New Daycare Praised for Unique Model in Salt Lake City

What can be done to help the childcare crisis in Utah? A preschool and daycare in Salt Lake City is tackling the issue in an innovative way.

Just west of downtown on North Temple, dozens gathered in the late spring sun on the freshly built courtyard of a large building complex, to celebrate the building’s grand opening.

“SPARK is here, and it is a heart in the neighborhood here on North Temple corridor,” said Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, looking around at the crowd from the podium with a smile.

SPARK is a 200-unit complex that combines affordable housing with affordable child care, by offering both in one building.

“Most of these families, you know, they're here because they're struggling in some way,” said David Brint, co-founder and principal at Brinshore Development—the company that built SPARK. “When you have a lot of families living somewhere, the single biggest indicator for success is early education.”

The complex offers other amenities to residents as well, including a one-acre park, playground, community center, business center, gym, and dog park. There’s also 8,000 square feet of retail space.

But Brint said having child care in the facility was what really drove their vision for the project.

All residents do is head downstairs in the morning for drop-off, and in the evening, pickup is just steps away from the front door.

“That really serves the purpose of making the experience of living here and support greater,” he said.

Brinshore Development partnered with local nonprofit Neighborhood House, an organization that offers preschool and daycare on an income-based sliding pay scale.

“I was really excited because this is a model that I think makes a lot of sense,” said Neighborhood House executive director Jennifer Nuttall.

She talked about how child care has become unaffordable for many Utah families, and how the Neighborhood House waitlist is currently hundreds of families long as parents look for help.

“When you start looking at high quality care for an infant, especially, it's costing more than your child having to go to college, which is not sustainable,” she explained. 

Neighborhood House has a single facility in Salt Lake City’s Poplar Grove area, where Nuttall said they serve 330 children daily, in addition to providing care for dozens of disabled and aging adults.

Opening a second facility on their own, she indicated, wouldn’t have been financially feasible.

“Every dollar we raise goes towards paying the difference between what it costs to provide a high-quality service, and what those families can actually afford,” Nuttall said. 

With this new public-private partnership, she explained they didn’t have to pay to build the satellite space. 

“If we don't have to fundraise for all of the facility expenses, that frees up more money to help families access the services,” she said.

Brint explained that projects like this can be difficult.

“It can be expensive,” he said. “And it's hard enough to build affordable housing, and to figure out how to build the space and charge a rent that's affordable.”

Brint expressed gratefulness that Brinshore didn’t take on the $99 million cost for the complex by itself.

According to Salt Lake City, more than $18 million came from public funding, including $14.5 million from the city’s Community Reinvestment Agency (CRA) and $1 million from the city’s Housing Stability Division.

The Olene Walker Housing Loan Fund contributed $2 million, a city press release states, and tax credits also played a role, as did private investment.

“It happened because the city and the CRA… understood the concept,” Brint said. “They understood what would be needed, and what the support would be, and why that should be a model.”

With the financials in place, Brinshore built out the preschool and daycare space for Neighborhood House on the first floor of SPARK, free of charge.

Nuttall said the satellite facility will stay open 11 hours a day, with capacity for 55 kids ages 15 months to five years old.

Neighborhood House educators will use the nonprofit’s preschool program, which she said is an evidence-based creative curriculum that helps them track each child’s progress toward kindergarten readiness.

Resident parents will pay what they can afford using the income-based sliding scale, and Nuttall said clients will have access to case management along with other services Neighborhood House offers at their flagship location.

“So, making sure that we have the infrastructure here in Salt Lake County to be able to provide the daycare that's needed for our hardworking workforce,” she said, adding that at the same time, “then their kids are also getting the early education they need to be successful as well, and break that cycle of intergenerational poverty.”

Brint said they’ve gotten nothing but positive feedback, and he described how SPARK has driven up interest across the industry.

“We've had other developers call us and say, ‘How do you do this? How did it work? What did you do?’” he said.

Nuttall expressed hope this could be the beginning of a new child care model, not just for them, but all across Utah.

“We want people to be able to be successful. We want their families to be happy and healthy,” she said, adding, “and that makes our community stronger.”