Quote:
Originally Posted by wrendog
You crack me up. Things can never change. Nope, never.
Cities can be stagnant and all the sudden have booms. It happens. Look at Austin. I know your pessimism will say it's different, but it could totally happen in SLC.
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Can it happen? Yes. Will it happen? Probably not. There is nothing in the surrounding areas history to ever indicate it would ever happen in Utah. And Austin is a bad example for the very reason that it is much much more liberal in the metro as a whole than the Salt Lake metro ever will be. Sure Salt Lake is liberal, but it’s hard to be a dynamic city center when all of your suburbs are literally competeing against you.
What makes Denver and Seattle so great of cities? It’s the fact they have centeralized literally everything and not all the suburbs are trying to get every attraction they can in their own city, instead the whole metros acting as one cohesive unit supporting the city centers. That desperately needs to happen in Utah. Imagine how great Salt Lake could be if every surrounding city supported it instead of competing against it.
Imagine how much less polluted the valley would be if not every city is trying to build their own versions of downtown that tend to be sprawled, but instead allowed Salt Lake to build a better network of an urban area that people would want and envy to live around, instead of building dozens of office parks catering to suburbs and adding to the entire reason to never change the mindset away from plain boring, polluting sprawl.
Yes I understand that every city has their share of office parks, and that may never change. But if Salt Lake wants to stay desirable and sustainable, then they are really going to have to figure out a way to convince people of a change of mindset.
What makes Utah desirable? 1) being Mormon, 2) the natural beauty. Who’s going to want to fly in and spend time in the mountains when they literally start to look like the mountains in LA. You know, if LA even has mountains, I mean you can’t see them 75% of the time.
That is my rant