Quote:
Originally Posted by felixg
I think you’d be surprised at how much underutilized space there is in and around downtown LA, not at all like sf. I think while population / demand are of course lower here than LA, entirely ruling out connecting, high density auto corridors from popping up is a little shortsighted. In cities like ours, cars will remain the preferred mode of transit for years to come, and when that’s the case I think convenience and travel time is often more of a motivator than actual free space. This makes spaces right along traffic arteries more desirable than ones even slightly less accessible by car or out in the sea of houses. You see it a little on state st, Reno’s Virginia st, and a lot on Phoenix’s central ave and of course wilshire in LA. The most extreme example is possibly the strip in vegas, there’s of course anomalies and differences there though
I feel that slc and LA are never recognized enough for their developmental and locational similarities — while lots of people love the idea of us evolving into something more eastern in form, our urban fabric is really stacked against it. If we want a realistic view into what slc will look like 50 years from now, I think looking to postindustrial, pre-automotive, western railroad cities is the move
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LA still has significant density miles and miles outside downtown, tho.
Salt Lake's metro density is abysmal. Even places like SugarHouse, though getting better with the multi-family buildings going up, are not remotely dense.
The difference between the Salt Lake and LA regions are twofold:
1. Salt Lake's density, even in the central communities, is more similar to places like Phoenix and Boise than San Francisco and Los Angeles. That's to say, there are some urban neighborhoods but not a lot and outside of pockets, most the detached housing sits largely on decent-sized lots. In fact, much of Salt Lake's urban core would be considered more outer-city neighborhoods for larger cities that are predominantly filled with apartments and rowhouses - not single-family, detached homes.
Los Angeles, though, is a bit of a mix, and certainly there are areas closer to downtown that fit this bill - but that is also a byproduct of the same issue that you kind of touched on and has impacted a lot of the west's growth: the fact many of these cities grew up around the automobile - especially neighborhoods on the west side. Look at that photo I posted a few days ago of SLC in the 1940s or so. You can see how undeveloped the west side was. Now it's got a huge chunk of the city's population. Even Central City is dominated by auto-oriented housing and again, while it's getting better, it's still an issue.
2. The amount of tolerance for multifamily development drops significantly the further you go out to the suburbs. Remember the whole hubbub over this development in Herriman:
People protested the fuck out of it because it was too urban. THAT - too urban lmao
Outside very small pockets, mostly located in non-residential areas, multifamily, large-scale development is still a slow-trickle for most of the suburbs.
LA is a different beast because it's so large. And certainly they have their share of NIMBYs - but it's not a surprise that most any major multi-family development is going up in Salt Lake City and not 10 miles south of it.
In LA, 10 miles south of downtown is still LA, so the overall support and mindset of the city bleeds over there - even if you run into a ton of NIBMYs (especially in the more affluent areas).
Look at the old Cottonwood Mall site. Cottonwood Mall was demolished in 2008 - FIFTEEN YEARS AGO - and it went from this in 2007ish even before the mall was officially demolished:
To this in 2014:
To this in 2018:
To finally this - I think:
It got progressively worse with each iteration.
That's the headwinds you are dealing with outside Salt Lake. To be honest, what you're seeing in SugarHouse right now and other areas of the city would not happen anywhere else in the valley. The people would rise up and burn the whole city down if needed. It's why, even today, a good chunk of the growth we see is still single-family, detached housing out in places like Daybreak. Daybreak is very limited on these larger developments.
The big problem with the Salt Lake area is that everything takes too damn long and oftentimes, when the development begins, it's much smaller than originally proposed. See the Cottonwood Mall site - or the residential towers they were going to build out in Sandy. Anyone remember that?
That was scaled down to this in 2018:
Guess what? It's 2023 and nothing like that has even been built yet. Neither is this, which was proposed in 2019 in their Sandy Cairns District:
Even that development on State in South Salt Lake has been scaled back considerably over the years - and South Salt Lake is basically SugarHouse-light.
My point? Salt Lake has a long ways to go before we see consistent urban development outside the city. Even places like LA are lightyears ahead of us.
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