can’t keep up with the housing demand. And the limited water supply of our desert state is under threat. It was obvious that the pace of company growth would eventually cause our current problems. But the solution is simple: Our legislators must stop giving financial incentives to new businesses so they can grow more naturally.

In a Deseret News article, “Rent Control? Leave the free market? What Utahns want to do about wild housing prices,” Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, member of a real estate and construction firm, said of the complex housing problem: “The reason we have so many different answers is , because it’s such a difficult and complex problem, and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious solution. If it were, we probably would have done it a long time ago.”

This morning I listened to a radio interview with Governor Spencer Cox in which he expressed pride in Utah, the fastest growing state with the largest economy in the nation.

It’s too late to undo what’s already been done, but it’s not too late for our legislature to stop incentivizing new businesses to come here.

Fred Ash

Sandy