This whole thing seems designed to make me perfectly angry. There is so much wrong I need to resort to a numbered list.
1) The wanton destruction of a historic building. This has been beat to death already but TL;DR - the theater is far enough back that there is space to build a highrise and preserve the theater. The two are not exclusive. The theater does not need to be restored now, so nothing needs to be done to it now. Let it sit. In time, support and funding will rise. It is a foolish and shortsighted mistake to smash things now that could be invaluable later.
2) The handouts to developers. They are just giving this site to the developers for literally ZERO dollars, even after the city paid $5.5 million for the building. I don't know how anyone can justify giving such an expensive city asset to a private developer.
3) "Affordable Housing." I am aware that my opinion is unconventional, but here it goes. I think the whole notion of 'affordable housing' is as short-sighted and dumb as demolishing a future public asset in favor of an empty backlot 'park' and a private tower. Paying for someone's housing isn't nearly as helpful as other solutions; sure the rent is cheaper, but the groceries, the goods and services, the parking/transportation, the taxes, and every other cost of living downtown is still just as expensive as before. If you really want people to have better access to jobs and school, then MAKE PUBLIC TRANSIT FREE! Seriously, we "spent" literally $5.5 MILLION to get 30 'lower cost' apartments. How many people will that help? At 4 people per apartment, that means 120 people pay slightly less money for rent.
Great, that's just Great.
120 people can fit into 1 BRT bus. ONE BUS. Meanwhile, places like Kansas City just voted to spend
$8 million per year so that public transit is FREE TO EVERYONE in the city. That's over 400,000 people who now have no cost barrier to getting between a place they can afford and the work, schools, commercial centers, libraries, public offices, and everything else in the city.
My stance: Affordable housing is a waste of public money that benefits only a very few individuals who would be better helped by that same investment being made in GOOD and FREE public transit. Affordable Housing is a political handout meant to earn popularity and votes for politicians; it is not a serious solution to any problem. It is treating the symptoms, not the cause.
And the fact that the theater that could become a downtown destination is being demolished for something as wasteful and ineffective as a mere 30 reduced priced apartments... this makes me furious.
I am reminded of another very short-sighted decision that was made just before the 2002 Olympics. The city had been looking at buying the Union Pacific Depot for some time to use as a transit hub. Everyone knew that commuter rail would be coming back one day, and the Union Pacific depot is the best place for a transportation hub. Look at Denver's Union Station, and compare that the the miserable excuse we have for an intermodal hub.
What happened instead? The sale of the depot site to a mall developer was approved, and instead of a transportation hub we have the Gateway. This thing is not necessarily bad, but we all know how it has struggled financially and otherwise. What is worse is that it could have been built anywhere. Even if they wanted to build it around the train station, they did not need to rip up the tracks. Imagine how cool it would be to have commuter trains stopping at a station surrounded by that much commercial development!
But our city is so short-sighted that our future intermodal hub was killed less than 10 years before FrontRunner opened in 2008.
A similar thing is going to happen to the Utah Theater. Just as downtown is revitalizing, short-sighted development is going to demolish a long-term asset in favor of short-term private profit. The city is going to tout what a good thing this is to low-income people (even though only a very few will actually benefit, and they know it!), and people on this thread will sing its praises as a wonderful, new, modern development that will really make Salt Lake City stand out...
But in the end, it will just be another tower among many, and downtown will have lost one more thing that could have made it awesome. In the long term it will be obvious how bad a decision it was, but that has never stopped short-sighted people with wrecking balls from getting rich.