Quote:
Originally Posted by i-215
Be careful what you wish for. I'm dealing with the opposite problem. Los Angeles is so ungovernable because of its size, the entire San Fernando Valley gets screwed over.
LA spends all its transportation money on Wilshire expanding the subway. Meanwhile, the valley (which has a population larger than Utah) has ZERO miles of rail transit (excluding commuter rail). And nothing on the horizon.
True, 420k vs. 3,900k is apples and oranges. But bigger has its limits.
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I used to be very pro SLC absorbing all the surrounding cities, potentially everything in Salt Lake County.
Lately, though, I have considered the real consequences of this. If Salt Lake absorbed all of these communities, the city would be entirely overrun with suburban mentality and concerns. Rather than being able to focus primarily on the urbanization of downtown and the surrounding areas, most residents (and therefore city council members and other officials) would be strong anti-development minded. We already see significant struggles in SLC in the wealthier and single-family home dominated neighborhoods on development, imagine this in everywhere.
My second thought is that Salt Lake is going to grow just fine on its own. With the rapidly increasing rate of construction, there is a real chance now that Salt Lake City will surpass 300,000 residents by 2030. That is roughly a 50% increase from 2020. This also means the city will shift from being a culturally 50/50 city, where around half the residents live in single family and half live in multifamily to the vast majority living in multifamily. This shift will have a significant political impact on the city long term, as the majority of its residents become apartment and condo dwellers, the culture of the city will shift from the 'quiet' and 'suburban' in nature to a more pro-urbanization and highrise mentality.
So thanks to enormous scale of development, SLC is about to go through a massive political, economic, and cultural power shift away from its suburban neighborhoods (like the Avenues, Sugar House, Yalecrest, etc.) to Downtown. These changes are going to take a bit of time, primarily because we are only at the start of the building boom. But when they do, the shift will fast and the impacts on upzoning, alternative mobility, and future development (especially in the 2030s and beyond) will be dramatic. When most of your constituents live in apartments in or around downtown, your focus as a politician will be on those places.
Right now, I think SLC is fine the way it is. I could see it absorb South SL, primarily because that city is pretty similar to SLC and it is basically too small to provide the same benefits that SLC can provide. But that's about it. I think it's good to have at least one city in the State being able to more freely focus on real urbanization (and even SLC is struggling with a lot of antidevelopment pressures).
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