What Salt Lake City gets right about downtown
By Miles Bryan Oct 13, 2023, ...Full Article @ https://www.vox.com/today-explained-...ousing-climate
For the past three years, the University of Toronto has published a graphic that encapsulates the grim state of America’s downtowns in a post-pandemic world. Its Downtown Recovery project ranks 51 US cities based on the cellphone data in their downtowns, relative to the same period in 2019. Most cities’ stats are awful: New York City was at 67 percent of its pre-pandemic downtown activity in May 2023. Minneapolis was at just 40 percent.
But not every city is struggling. A few have actually exceeded pre-Covid activity downtown. The No. 1 spot? It’s consistently been held by … drumroll please …
Salt Lake City, Utah.
I first encountered this stat while reporting and producing a series on downtown recovery last spring for Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, and it has been puzzling me ever since. After all, Salt Lake City isn’t exactly known for its forward-thinking urbanism — but by the time I finished a reporting trip to the city in late August, I had begun to think that maybe it should be.
In the past few years, Salt Lake’s policymakers and other stakeholders have been on an aggressive campaign to facilitate the construction of thousands of new housing units in the city’s downtown. It’s transforming the area from a single-use office district to something that fits the remote-work era.
“We want to make downtown or make Salt Lake City a place where people can live and work and play. That’s essentially the umbrella of what we want as policymakers,” Ana Valdemoros, a city council member who represents downtown, told me.
It could be a model for downtown development in other spread-out American cities...
Making it easy to build
Salt Lake City was already growing rapidly before the pandemic. And when the early-pandemic lockdowns hit in spring 2020, in-migration from other states surged, driven by access to the city’s outdoor amenities and its burgeoning tech sector, among other things.
That growth has contributed to an already-acute housing crisis: The average single-family home in the city costs more than half a million dollars, and rents are higher than they’ve ever been.
But the city has responded with a ton of new housing — especially downtown. Downtown Salt Lake has built more new apartments since 2020 than downtown Manhattan, according to data analyzed by Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brookings Metro program...
“What really struck me about Salt Lake was not just the high rate of growth, but that this growth is at the center of the region that’s in and around the downtown area,” Loh said. “That is really different from the trajectory that most metro areas are on right now.”
Politicians and city planners I talked to cited two major policy drivers behind the downtown housing boom: First, the city laid out a long-term plan for the area before demand spiked; and second, it’s made the permitting process very straightforward for developers seeking to build new housing.
Salt Lake finished connecting its light rail system between downtown and its airport in 2013. Around that time, the city also re-zoned the areas around its transit stations downtown to encourage denser development, and reduced or eliminated parking minimums — requirements that new construction come with a certain number of parking spaces — which drive up the cost of new housing.
“We’re inviting [developers and residents] in to sit down with our teams, and this happens on a monthly basis. We’ll pull up their permit. We’ll look at the process and where the hang-ups were and have a really frank discussion about how did this experience happen? How can we do better? What parts of our system or our policy are encumbering the ease of making good things happen in the city?” Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall told me in an interview. “Which is how we’ve been able to achieve faster approvals and permitting and inspections.”
The mayor’s office says the result of its outreach is clear: Last year, Salt Lake built more housing per capita than big, expensive cities like New York and Los Angeles, as well as more than its fast-growing western peers like Phoenix or Denver...
A “virtuous loop”
...Downtown Salt Lake City’s new residents are transforming the area in other ways, too. Public transit is free downtown and busier than it was before the pandemic, Main Street is often closed to cars so people can shop and eat on the street, and the area is surprisingly lively during nights and weekends.
“We are transitioning from an eight-hour, five-day-a-week city, to an 18-hour city, seven days a week,” said Jessica Thesing, deputy director of Salt Lake City’s Downtown Alliance
...Full Article @ https://www.vox.com/today-explained-...ousing-climate
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