Buying in Orem, a city with almost no open land left

Effectively, yes, and the city says so itself. Orem fills 18.61 square miles in the middle of Utah Valley, and its own long range plan says there is very little open land left to build on, so most new homes now come from redeveloping older sites rather than opening new subdivisions. In practice, the new homes you see here are mostly apartments and townhomes along State Street and University Parkway and around University Place, not new houses on open ground.

Yes, under specific rules. An accessory apartment in Orem is a second, smaller home inside a house, with its own kitchen, sleeping space and bathroom, and the owner has to live either in the main house or in the apartment. The apartment cannot be larger than 1,200 square feet or have more than two bedrooms, the main house has to keep at least 1,000 square feet of finished living space of its own, and the smallest allowed is 300 square feet. The city registers these apartments and publishes a compliance checklist.

Ask the city, and start with the list it already publishes. Orem keeps a public register of registered basement and accessory apartments sorted by address, running past a thousand entries, and it takes reports on unregistered ones through its Neighborhood Improvement Team. An apartment that is not on the register is not automatically illegal, but the question has a clear answer the city can give you in writing, and it is far cheaper to ask before an offer than after one.

Not at the front, and not on a street facing side when that door exists only to reach it. Orem's rules say a new house built with an accessory apartment cannot have a separate entrance at the front, or on a side facing the street, if the only purpose of that door is to serve the apartment, and an apartment added to an existing house has to use doors that are already there on any street facing side. The point is that a street of single family houses keeps looking like one from the sidewalk.

Orem is in Alpine School District today. In November 2024 voters approved splitting Alpine into three districts, and Orem moves into the new Timpanogos School District, with Pleasant Grove, Lindon and Vineyard, starting the 2027 to 2028 school year. The district line follows the city boundary, so check any specific address against Utah County's school district boundary FAQ rather than trusting a map.

Nine adopted plans, one for each of the city's nine areas, written with residents and local businesses and finished between 2016 and 2020. They cover the whole city, from Canyon View, Orchard and Cascade through to Lakeview and Cherry Hill, and each one sets down that area's goals and concerns for the city. They are worth reading before you buy, because in a city that cannot spread outward they are a lasting record of what the people already on a street asked the city for, rather than something that gets overtaken in a few years.

Less than it could before 2022, and the limits are written down. That year the city council lowered the general height limit in the C2 commercial zone from 60 feet to 48 feet, and capped any building closer than 100 feet to a residential zone at 35 feet, along with more parking and larger setbacks. The broader approach, the State Street plan, steers new development toward the big intersections along State Street rather than into residential streets. Check the specific address and its zoning with the city's planning department.

Better than most Utah suburbs its size, within limits. The Orem Central FrontRunner station puts you on the commuter train along the Wasatch Front, with a park and ride of roughly 500 free spaces, and the UVX rapid bus runs University Parkway in its own lanes every ten to fifteen minutes. One update to older material: UVX is no longer free to ride, though university students, faculty and staff still ride free on their school passes.

It is moving through the federal funding process rather than being built, and the difference matters. As of 2026, FrontRunner 2X has been cleared into the engineering phase of the federal Capital Investment Grants program, a step toward a grant of close to 1.3 billion dollars. If it goes ahead it would add a second track at eleven points between Ogden and Provo, put ten new trains into service, and make service faster and more frequent, with construction talked about for roughly 2027 to 2030. No track has been laid and the funding is not finalized.