Today, Explained - America’s most successful downtown?

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

And the ecological crisis that threatens everything. Today, Explained’s Miles Bryan heads to Salt Lake City. This episode was reported and produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Serena Solin and Laura Bullard, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Previously, on Today Explained. Okay, this doom loop, it's sort of a death spiral for cities. Property values will fall further, taxes will have to rise further, government spending will have to fall further, more people will leave, and so forth and so forth. We've talked a lot about the doom loop threatening American downtowns post-pandemic. Bleak stuff. But Today Explained producer and reporter Miles Bryan is here with some good news on this subject. Yeah, I'm here today to bring you a downtown that's become

near and dear to my heart. Which is it, Miles? Is it Portland, Maine? Is it Portland, Oregon? Is it Miami, Florida? It is Salt Lake City. In Utah? Salt Lake's downtown isn't just recovering from the pandemic, it's thriving. I want to tell you about it because it's doing nearly everything a downtown should be doing right now, and because there's one thing that might blow it all up. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer,

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. I just started thinking, you know, Salt Lake ain't that bad. I know, no, no, I mean, I know it sucks and all, but, you know, this is life. Today explains Sean Ramos for him and Miles Bryant here. Miles, Salt Lake City? Really? Yeah, it seemed weird to me too.

But when I started reporting on cities earlier this year, I came across this research from the University of Toronto. It tracks how busy downtowns are by monitoring cell phone activity. Creepy! I know it's weird, but it's helpful if you want to understand how cities are doing right now. So the data goes up to May of this year, and most cities at that time were way less busy in their downtowns than they were in May of 2019. New York was at 67% of its pre-COVID downtown activity. Phoenix was at 72%. But downtown Salt Lake City was at 139% of its pre-COVID activity.

Wow. Yeah. So Salt Lake was already growing really fast before the pandemic. It has great access to nature, and it's been attracting tons of tech and finance jobs recently. But when I bounced all of this off Tracy Lowe from the Brookings Institution, she said there's one area where downtown Salt Lake really stands out. So lots of U.S. metro areas are growing, but mostly they're growing at the edges. What really struck me about Salt Lake City was not just the high rate of population growth,

but that the growth is at the center of the region in and around the downtown area, which is just really different. There were more apartments built in downtown Salt Lake City last year than in downtown New York City. Say what? Yeah, it's kind of crazy.

I wanted to see for myself how all this new housing can change the feel of a downtown. So in late August, I took a little trip. So as you look around downtown Salt Lake, I mean, there's just cranes everywhere. That's Benjamin Wood. He's a local Alt Weekly writer in Salt Lake and bike and walk advocacy guy.

Most of these have some residential element. There's a lot of mixed use going in. It means there's customers for the restaurants. and bike and walk advocacy guy. Most of these have some residential element. There's a lot of mixed use going in. It means there's customers for the restaurants. There's eyes on the street so it doesn't feel so sketchy when it gets dark. And it's bringing bodies downtown. Ben and I biked around on e-bikes. Woo!

Though my battery conked out. That's tough. You need the throttle that I got. We might need to switch bikes. I'm good. If you don't mind going out. That's tough. You need the throttle that I got. We might need to switch bikes. I'm good. If you don't mind going slow. Not at all.

Which was a little... Sad. Humbling. Humbling. So we were biking around, which is kind of surprising if you know the history of Salt Lake, because the city was very much not laid out to be bike-friendly

or even pedestrian-friendly. Mormon leader Brigham Young settled the Salt Lake Valley with his followers in the mid-19th century. You know, the church and its followers were looking for a refuge, and they felt like they found it in this valley shielded by mountains and bordered by the massive Saltwater Lake, from which the city takes its name. But they had some kind of zany ideas about urban design.

Brigham Young wanted to be able to do a U-turn with a team of oxen, right? And that was probably a good idea in 1850, right? But in 2023, we don't have a lot of ox carts going around. We don't have a lot of teams of oxen we're trying to turn. What we're left with is nine lane streets. So not only are the roads super wide, the blocks are extremely long, not exactly ideal for walking around. But Wood tells me the new development that's going into downtown is actually helping to fix those 19th century design flaws. When new development comes in, they're the ones that are putting in mid-block crossings and walkways and paseos. So as things start to turn over, we're starting to cut these walking paths where we've needed them for a long time. They just haven't been possible. The city has put in a decent amount of bike lanes downtown.

Public transit downtown is free and very well used. They're at basically 100% of their pre-COVID ridership. Nice. Yeah. And this is all happening in the capital of a red state in a very car-centric community. So, you know, if it can happen here, I think it's possible it can happen anywhere. All right, so the city is making downtown a nice place to live. A lot of cities are. How are they getting people to move there in the first place?

I think the city has done two big things right to encourage dense residential development in the downtown core. First, they laid out a long-term plan for the area before there was a lot of demand there. And second, they just made it really easy to build. So taking a step back, affordable housing is a huge issue in Salt Lake. Single-family homes cost an average of more than half a million dollars. And there isn't really anywhere for the city to sprawl. The city's sort of hemmed in by

the mountains and the great Salt Lake. The state of Utah has been the fastest growing state in the nation. I talked about this stuff with Erin Mendenhall. She's the mayor of Salt Lake City. So we have a major shortage of missing middle housing and certainly, like a lot of other parts of the country, affordable and deeply affordable housing. About a decade ago, the city planning department in Salt Lake started changing regulations for what can be built downtown and in the immediate surrounding area. They allowed more density and reduced parking requirements. And a lot of times when city officials try to make these kinds of changes, neighbors

get super mad, right? Like they don't want to give up their parking spot. New high-rise buildings are sprouting up all over Hillcrest, but that's leaving some wondering where all of the new residents are going to park. But crucially, Salt Lake did this stuff before the boom in downtown development, which officials say has made it far less of an issue. And since that time, the mayor says the city has been super focused on just making sure Salt Lake is an easy place to build new housing. We're doing something that wasn't happening consistently before, and that's inviting in the permit holders and the developers to sit

down with our teams. We'll pull up their permit. We'll look at the process and where the hangups were, which is how we've been able to achieve faster approvals and permitting and inspections. Since 2016, the time it takes for the city to review a building permit has fallen by two-thirds, even as the number of permits being applied for has gone way up. And the result is Salt Lake City now builds a ton of housing. Last year, it built more housing per capita than big expensive cities like New York and Los Angeles, as well as more than their other fast-growing western piers like Phoenix or Denver. Okay, but no offense to Mayor Mendenhall, but it's her job to say the city's functioning really well and made all sorts of good decisions.

Did you talk to anyone else involved? Yeah, I definitely ran everything I heard from her by experts and advocates and by residential developers, including this guy named Dan Lofgren. He's a longtime developer in the area. Very nice. Very Utah. This is a box of cookies. Ruby snap, gourmet cookies. I met him at one of his recently finished apartment buildings. Exotic's the wrong word because they're all common flavors you would expect. But that's a s'mores cookie, for example. So you've got to try one. Oh, yeah, I'll definitely try one.

Is this like a Salt Lake City specialty or why these cookies? No, it's just our way to say welcome. Glad you're here. Everyone's trying to buy you, Miles. But anyway, you know, he told me what the mayor was saying jives with his experience. He called the situation in downtown Salt Lake over the last couple of years a, quote, virtuous loop. Our job growth continues to be pretty robust. Well, job growth means new households in the market.

New households mean a demand for housing. And many of those households who are coming to the market in response to that job growth have had experience living in a downtown. Well, what's the natural impact of that? Those residents have capacity and demand for additional services. So more restaurants come, so more services come. So now more services come. So, now, downtown becomes even that much more attractive place to live, and it starts to build on itself. It starts to kind of gain its own momentum. And, you know, there's one other factor in this virtuous loop we got to talk about, the Mormon church. They own about a quarter of downtown Salt Lake's land and buildings. The church has different incentives than a normal property owner, right? Like, that's sort of intuitive. They're interested in the long-term vitality of downtown Salt Lake because, you know, that's the location of their most sacred space,

their sacred temple. And the church actually helped kick off downtown Salt Lake's residential boom years ago when it converted an old shopping mall into a mix of stores, offices, and apartments and condos during the Great Recession when, you know, not very much else was getting built. The downtown City Creek development sponsored by the church is a vast undertaking. Forbes magazine calls the Salt Lake City project the ancient ideal of building a city around its essential sacred space, referring to its close proximity to the worldwide headquarters of the church, Temple Square. Does it feel like a neighborhood, Miles?

Because my experience in downtown Salt Lake City is that it's sort of quiet come nighttime. Not a lot of activity. I thought it was pretty lively for a mid-sized city downtown these days. But Sean, I, like you, am old and uncool. And so maybe we're not the best people to answer this question. But I found someone who is a good person to answer. Her name is Macy Weeks, and she moved to the edge of Salt Lake City's downtown a year ago. I'm 20 years old. And yep, that's about it. So this is a pretty residential feeling street. Oh yeah. Macy grew up in a suburb of Seattle. She's an aspiring songwriter. Teenagers since like the dawn of time who are are into music have wanted have met up and made

plans to move to the city but not to salt lake right to seattle or new york or how did that happen well seattle's dead basically and california is too expensive so if i was going to find a place that was going to be like affordable ish and, you know, have a good bar scene. Yeah, it's here. It's basically just here. There's like, there's so many young people here. Wow. RIP Seattle. So do you think this is going to last? Does the future of Salt Lake City seem bright?

You know, Sean, there is one other thing that came up in all my interviews that kind of casts a shadow over that future. I think everything we're talking about comes back to the lake. Salt Lake City's namesake, the Great Salt Lake. It's in trouble. Heavens yes, I'm worried about the lake. I'm worried about what the lake means for my kids and grandkids. And if there aren't big changes, the whole region's success is in jeopardy. The economic, the health impact, and the identity impact of that on the state of Utah would be incredibly tragic. Okay, I know you hate saying that's coming up, but what's a good turn here to the break? No, I say I hate saying after the break. Say, um, I'm going to tell you more about the lake when we're back or something. Yeah. I'm going to tell you more about the lake when we're back or something.

Yeah. I'm going to tell you all about the lake when we're back. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Thank you. your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained. Ramp.com slash explained.

R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. We need more rain, and we need it now. That's why I'm asking Utahns of all faiths to join me in a weekend of prayer. Today Explained is back with reporter-producer Miles Bryan, who just got back from a visit to the urbanist paradise of Salt Lake City, Utah. Unfortunately, the city's namesake is a bit of an issue.

Miles? Yes. To get a sense of the problem, I drove out to the edge of the Great Salt Lake and I met up with this guy named Kevin Perry. I'm a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah. Now, if you haven't been to the Great Salt Lake,

it's weird. It's not like any big lake that I've spent time at before. It's marshy with these long salt flats that stretch on forever. And even though the lake is huge, the whole thing looks kind of shallow. There used to be a annual swimming race, marathon swimming from here to Antelope Island. I can see the island, but it looks like you could walk to it. You can now. There's no way to swim from here to there. Right.

When you hear Great Salt Lake, you might be thinking lots of water, but that's not the case here. Remind people why that is. Well, the Great Salt Lake is a terminal basin, right? Meaning water from streams and rivers flows into it. And for decades, Utah has diverted that water away from the lake to grow crops and to fuel the growth of its cities, which means the lake isn't getting enough water.

And what happens if and when the lake really dries up? Well, the consequences of the lake drying up are already here. It's already been happening. The first tipping point was when we started exposing vast stretches of the lake bed to the air. And then we had dust plumes that were coming off of the lake. And that's been going on for more than a decade. And then, as the lake continues to get lower and lower,

last year they had to pull every single boat off of the Great Salt Lake because the marinas were dry. Utah's Department of Natural Resources now planning to dredge the marina so search and rescue teams can get their boats out in the event of an emergency. So we reached the dust tipping point a decade ago. We reached the boating and recreation tipping point basically several years ago. We reached the boating and recreation tipping point basically several years ago. And then in

October of 2022, we almost reached the salinity tipping point, which is the most dire. It's the death of the ecosystem. Every year, more than 10 million birds stop by this lake in order to gorge themselves on the brine shrimp and the brine flies. As the lake shrinks, it gets saltier and saltier, and last October, the salinity levels reached 19%, which is well out of the range of what the brine shrimp and the brine flies can tolerate, and they started dying en masse. What would it mean for these birds to not have this lake? So they've got to get from central Canada to central Argentina or southern Mexico

without a stopover. You just can't do it. At which point, you're coming very, very close to the entire ecosystem collapsing. Now, I should say that since last fall, there's been a ton of rain and snow in Utah, and that really has helped refill the Great Salt Lake a bit, but it's still on a long-term trajectory of collapse.

There's a worst-case scenario, then there's a worst-worst-case scenario. Okay, let me get them both. So, from an ecological perspective, the loss of the brine shrimp and the brine flies is the death of the lake and the death of millions of birds that would otherwise come through here. But if the lake keeps drying up, it would also decimate the companies that extract minerals like salt and magnesium out of the lake and generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the state's economy every year.

It would decimate Salt Lake City's skiing industry, which relies on lake effect snow. And perhaps most importantly for the residents of Salt Lake and the whole region, it would make those dust storms a whole lot worse. You also have massive dust plumes, which are coming off the lake and moving into the surrounding communities and exposing the two and a half million people that live adjacent to the lake to everything that is in the dust, including arsenic. I asked all my interviewees what they thought about the lake and the potential for these arsenic dust storms. And for most of them, it was a really pressing existential concern. Except for Macy. That wasn't true at all for her. So many natural disasters all the time. The world is literally exploding. Like, of course here is going to have some awful impending doom event. Fair, honestly. But I don't think the looming threat of the Great Salt Lake means Salt Lake City is going to have to

start shrinking or rolling back some of the changes it's making in its downtown that has made it so much more vibrant than it has been. In fact, I think downtown Salt Lake's growth is actually probably helpful for solving the water crisis. Really? Okay, I know that's going to take some explanation, but let's start on an alfalfa farm. Which farm? Sorry. Alfalfa. Alfalfa and hay farming in Utah sucks up more than two-thirds of the state's diverted water. Two-thirds. So saving the Great Salt Lake

mostly means getting those farmers on board with water conservation. And that requires legislative action. For many years, the legislature wasn't super interested in that. It's dominated by Republicans, and it wasn't really taking this problem seriously. But in the last few years, that's really started to change. At a wetland preserve near the Great Salt Lake, Governor Spencer Cox held a bill signing ceremony for legislation aimed at saving the lake. The legislature made big changes to the state's water laws, and in, passed bills dedicating hundreds of millions of dollars to improving water efficiency in agriculture.

Now there's an incentive to use less water. And that's a big deal. To be fair, lawmakers have mostly just grabbed the lowest hanging fruit here so far. And lots of people will say they need to do more and they need to do it faster. In fact, a bunch of environmental groups are suing the state to force them to do just that.

The suit filed by Sierra Club, the Utah Rivers Council, and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment and others seek to force the state to create a plan to raise water levels. But I gotta say, I was surprised to find that there seems to be a bipartisan consensus that this is a serious problem. And you know, this consensus is exemplified by one guy, a Utah Speaker of the House. His name's Brad Wilson. He's a conservative Republican, lives in the Salt Lake City exurbs.

He actually just announced he's resigning in November to make a run for Senate. But over the last couple of years, he's made saving the Great Salt Lake his marquee issue. The politics of Salt Lake City are different than the politics of where I live. But we care a lot about the city, and a lot of it goes back to our pioneer heritage. I mean, the first real city that was settled was Salt Lake City by our pioneer ancestors,

and we care about it as a community because of that. This goes back to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and the gang. Exactly. And the church, which is a leader in so many ways, has been a leader in changes downtown, is also on board with water conservation. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has donated thousands of shares of water to the Great Salt Lake.

But even so, Brad Wilson told me the politics of this effort are still tricky. Cities have to find some water savings as well. I think that tension between growth and agriculture slash water use in general is going to be the tug and pull that will happen over the next decade. Over the next decade strikes me as a little optimistic, considering, as we just heard from your scientist, this is happening right now. Does this right now mean that this idyllic picture you painted of Salt Lake City and

its growth is going to slow down, is going to stop? Well, now we get back to the optimism, I promise, because I think downtown Salt Lake is a model for how the region can keep growing while shrinking its water usage. And the key to that is where cities' water goes. Kevin told me half of all the water that Utah cities use goes to landscaping. It goes to the Kentucky bluegrass lawns that you notice when you visit and then fill the region outside of downtown. Every apartment or condo built in downtown Salt Lake has meant one less lawn.

We are an example of how adding population in the right way actually reduced our water consumption, allowed our city to grow. I don't know a city or a town in this nation that doesn't want to grow. You know, what are we supposed to take away from all this? One obvious lesson is that cities running low on water, and there's a bunch of them in America these days, should look to density as a way to grow sustainably. But there's a bigger one, I think, too. You know, it often feels to me like we live in this zero-sum world when it comes to growth right now. You know, it's like cities versus states.

In urban areas, it's new development versus protecting nature or not displacing longtime residents. To me, the thing that makes me optimistic about the Salt Lake City story is that it points towards the possibility that we can break out of that zero-sum world. That, you know, it's maybe possible to get all the benefits of a growing population and economy. It points towards the possibility that we can break out of that zero-sum world. That, you know, it's maybe possible to get all the benefits of a growing population and economy and still care about the environment. Salt Lake City and its environs have managed to sort of find a common purpose here is because they all share this history, this religion even, that ties a lot of them together. What about all the cities that don't have that? Sure, they maybe have a bigger challenge in getting on the same page. But nearly all American cities have their own housing crisis, right? And the whole country faces an existential threat from climate change. So to me, the Salt Lake story is a nice reminder that cooperation

is possible, that this kind of story doesn't always have to end in doom and gloom. So are you moving to Salt Lake City? I was convinced. My wife, not so much. Miles Bryan, Today Explained. Miles was edited by Matthew Collette and fact-checked by Serena Solon and Laura Bullard. Our show was mixed by David Herman. Go Utes!