Ground has broken on Camden Court, a 96-unit affordable housing community rising at 390 W. 1300 South in Salt Lake City, adding another project to the city's fast-expanding push to build income-restricted homes as rents keep climbing. The development, formerly known as 1300 S Apartments, is being built by Hermes Affordable Services and represents one of several affordable housing projects the city has backed in recent months across downtown and the west side.
Camden Court's financing came together after the Utah Housing Corporation approved up to $19.1 million in tax-exempt private activity bond financing for the project in April 2026, according to Utah Housing Corporation records. The project reportedly needed board extensions before the financing was finalized and construction could begin, per those same records. As KUTV reports, the need for housing keeps growing even as the city breaks ground on new affordable units like this one.
A Citywide Pattern of Public-Private Deals
Camden Court isn't an outlier — it's part of a pattern of city-backed affordable housing that has reshaped several corridors of Salt Lake City over the past couple of years. The Salt Lake City Community Reinvestment Agency has supported similar projects including Aster Apartments, SPARK Apartments, and Arbor 515, according to the KUTV report. Each relies on a different mix of public subsidy, bond financing, and land deals rather than any kind of municipal rent cap.
SPARK Apartments, a $99 million development at 1490 W. North Temple, brought 200 income-restricted apartments online near downtown in 2025, including 48 deeply affordable units reserved for households earning between 20% and 30% of area median income. The project, which replaced a blighted mid-century motel near the TRAX Power Station stop, also includes an on-site daycare center operated by Neighborhood House, as Hoodline reported at its opening.
Adaptive Reuse and a Tenant Wealth Experiment
Arbor 515, described in the KUTV report as recently opened, converted a vacant 14-story former University of Utah Health office tower at 515 E. 100 South into 96 affordable units. The project launched what it calls a Tenant Wealth Initiative, returning 75% of the developer's annual cash flow to tenants as rent rebates after the first year, along with equity proceeds from any future refinancing or sale, according to Affordable Housing Finance. The building's ground floor also houses a Montessori school.
Downtown, the $95 million Aster Apartments development at 255 S. State Street added 190 mixed-income units, including 168 income-restricted homes reserved for households earning between 20% and 80% of area median income. The project restored the historic 19th-century Cramer House within a public pedestrian paseo after Brinshore Development stepped in to rescue a stalled site, per HUD USER.
Why Rent Control Isn't the Tool
None of these projects involve actual rent control in the traditional sense, even though coverage of Aster, SPARK, and Arbor 515 has described elements of price restriction at each site. Under Utah Code § 57-20-1, local governments in the state are statutorily barred from enacting local rent control or fee limitations on private residential properties without express authorization from the state legislature. Instead, cities like Salt Lake City achieve affordability through restrictive covenants tied to public subsidies, bond financing, and land write-downs rather than municipal price caps.
That legal constraint helps explain why the Salt Lake City Community Reinvestment Agency plays such an outsized role in these deals. In November 2025, the agency released a notice offering $14.4 million in affordable housing funding, including $8 million dedicated specifically to its Housing Development Loan Program for low-income rental and homeownership projects, Hoodline reported at the time. The agency frequently leverages land write-downs and low-interest loans to bridge budget gaps that developers can't close on their own.
The Scale of the Shortage
The urgency behind all this activity traces back to a punishing rent surge. Salt Lake City's five-year housing plan notes that average rents across Salt Lake County jumped by $321 per month between 2020 and 2022 alone — nearly matching the $409 total increase recorded across the two decades before that, according to HUD USER's case study. Research from the University of Utah's Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute shows Utah faces a statewide housing deficit exceeding 50,000 units, though the same research notes that middle-density housing types like townhomes and twin homes cost about $150,000 less to build than single-family homes in the region.
Against that backdrop, Salt Lake City's Housing SLC 2023–2027 plan set a goal of enabling 2,000 deeply affordable housing units for households earning 30% of area median income or less by June 2028. As of mid-2026, roughly 700 units were built, under construction, or planned toward that target, according to Building Salt Lake. Deeply affordable units of that kind typically target single-person households earning around $26,500 a year.
Market-Rate Growth Continues Alongside
Not every major project rising in Salt Lake City is income-restricted. Downtown's 41-story, 451-foot Astra Tower opened in May 2025 as Utah's tallest skyscraper, featuring high-end luxury apartments and an LED crown wired to EPA and NOAA sensors that displays real-time ambient air quality colors. The tower unintentionally became the state's tallest building due to lot size constraints that forced its developers to build vertically rather than spread out.
Market-rate towers like Astra add to overall downtown inventory, but city officials remain focused on hitting the 2,000-unit deeply affordable target by 2028 — a goal that will require continuous capital injections as construction costs keep rising. Camden Court's groundbreaking adds another 96 units to that count, even as the underlying math of Utah's housing shortage keeps outpacing what any single project can solve.
