South Salt Lake caps number of short-term rentals in city
May 01, 2025 02:36PM ● By Linda Petersen
Short-term rentals will only be allowed in certain zones in South Salt Lake. (Photo courtesy SSL)
For the past two years in council meetings and at various community events, city officials have been discussing the issue among themselves and with local residents, Weidenhamer said.
“We've spent a fair amount of time on this — three work meetings and numerous other informal conversations meetings with neighborhoods and breakfasts really learning where the community is," he said.
Based on this feedback the city council made significant changes to the city’s short-term rental ordinance that evening. The number of such rentals in the city has now been capped at 200. Any homeowner coming in above that limit hoping to do a short-term rental would be put on a wait list. Current short-term rentals are grandfathered in under the ordinance. The city currently has about 12,000 housing units. Close to 7,000 of those are rentals and 5,100 are occupier-owned, with approximately 3,500 single-family owner-occupied properties.
“We're recommending a cap of 200 because that's what we think we have about now,” Weidenhamer said. “We feel like that's a natural inflection or tipping point. That's still less than 6% of your single-family housing units."
City officials had previously given short-term rental property owners six weeks to provide feedback on the proposed changes. Several of them attended a Feb. 20 planning commission meeting, Weidenhamer said.
“I thought we were going to get pitchforks and anger, and really what we had was a lot of people who had existing licenses come and show us that they were good people in the community and they had good homes and cared about South Salt Lake and cared about the neighborhood,” he said. “I think that was a really compelling part of the process and the take-home from that was this idea that we're moving in the right direction and that grandfathering existing licensed folks in was the right thing to do.”
Now, short-term rentals are only allowed in certain zones in the city: R1 (detached single-family residential dwelling units) and MPMU (master planned mixed use). They’re prohibited in both zones if the owner is not a city resident or does not live within 30 miles of the property.
City officials would like to see all such property owners licensed although Weidenhamer conceded that there are a number not willing to do so. The city sent out a letter to the property owners in January giving them the opportunity to become licensed but only four people responded.
“We learned from informal talks that a lot of those folks really don't want to pay the fees; they're not interested in the regulation [of their properties],” Weidenhamer said.
Those property owners who already have licenses will be grandfathered in, he said. If those properties are sold, the new owners will need to comply with updated requirements such as parking and occupancy requirements. Since the city does not have the resources to police these properties, compliance will be addressed on a complaint basis, Weidenhamer said.
Gov. Spencer Cox and the Utah Legislature are working toward developing a statewide registration or identification program that local municipalities can opt into, he said. However, “legislation continues to evolve slowly as the governor looks at balancing private property rights with his housing goals and believes very firmly that the proliferation of short-term rentals has started to really impact affordable housing, so it continues to evolve.”
Councilmember Clarissa Williams expressed concern that as local residents sell their homes investors could come in and buy up those properties for the short-term rental market. The proposed changes do not address that issue, Weidenhamer said.
“In the end of the day we were focusing on ownership requirements [and] particularly if you're a South Salt Lake resident,” he said. “The ownership requirement would essentially weed that out. I think that balance of the 30 miles, it reflected the people we saw at the planning commission meeting. It ended up being a feeling of these are people who are invested in this community, in this county, in this region in the valley, and that satisfied the Planning Commission in that balance and that's what we're bringing to you tonight.”
After the discussion the city council voted unanimously to approve the ordinance changes.
