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An apartment complex rises along 12th Street on Wednesday, June 5, 2024.

Rob Nielsen, Standard-Examiner

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Ogden City Planning Manager Barton Brierley speaks to the editorial board at the Standard-Examiner in Ogden on Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2025.

Jared Lloyd, Daily Herald

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Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of three stories following a Standard-Examiner editorial board interview with Ogden City Planning Manager Barton Brierley and Community Development Director Jeremy Smith on a wide range of topics, including housing challenges, appropriate development, the general plan and more. Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski also joined the interview. 

OGDEN — Where is the right spot to place new apartments in Ogden?

It’s a question that has confronted city staff and elected leaders on a constant basis over the last few years as the city aims to take on growth while simultaneously considering its limitations and public sentiment.

“There’s a need for apartments, but we’ve found we need to make sure that they’re in the right spot,” Ogden City Planning Manager Barton Brierley said during an interview at the Standard-Examiner on Wednesday. “It has to be a quality community. We can’t, anymore, just put them anywhere.”

Ogden mayor Ben Nadolski said that apartment placement has been on the minds of residents to the point that, while gathering feedback for the adoption of a new 25-year general plan, the city decided to act.

“We heard, loud and clear, early in the feedback that reinforced what we had already known: people don’t want to build out and have high-density housing and apartments just anywhere and everywhere,” he said. “We took some intermediate steps with an ordinance to put a pause on that so that we could get through this long-term process.”

Brierley elaborated on the goals of the apartment ordinance passed last year.

“We specifically adopted an ordinance that prevents — in our highway commercial zones — new apartments and to focus them on areas where there are good quality neighborhoods,” he said.

He said downtown Ogden is an example of places where new apartment builds make sense.

“You have walkability, you have good crosswalks, you have places to shop, you have places to gather, there’s open spaces, there’s events, it’s safe,” he said. “You have all of those elements there and some mixed-use areas where there’s parks nearby and trails.”

He said selection of sites for apartment buildings hasn’t always been the best in the past.

“I had to kind of cringe,” he said. “We had one commercial area that allows some industrial use, there was an apartment building and the neighbor next door wants to do kind of a noisy manufacturing operation. We’re just like, ‘That’s not the right spot for it.'”

Nadolski said that examples like these come down to policies that are stuck in the past.

“Those are the circumstances you get when your land use is out of date,” he said. “To make decisions on policy and land use, like for the Planning Commission and council — speaking from my experience on the council — it was really hard because it didn’t fit, yet here was our ordinance and our policy. How do we create a better outcome with underlying policies that just don’t work for us right now.”

Along with formulating a new general plan, the city is in the middle of a two-year effort to update its zoning ordinances.

However, Nadolski said there will still be a stream of apartments coming in for some time approved under the rules set before last year’s change to apartment ordinance.

“There’s still more to come because I inherited 3,200 entitled units,” he said. “There’s still more of what we don’t necessarily want coming and approved, but we could not legally stop that. That’s the importance of land use.”

He said this isn’t a problem that’s unique to Ogden either.

“It’s happening in cities across the country,” he said. “There were communities across the country that were not prepared for the unprecedented macro-economics that happened, and we’re one of them unfortunately.”