Downtown Salt Lake Metropolis’s “virtuous loop,” defined

For the previous three years, the College of Toronto has printed a graphic that encapsulates the grim state of America’s downtowns in a post-pandemic world. Its Downtown Restoration challenge ranks 51 US cities primarily based on the cellphone knowledge of their downtowns, relative to the identical interval in 2019. Most cities’ stats are terrible: New York Metropolis was at 67 % of its pre-pandemic downtown exercise in Might 2023. Minneapolis was at simply 40 %.

However not each metropolis is struggling. A number of have really exceeded pre-Covid exercise downtown. The No. 1 spot? It’s constantly been held by … drumroll please …

Salt Lake Metropolis, Utah.

I first encountered this stat whereas reporting and producing a collection on downtown restoration final spring for Vox’s At this time, Defined podcast, and it has been puzzling me ever since. In any case, Salt Lake Metropolis isn’t precisely identified for its forward-thinking urbanism — however by the point I completed a reporting journey to the town in late August, I had begun to suppose that possibly it ought to be.

Previously few years, Salt Lake’s policymakers and different stakeholders have been on an aggressive marketing campaign to facilitate the development of hundreds of latest housing items within the metropolis’s downtown. It’s remodeling the realm from a single-use workplace district to one thing that matches the remote-work period.

“We need to make downtown or make Salt Lake Metropolis a spot the place individuals can stay and work and play. That’s primarily the umbrella of what we would like as policymakers,” Ana Valdemoros, a metropolis council member who represents downtown, advised me.

It may very well be a mannequin for downtown improvement in different spread-out American cities — if its development isn’t squashed by a brewing environmental disaster.

Making it simple to construct

Salt Lake Metropolis was already rising quickly earlier than the pandemic. And when the early-pandemic lockdowns hit in spring 2020, in-migration from different states surged, pushed by entry to the town’s out of doors facilities and its burgeoning tech sector, amongst different issues.

That development has contributed to an already-acute housing disaster: The typical single-family house within the metropolis prices greater than half one million {dollars}, and rents are larger than they’ve ever been.

However the metropolis has responded with a ton of latest housing — particularly downtown. Downtown Salt Lake has constructed extra new flats since 2020 than downtown Manhattan, in response to knowledge analyzed by Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow on the Brookings Establishment’s Brookings Metro program.

CoStar/Brookings Metro

“What actually struck me about Salt Lake was not simply the excessive fee of development, however that this development is on the middle of the area that’s in and across the downtown space,” Loh mentioned. “That’s actually totally different from the trajectory that the majority metro areas are on proper now.”

Politicians and metropolis planners I talked to cited two main coverage drivers behind the downtown housing growth: First, the town laid out a long-term plan for the realm earlier than demand spiked; and second, it’s made the allowing course of very easy for builders searching for to construct new housing.

Salt Lake completed connecting its mild rail system between downtown and its airport in 2013. Round that point, the town additionally re-zoned the areas round its transit stations downtown to encourage denser improvement, and decreased or eradicated parking minimums — necessities that new building include a sure variety of parking areas — which drive up the price of new housing.

“We’re inviting [developers and residents] in to take a seat down with our groups, and this occurs on a month-to-month foundation. We’ll pull up their allow. We’ll have a look at the method and the place the hang-ups have been and have a very frank dialogue about how did this expertise occur? How can we do higher? What elements of our system or our coverage are encumbering the benefit of constructing good issues occur within the metropolis?” Salt Lake Metropolis Mayor Erin Mendenhall advised me in an interview. “Which is how we’ve been capable of obtain quicker approvals and allowing and inspections.”

The mayor’s workplace says the results of its outreach is evident: Final 12 months, Salt Lake constructed extra housing per capita than massive, costly cities like New York and Los Angeles, in addition to greater than its fast-growing western friends like Phoenix or Denver.

Mendenhall is up for reelection subsequent month, and her main competitor has argued that non-public improvement is inadequate, suggesting the town construct its personal social housing as an alternative. Nonetheless, downtown Salt Lake’s house inventory is anticipated to greater than double by the top of subsequent 12 months, as building at present in progress finishes. That new provide may assist carry rents down.

A “virtuous loop”

Downtown Salt Lake Metropolis’s new residents are remodeling the realm in different methods, too. Public transit is free downtown and busier than it was earlier than the pandemic, Essential Road is usually closed to vehicles so individuals can store and eat on the road, and the realm is surprisingly vigorous throughout nights and weekends.

“We’re transitioning from an eight-hour, five-day-a-week metropolis, to an 18-hour metropolis, seven days per week,” mentioned Jessica Thesing, deputy director of Salt Lake Metropolis’s Downtown Alliance.

Longtime space housing developer Dan Lofgren described the story of Salt Lake’s downtown lately as a “virtuous loop”: the alternative of the doom loop that many American downtowns are teetering on the sting of.

“[New] residents have capability and demand for extra providers,” Lofgren mentioned. “So extra eating places come, so extra providers come. So now downtown turns into even that rather more [of an] engaging place to stay, and it begins to construct on itself. It begins to type of acquire its personal momentum.”

Macy Weeks has been a part of that shift. Final 12 months, the 20-year-old determined to depart the Seattle suburbs in quest of a metropolis to launch her songwriting profession. She selected Salt Lake.

“Seattle’s useless, principally, and California’s too costly. So if I used to be going to discover a place that was going to be affordable-ish and have an excellent bar scene, it’s right here,” Weeks mentioned.

The environmental risk

There may be an existential risk to this feel-good story, nevertheless: the eponymous Nice Salt Lake. The huge saltwater lake is drying up at an unsustainable fee, the results of a long time of wasteful water coverage that has diverted an excessive amount of water from reaching it. It was quickly buoyed by the report rainfall the western United States received during the last 12 months, however earlier than that, it was on monitor to dry up earlier than the top of the last decade — and its trajectory continues to be regarding.

If the Nice Salt Lake have been allowed to evaporate solely, the results can be wide-reaching. It might be devastating for the hundreds of thousands of migratory birds that cease over there yearly, Kevin Perry, an atmospheric sciences professor on the College of Utah, advised me. It might wreak havoc on the realm’s ski resorts, which depend on lake impact snow. And, maybe most troublingly for individuals within the Salt Lake metro space, it might dramatically worsen the mud storms that already come off the lake.

In keeping with Perry, mud plumes from the lake, that are created when evaporation exposes parts of the lake mattress to the air, are “shifting into the encompassing communities and exposing the two.5 million those who stay adjoining to the lake to every little thing that’s within the mud, together with arsenic.”

The specter of these arsenic mud storms, which a Utah state lawmaker described to the New York Instances as an “environmental nuclear bomb” in a 2022 story, has helped spur the Utah legislature to make some massive adjustments to water coverage after a long time of inaction. The state devoted a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} final 12 months to lowering water use. A lot of that new funding goes towards making agriculture extra water-efficient: At the moment, alfalfa and different kinds of hay farming suck up greater than two-thirds of the state’s diverted water. However the state’s quickly rising city areas want to search out water financial savings, too.

“I feel that stress between development and agriculture [and] water use normally goes to be the tug and pull that may occur over the following decade,” state Rep. Brad Wilson, the Republican speaker of the Utah Home, mentioned. “That’s the place that is going to get, I feel, a bit more durable, fairly frankly, as time goes on.”

An optimistic tackle the way forward for the lake, and downtown

Some media protection has framed Salt Lake’s looming environmental disaster as one the place the area has to decide on between development and environmental stewardship. Salt Lake Metropolis’s downtown, nevertheless, really gives the street map out of that binary.

Particularly, the Salt Lake Metropolis metro has a landscaping downside: Most houses within the arid desert area have lawns, and greater than half of all of Utah’s residential water use goes to landscaping. However each new apartment or house downtown means one much less garden. And with the town’s development concentrated there, water use has been falling. The inhabitants of Salt Lake has grown by about 10 % since 2000, however the metropolis has decreased its water use by greater than twice that over the identical stretch of time.

That lower alone gained’t be sufficient to chart a manner out of the Nice Salt Lake’s disaster, however it’s nonetheless vital. If the town can efficiently transition away from water-guzzling lawns that have been by no means meant to exist in that surroundings, it’s going to set the stage for onerous conversations about water use throughout the state.

To me, this story resonates in two methods. First, I feel Salt Lake’s downtown transformation can present a template for different cities that need to reenergize their cores however lack the legacy of bustling city life that cities like New York have. If these adjustments can occur in a conservative state with a deeply ingrained driving tradition, why can’t they occur anyplace?

Second, city points usually seem to be they exist in a zero-sum world: blue cities versus crimson states; the Northeast versus the Solar Belt; new improvement versus defending longtime residents or the surroundings. Salt Lake Metropolis’s trajectory is a useful reminder that it doesn’t must be this fashion.

“We’re an instance of how including inhabitants in the suitable manner really decreased our water consumption, permitting our metropolis to develop,” Mendenhall mentioned. “I don’t know a metropolis or a city on this nation that doesn’t need to develop.”