Web Development Live

Brigham Young famously wanted streets wide enough to turn a team of horses and wagon in, and the superblocks were designed to be neatly divided into plots that would give the settlers enough land to grow crops, have an orchard and sustain themselves.

Few wagon trains are pulling U-turns in downtown Salt Lake these days, and the office buildings and parking lots don’t leave much room for fruit trees. And even the most meticulously planned community loses its luster over time and needs some modernizing especially if the alternative for new investment is not unsettled wilderness but the growing suburbs and towns strung along the Wasatch front.

So Salt Lake is embarking on a major redevelopment effort under an umbrella plan called Downtown Rising in which nearly $2 billion will be invested in new offices, residential and retail buildings, arts, culture and governmental facilities and transit projects.

There’s a Seattle component to this. Seattle-based architecture firm Callison is a participant in one of downtown Salt Lake’s biggest projects, City Creek, a 20-acre mixed-use project across the street from Temple Square.

Seattle-based retailer Nordstrom was one of the drivers behind the redevelopment effort generally and City Creek in particular.

“Frankly, the heart of downtown has for the last 20 years been slipping into a worse state of repair,” says Callison principal Stan Laegreid. “It was turning into quite a liability. Everyone agreed something needed to be done.” As a downtown tenant with a lease nearing its end, Nordstrom was “watching the value of a downtown and a commercial market just steadily slip away.” The retailer was reluctant to stay unless “there was a larger commitment to turn downtown around.”

Beyond those specifics, Salt Lake’s efforts to rejuvenate its downtown have some interesting parallels and contrasts for Seattle as it considers its own redevelopment efforts in places such as South Lake Union, south downtown and Sodo.

Salt Lake and Seattle are hardly alone among western U.S. cities considering large-scale redevelopments that involve millions of dollars in investment and years of planning and wrangling. Some cities get a blank canvas to work with in the form of abandoned rail yards that cover acres of potentially prime developable real estate. Sacramento, Calif.; Santa Fe, N.M.; and Spokane are in varying stages of rail-yard redevelopment projects. Renton is working with former Boeing property near Lake Washington. Yakima is looking at what it can do with a former sawmill.

Salt Lake differs somewhat in that it’s trying to work a somewhat coordinated plan into and around an existing downtown, although Laegreid says there’s actually considerable open property in the downtown core.

But the biggest difference between Salt Lake and Seattle is the influence and participation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Temple Square is at the physical heart of downtown, drawing visitors as both a religious center and tourist destination.

“They have deliberately spearheaded this effort,” Laegreid says. “That introduces a dynamic and a patronage in the process that very few cities have. That was a big trigger in allowing this to happen.”

Contrast that with development efforts in Seattle. One striking feature about Downtown Rising is the breadth of business sector and governmental participation in a shared plan for downtown. With Seattle’s fractious political scene, very little gets done in a coordinated fashion unless, of course, a private developer such as Paul Allen’s Vulcan in South Lake Union has the size and drive to come up with a large-scale redevelopment plan on its own and push it to reality.

Not that having such an influential partner meant immediate unanimity in Salt Lake. “There still were a lot of vested parties that collectively had to share a vision,” Laegreid says. Once the first ideas were floated, human nature took over. “Everyone’s got opinions,” he says. “There was a certain amount of compromising, everyone getting their voices heard.” Although Salt Lake isn’t as consensus-crazy as Seattle, “given the high profile of the project, it started to feel much more like a Seattle” process.