Salt Lake's Palmer Court Set for Demolition as First Phase Advances

A Deeply Affordable Project Files for Review

As first reported by Building Salt Lake, architects submitted an Affordable Housing Incentives application and a design review application for a project now called The Edward, at 999 S. Main St. in the Ballpark neighborhood. The .9-acre site sits in the D-2 zone, where buildings can rise to 120 feet, and the submitted plans show six floors at roughly 73 feet, fronting State Street rather than Main.

All 187 units would be studios averaging around 420 square feet, with 10 units reserved for households at or below 25 percent of area median income and the remainder at or below 30 percent. For a single person in Salt Lake City, 30 percent AMI works out to about $26,500 a year. That figure is worth sitting with: this project isn't competing with market-rate studios in Ballpark, it's operating in a parallel housing system where rent revenue was never designed to cover the debt.

The Funding Stack Behind a Non-Market Deal

The Edward has already drawn over $2.16 million from the Salt Lake City Community Reinvestment Agency's Housing Development Loan Program in March, plus more than $5.7 million from the Utah Housing Corporation last year. Deals at this income level don't pencil on rent alone — they pencil on layered public capital, and the size of that stack this early in the entitlement process signals the city and state remain committed to funding deeply affordable units even as construction costs stay elevated.

The Road Home and First Step House, both nonprofits focused on homelessness and substance-abuse services, are listed as developers and would also operate the building. That's a different tenant profile than a typical multifamily deal: the ground floor is planned for offices, a food pantry, clinic space, classrooms, therapy rooms and a gym — over 13,000 square feet of service space layered under roughly 78,000 square feet of housing. Investors watching this corridor should read that mix as a long-term institutional use, not a rotating retail base.

What the Zoning Requests Reveal About the Corridor

The applications ask for a handful of exemptions, including relief from glazing requirements and a street-facing facade length of up to 250 feet — notable because the Salt Lake City Council tightened facade length rules on buildings around this time last year. Getting an exemption request through cleanly on a project this size will be a marker other Ballpark and State Street landowners watch closely when they plan their own D-2 buildings.

More telling is the parking plan: 124 spaces against a 64-space requirement, even though D-2 studio units carry no parking minimum at all. That's a deliberate over-build for a supportive-housing operator anticipating staff, service visits and clinic traffic, not a market apartment sponsor chasing curb appeal. For owners along State and Main, it's a data point that this stretch of Ballpark isn't shedding parking as fast as the zoning code allows.

Palmer Court's Larger Site Is the Real Prize

The Edward is explicitly phase one. Once its 187 units are built, the plan is to relocate all 201 residents currently at Palmer Court, then demolish that building — possibly as early as 2028 — and redevelop the underlying parcel. City planning staff estimated last year that roughly 60 percent of the current Palmer Court site is parking or landscaping, which points toward a materially denser second-phase project once the land is freed up.

That timeline matters against the backdrop of Salt Lake City's Housing SLC goal of 2,000 deeply affordable units by June 2028 — a target the city sits roughly 1,300 units short of as of this summer. Owners, contractors and investors with interests near the Ballpark corridor have a multi-year window to watch how this phased redevelopment reshapes land use and demand along State Street; our team at Team Utah Commercial (801-898-8810) is tracking the site assembly and permitting activity as the next phase takes shape.

Source: this analysis discusses reporting by buildingsaltlake.