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Originally Posted by Makid
There are a few factors regarding the growth rate of SLC that have been lightly touched on:
1. The size of the City area. The City is what, 180 square miles and of that only about 120 is habitable. This is a lot smaller than the rest of the cities that are generally compared to Salt Lake for population.
2. Salt Lake City does have a large swath of land that could be developed. The Northwest Quadrant has been in the planning stages for years. It is estimated that it will be able to hold between 40,000 and 60,000 people based on the planning that has been done.
This would grow Salt Lake Cities population by 23% - 28% from the current estimated population without any increase in rest of the City.
I do think that we will see Salt Lake grow again but a growth rate of 2% to 3% a year is still positive.
I do think we will see more external growth happening in Salt Lake over the next few years. As Salt Lake adds additional companies downtown, there will be those that transfer to Salt Lake (Similar to when Goldman moved in).
One thing that will help this increase to happen faster is for Salt Lake to work on getting more of the Tech sector to have offices within Salt Lake City. This has happened with Domo (in the Walker building) as well as a few others over time.
If we can increase the Tech sector jobs within the Downtown area, this will help to increase the number of people moving to the City from outside of the State.
Lastly, the one factor that will also help increase migration to the State and particularly Salt Lake City is the continued growth of the Commercial and Hospitality sectors downtown. Both sectors will need additional people and the rate at which they are growing, this will increase the pull from those who are looking for work in other areas of the Country (for opportunities in these sectors as well as construction jobs to build these projects). This would be the same situation as what happened in North Dakota with the Oil Field jobs but on a wider focus.
We will see this increase in migration begin to move faster as the unemployment rate continues to fall.
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As usual your outlook is well balanced and quite objective. I'm hoping that indeed the Northwest Quadrant will be developed as previously announced. Given time I'm optimistic that it will be. Of course, that specific area of development is incredibly more complicated and labor intensive than simply incorporating into and adding housing tracts to the Mohave desert, the Kansas like plains of Denver, or any vapid valley of nothing but unencumbered sagebrush.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Comrade
The purpose isn't to compare the Salt Lake region to western regions - it's to compare the central city to those cities. Granted, they're not all similar, and you're right, a vast amount of Phoenix's growth is probably suburban in nature. But I'd wager the growth seen in Denver, Seattle, Portland and Sacramento aren't entirely driven by the expansion of the city's limits or a huge swath of suburban growth - it's driven by a great deal of more urban development. We're seeing that same development, too, but at a much smaller scale because the population of the state continues to be geared more toward the suburbs. So, yeah, it'd defeat the entire purpose of the post to compare the Salt Lake Valley because, on the whole, the Salt Lake Valley is far less urban than Denver city or Portland city or Seattle city - or even Sacramento city.
The point being that Utah's limited population demographic means SLC is at a huge disadvantage in terms of growth without external migration into the state. The pool is very shallow in that regard. Utahns are still overwhelmingly like-minded in the way they live their lives - they marry young, start a family young and move out to the suburbs. Rarely, especially today, do you see a young Mormon family raising their kids in Salt Lake City. There are examples of this, of course, but on the whole that just isn't happening.
That is a majority of Utah's growth - young families having children.
Young families with children, especially young, Mormon families, are not the type of people who will live in Salt Lake City on the whole. If that's a strong majority of the growth we're seeing as a state, SLC is either going to have to make a push to suburbanize even more to draw those families back into the city with affordable housing - or they're going to hit their cap and the growth will stall. There's only a certain amount of non-Mormon, non-family oriented 20-somethings out there (the type who typically fuel urban growth in most cities) and they're a very small minority compared to the other demographic.
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Comrade, I agree with you 100% about the challenges that face the Wasatch Front as far as in migration, and Mormon families being more prone by nature of their size to migrating toward the suburbs.
You brought up Phoenix, and that's a good example, but I wasn't even thinking of Phoenix in particular, except for maybe Arizona and Nevada cities in general, such as Vegas and Tucson. I'm thinking most of those cities do however have large tracts of empty flat land to develop on. Not just cities like Albuquerque, but also including Boise and Denver. What does Salt Lake have other than a very environmentally complicated Northwest Quadrant, which in and of itself is very limited.
I would be interested to see the increase in apartment unit per capita population being added to Salt Lake City proper over these past two years, when compared to per unit per capita population growth in those cities on that list above. I wish we could also see the amount of total sq. footage of development added, along with the development dollar expenditures in all categories such as retail, commercial, residential, educational and manufacturing/warehousing. I'm sure even without it's extensive CSA, Salt Lake City proper compares favorably when tallying up the redevelopment and new development of it's infrastructure in all of the various categories.
My assertion would be that the burgeoning and becoming very large Wasatch CSA and it's Great Basin/Intermountain reach will be more than enough of a population provision for smallish Salt Lake City proper's vibrant urban additions. This, even taking into account a large percentage of Mormon population. I would move back to the Wasatch in a heart beat, at least part time. This only can happen as my industry grows in that area, and of course my flexibility to be able to be away from Southern Cal. for extended periods of time. I think little Salt Lake City will continue on its current path of attractive inner infrastructure redevelopment, increased density, and a yearly add on of vibrant urban options. This will happen as the numbers of people along the Wasatch like me continue to increase. Whether those people are born and raised in Utah or move from somewhere else, they are ever increasing their numbers. People who have no bitter axe to grind or have no problem living amongst peoples of all types.
Whether we like it or not Salt Lake City seems intent on limiting it's border size. The most we can anticipate is that it will just continue to infill and therefore build upward. Someday it will resemble development wise a more dense style San Francisco Peninsula, surrounded by a giant water shoreline, mountains and a huge CSA population. Even still, when Salt Lake's CSA reaches 5 or more million, it's City proper is going to probably number less than 5 hundred thousand.
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