Blog

Op-Ed: Why should we care about educational attainment?

Written by: Peter Reichard

Post-secondary educational attainment matters a lot. For years, Utah Foundation has been uncovering data on challenges and successes that connect directly to post-secondary educational attainment. In fact, attainment matters so much to us that we just launched a series on the topic with a report that examines strategies that can be deployed to help boost attainment levels. What is educational attainment? In general, it is the highest level of education that a person or population … Continued

Significant Statistics | 2020 a standout year for home sale price escalation

Written by: Christopher Collard

Utah Foundation’s 2020 Utah Priorities Project found that housing affordability is a top issue to Utah voters. This is due in part to increasing housing prices. Based on data collected by Redfin (a real estate brokerage that publishes national housing data), Utah’s housing prices skyrocketed in 2020. (See Figure 1.) A study by bankrate.com found that over the course of 2020, Utah’s home home values increased by 15.4 percent, which was the third-highest increase among … Continued

Utah Thrives Podcast | The Why and How of Boosting Post-Secondary Attainment

Written by: Staff

Utah Foundation has launched a series of reports on how Utah can boost educational attainment. The first report in that series, Beating the Odds: Post-Secondary Success for Adult, First-Generation and Lower-Income Students, explores various means of promoting both student retention and completion of certificates and degrees. It focuses on subsets of students who have been less likely to attain higher levels of education and receive the socio-economic benefits of that attainment.  In this edition of Utah … Continued

Op-Ed: Has Utah found a better way to pay for roads?

Written by: Peter Reichard

About 8,000 years ago, somebody in what is now Iraq came up with the idea of taxing the public for services and infrastructure. In addition to funding armies, taxation in the ancient world went heavily toward building roads. Whether it was property taxes or some other exaction, few were particularly pleased. Tax collectors were despised in the ancient world. After these millennia, is it possible that Utah has figured out the best way for the … Continued

Significant Statistics | Rents in Salt Lake area expensive from a national perspective, but not among Mountain State peers

Written by: Christopher Collard

Utah Foundation’s 2020 Utah Priorities Project found that housing affordability is a top issue to Utah voters. Previous Utah Foundation research indicated that housing affordability was of much greater concern among renters than homeowners.  While the increasing cost of owning a home is potentially offset by record low interest rates, there is no such offset for renters. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development uses a national survey to calculate the Fair Market Rent, … Continued

Significant Statistics | Priorities survey reveals divergent housing affordability concerns by age, political viewpoint, ethnicity

Written by: Christopher Collard

Utah Foundation had asked about housing prices in its 2008, 2010 and 2012 Utah Priorities Project surveys but housing had never been one of the top 10 issues. However, housing affordability was the second most important issue to Utah voters in early 2020. With the emergence of the coronavirus, concerns about housing affordability dropped to 7th – with just under one-third of Utahns ranking it in the top 5. (See Figure 1.) Interestingly, housing affordability … Continued

Utah Thrives Podcast | Connecting Teleworking and Air Quality in Utah

Written by: Peter Reichard

In April 2020, Utah Foundation released a report, Work Away from Work: The Challenges and Promise of Teleworking, on remote work. It provided an overview of the potential benefits and pitfalls of the massive experiment in teleworking prompted by the pandemic. In January 2021, Utah Foundation released a followup report, The Way Home: The Shift to Telework and its Air Quality Ramifications. The report focuses on how remote work relates to future growth, traffic and air … Continued

Op-Ed: Can the telework revolution improve traffic and air quality in Utah?

Written by: Peter Reichard

Every couple of decades, the trajectory of modern history pivots on game-changing innovations: the rise of trains, planes and automobiles; the invention of the light bulb; the birth of television; the emergence of the PC; the dawn of the internet. We are due for another pivot, and it may have arrived in the form of a remote revolution. With the lockdowns of 2020, the worldwide embrace of telehealth, e-commerce, telemeetings, online education and telework suddenly … Continued

Op ed: Development tax breaks need oversight

Written by: Peter Reichard

It looked like a stroke of genius. Back in the 1950s, California officials, looking to fund economic development projects under tight budget constraints, created a mechanism known as tax increment financing, or TIF. The idea was to pledge new (or incremental) tax revenue generated from a project to make the project itself possible. It would be a clean win for the public, because the only money to be spent would be money that would not … Continued