2026 Regional Solutions: Finding Middle Housing

Join us for Regional Solutions: Finding Middle Housing. As communities across Utah face consistent housing affordability challenges, planners, policymakers, and community and economic development experts must work together to find solutions that address Missing Middle Housing.

Why Is This So Important?

• Housing Costs: With the median home sale price being unaffordable for the average Utah household, planners must understand the impact of market dynamics on housing affordability.
• Development Pressure: Salt Lake County isn’t getting any bigger. As our communities become built out and as housing demand rises, cities across the county are feeling intense pressure from developers to build.
• Financial Sustainability: Cities can create thoughtful plans that support strategic growth and financial sustainability. Through the establishment of mixed-use, centered development, communities can generate more sustainable revenue while facilitating affordability.

Join us on September 30th for "2026 Regional Solutions: Finding Middle Housing," where we will confront these pressing issues and explore innovative strategies to implement Missing Middle Housing.

Each attendee will receive a free copy of Daniel Parolek's "Missing Middle Housing" book.

Image: Daniel Parolek/Island Press

Networking & Collaboration: In-person events are powerful for building connections. Meeting with other city and county staff, planners, developers, and community leaders who are also working on middle-housing initiatives. These relationships can lead to partnerships, joint projects, or peer learning.

Advocacy & Influence: If you’re a decision-maker, knowledge and connections gained here could help you drive real change. Attending demonstrates commitment to housing innovation, which can bolster your credibility within your organization or community. In addition, if you are in public service or advocacy, showing up in-person gives you a platform to be seen, to influence, and to voice community needs.

Professional Development: Stay up-to-date on policy trends, design innovation, and best practices. Hearing expert talks, visioning sessions, lessons learned, and success stories can energize you — sometimes helping you bring a fresh perspective back to your day job or community.

Engaging, Creditable Sessions: You can look forward to diving into an interactive workshop, listening to a dynamic panel session, and hearing from the award-winning urban design strategist, author, and “recovering architect” Daniel Parolek. Some sessions may qualify for continuing education units.

Actionable Insights and Resources: This event promises practical tools and “real examples” that attendees can use in their own communities. You’ll likely come away with concrete policy ideas, planning strategies, and design concepts for implementing middle-housing types.

We’re thrilled to announce our 2026 Regional Solutions keynote speakers: Drew Finke and Stefan Pellegrini. As one of the key principals involved in the development of the Utah Missing Middle Toolkit, Pellegrini complements his national experience with hyper-local contextual knowledge of Utah communities.

Stefan’s passion for revitalizing and reimagining places has roots in a childhood spent in the Rust Belt where he experienced first-hand the impacts of declining industry. He works tirelessly to demonstrate how physical placemaking strategies can provide a means to empower residents, build social capital, and nurture community. Inspired by places of all scales and the work of those that advocate for public life within them, he skillfully brings diverse people, ideas, and opinions together to shepherd successful, productive and beautiful projects.

His work spans more than twenty years and includes mixed-income neighborhoods, downtown urban design plans, community revitalization strategies, and regional plans and codes across the US and abroad, and has been recognized by awards such as the Driehaus Form-Based Code Award, the CNU Charter Award, and the Hawai’i APA Outstanding Planning and Best Practice Award. He is also a devoted educator, teaching in the Urban Design program at the University of California, Berkeley, and frequently speaking on Urban Design, Form-Based Coding, Small Town and Rural Revitalization, and Infill/Missing Middle Housing.

Joining Stefan is Drew Finke, Senior Associate at Opticos.

Drawing on his training in architecture and planning, Drew’s work sustains and strengthens local culture and traditions through thoughtful, community-driven designs and policies that reinforce a community’s unique sense of place. Drew’s work is animated by an interest in how walkable, equitable, sustainable and beautiful neighborhoods, main streets and downtowns can thrive in a wide range of contexts, be they big cities or small towns.

Since joining Opticos in 2013, Drew has applied this sensibility to impactful projects in a variety of places, from an award-winning place-based comprehensive plan and follow-up implementation charrettes in Memphis, Tennessee, to contextually-sensitive form-based codes for rural Kauaʻi County in Hawaiʻi, and neighborhood plans for an affordable Missing Middle Housing neighborhood in Mammoth Lakes, California. Uniting these projects is an emphasis on authentic community engagement and feasible implementation strategies that empower communities and provide confidence in the face of change.

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