Posted Feb 23, 2023, 4:51 PM
|
|
Space Magi
|
|
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Salt Lake City
Posts: 1,815
|
|
In your view, is Salt Lake a city of 1.2 million or 2.7 million?
We are currently having this discussion in the SLC Development News Thread over on the Mountain West subforum, but I'm curious to get more diverse perspectives. Here's a selection of the points made so far:
Quote:
Originally Posted by locolife
I'm from SLC and always cheer for it to do well, enjoy all the great progress downtown. But I have to throw some love out to Phoenix, as my new hometown for a long time now. The SLC CSA has about 3 million and Phoenix has about 5 million, so PHX is about 1.7x the size of SLC. It's bigger here but not that much bigger and it wasn't all that long ago that SLC was larger than Phoenix but it's grown fast in the valley of the sun.
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Atlas
This comes off as cherry picking to me. Phoenix CSA is 5 million while SLC CSA is 2.6 million, so it's more like 1.9x. Phoenix metro is 4.8 million while SLC metro is 1.2 million, 4x larger. Phoenix proper is 1.6 million while SLC proper is 200k, 8x larger. Phoenix proper represents 32% of its CSA population. SLC proper is only 7.7% of its CSA.
The last number is really noteworthy. The SLC government has barely more political influence than any other city on the Wasatch Front thanks to its limited geographical boundaries..
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by locolife
So I’m “cherry picking” the Combined Statistical Population? Which infers that your argument is DT SLC would be exactly the same as it is now if it wasn’t part of a nearly 2.7M CSA? Sorry not buying that at all. It’s a contiguous region and SLC is the center of it all. PHX actually splits urbanity with Tempe quite a bit here, it’s home ASU is which is an economic gorilla .
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Atlas
Do you really see SLC as a peer city with St. Louis or Pittsburgh? Or larger than Las Vegas and Kansas City? Do you really think Phoenix is only 2x the size of SLC? To me that only makes sense in the most myopic view.
CSA is almost always misleading in city comparisons. Urban area is a better metric. Phoenix is 4x larger by that standard.
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by locolife
Yes, you’re on this thread a lot, do you really think a lot of what gets discussed on here such as sports team expansions, the all star game, the airport, front runner expansion, and new employers ignore Provo and Ogden as sources of employees or disposable income because they’re not in the same “urban area” or “MSA” as Salt Lake City? Of course not.
It’s a 100+ mile stretch of contiguous development comprising a population of 2.8 million. SLC is a peer to KC, PIT and STL with slightly more people. And why wouldn’t that be a good thing, especially to a development focused thread?
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Atlas
Provo and Ogden have largely developed separately from SLC. People from these places don't typically tell outsiders that they're "from Salt Lake" in the same way that people from the Salt Lake Valley do. There is a real qualitative difference there and it's strongly correlated to geography. The fact that they're now, within the last decade or two, abutting each other with sprawl doesn't automatically make it all Salt Lake by default. In the same way, I don't think Boulder should be considered part of Denver or Baltimore to be part of DC. These are distinct places.
Further, SLC just does not pull the weight of a city of 2.6 million people on a national level. You can pretend it does and make value judgements about that ("isn't that good?"), but at the end of the day no one seriously thinks of SLC as a larger city than Kansas City or Las Vegas. That's why most people in this thread think SLC is not going to get an NFL or MLB team anytime soon. That's why SLC isn't considered an important-enough media market for the Big 10 to consider adding AAU-member University of Utah. That's why SLC has zero Fortune 500 company headquarters and zero 500 ft towers.
SLC is truly more like a Richmond or a Buffalo right now in both characteristics and behavior. The scenery is better and the culture is different, but it's got a lot more in common with those places than it does with the likes of St. Louis and Charlotte.
|
Clearly, I am in the former camp. What do you think? Is SLC a peer to places like KC and Pittsburgh or not?
|