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For the previous three years, the College of Toronto has printed a graphic that encapsulates the grim state of America’s downtowns in a post-pandemic world. Its Downtown Restoration undertaking ranks 51 US cities primarily based on the cellphone knowledge of their downtowns, relative to the identical interval in 2019. Most cities’ stats are terrible: New York Metropolis was at 67 % of its pre-pandemic downtown exercise in Might 2023. Minneapolis was at simply 40 %.

However not each metropolis is struggling. Just a few have truly exceeded pre-Covid exercise downtown. The No. 1 spot? It’s constantly been held by … drumroll please …

Salt Lake Metropolis, Utah.

I first encountered this stat whereas reporting and producing a sequence on downtown restoration final spring for Vox’s At the moment, Defined podcast, and it has been puzzling me ever since. In spite of everything, Salt Lake Metropolis isn’t precisely identified for its forward-thinking urbanism — however by the point I completed a reporting journey to town in late August, I had begun to suppose that possibly it must be.

Prior to now few years, Salt Lake’s policymakers and different stakeholders have been on an aggressive marketing campaign to facilitate the development of hundreds of latest housing items within the metropolis’s downtown. It’s remodeling the world from a single-use workplace district to one thing that matches the remote-work period.

“We need to make downtown or make Salt Lake Metropolis a spot the place individuals can stay and work and play. That’s basically the umbrella of what we wish as policymakers,” Ana Valdemoros, a metropolis council member who represents downtown, informed me.

It might be a mannequin for downtown growth in different spread-out American cities — if its development isn’t squashed by a brewing environmental disaster.

Making it straightforward to construct

Salt Lake Metropolis was already rising quickly earlier than the pandemic. And when the early-pandemic lockdowns hit in spring 2020, in-migration from different states surged, pushed by entry to town’s outside facilities and its burgeoning tech sector, amongst different issues.

That development has contributed to an already-acute housing disaster: The typical single-family residence within the metropolis prices greater than half 1,000,000 {dollars}, and rents are greater than they’ve ever been.

However the metropolis has responded with a ton of latest housing — particularly downtown. Downtown Salt Lake has constructed extra new flats since 2020 than downtown Manhattan, in response to knowledge analyzed by Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow on the Brookings Establishment’s Brookings Metro program.

CoStar/Brookings Metro

“What actually struck me about Salt Lake was not simply the excessive price of development, however that this development is on the middle of the area that’s in and across the downtown space,” Loh stated. “That’s actually completely different from the trajectory that the majority metro areas are on proper now.”

Politicians and metropolis planners I talked to cited two main coverage drivers behind the downtown housing increase: First, town laid out a long-term plan for the world earlier than demand spiked; and second, it’s made the allowing course of very easy for builders searching for to construct new housing.

Salt Lake completed connecting its mild rail system between downtown and its airport in 2013. Round that point, town additionally re-zoned the areas round its transit stations downtown to encourage denser growth, and diminished or eradicated parking minimums — necessities that new building include a sure variety of parking areas — which drive up the price of new housing.

“We’re inviting [developers and residents] in to take a seat down with our groups, and this occurs on a month-to-month foundation. We’ll pull up their allow. We’ll take a look at the method and the place the hang-ups have been and have a very frank dialogue about how did this expertise occur? How can we do higher? What elements of our system or our coverage are encumbering the convenience of constructing good issues occur within the metropolis?” Salt Lake Metropolis Mayor Erin Mendenhall informed me in an interview. “Which is how we’ve been capable of obtain sooner approvals and allowing and inspections.”

The mayor’s workplace says the results of its outreach is evident: Final yr, Salt Lake constructed extra housing per capita than large, costly cities like New York and Los Angeles, in addition to greater than its fast-growing western friends like Phoenix or Denver.

Mendenhall is up for reelection subsequent month, and her main competitor has argued that personal growth is inadequate, suggesting town construct its personal social housing as an alternative. Nonetheless, downtown Salt Lake’s residence inventory is predicted to greater than double by the top of subsequent yr, as building at the moment in progress finishes. That new provide might assist convey rents down.

A “virtuous loop”

Downtown Salt Lake Metropolis’s new residents are remodeling the world in different methods, too. Public transit is free downtown and busier than it was earlier than the pandemic, Principal Road is typically closed to automobiles so individuals can store and eat on the road, and the world is surprisingly vigorous throughout nights and weekends.

“We’re transitioning from an eight-hour, five-day-a-week metropolis, to an 18-hour metropolis, seven days per week,” stated Jessica Thesing, deputy director of Salt Lake Metropolis’s Downtown Alliance.

Longtime space housing developer Dan Lofgren described the story of Salt Lake’s downtown in recent times as a “virtuous loop”: the alternative of the doom loop that many American downtowns are teetering on the sting of.

“[New] residents have capability and demand for added providers,” Lofgren stated. “So extra eating places come, so extra providers come. So now downtown turns into even that rather more [of an] engaging place to stay, and it begins to construct on itself. It begins to sort of acquire its personal momentum.”

Macy Weeks has been a part of that shift. Final yr, the 20-year-old determined to go away the Seattle suburbs looking for a metropolis to launch her songwriting profession. She selected Salt Lake.

“Seattle’s useless, principally, and California’s too costly. So if I used to be going to discover a place that was going to be affordable-ish and have a superb bar scene, it’s right here,” Weeks stated.

The environmental menace

There’s an existential menace to this feel-good story, nevertheless: the eponymous Nice Salt Lake. The large saltwater lake is drying up at an unsustainable price, the results of many years of wasteful water coverage that has diverted an excessive amount of water from reaching it. It was quickly buoyed by the file rainfall the western United States obtained over the past yr, however earlier than that, it was on monitor to dry up earlier than the top of the last decade — and its trajectory remains to be regarding.

If the Nice Salt Lake have been allowed to evaporate totally, the consequences could be wide-reaching. It might be devastating for the thousands and thousands of migratory birds that cease over there yearly, Kevin Perry, an atmospheric sciences professor on the College of Utah, informed me. It might wreak havoc on the world’s ski resorts, which depend on lake impact snow. And, maybe most troublingly for individuals within the Salt Lake metro space, it will dramatically worsen the mud storms that already come off the lake.

In keeping with Perry, mud plumes from the lake, that are created when evaporation exposes parts of the lake mattress to the air, are “transferring into the encompassing communities and exposing the two.5 million those who stay adjoining to the lake to every thing that’s within the mud, together with arsenic.”

The specter of these arsenic mud storms, which a Utah state lawmaker described to the New York Occasions as an “environmental nuclear bomb” in a 2022 story, has helped spur the Utah legislature to make some large adjustments to water coverage after many years of inaction. The state devoted a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of {dollars} final yr to lowering water use. A lot of that new funding goes towards making agriculture extra water-efficient: At present, alfalfa and different sorts of hay farming suck up greater than two-thirds of the state’s diverted water. However the state’s quickly rising city areas want to search out water financial savings, too.

“I believe that stress between development and agriculture [and] water use on the whole goes to be the tug and pull that can occur over the subsequent decade,” state Rep. Brad Wilson, the Republican speaker of the Utah Home, stated. “That’s the place that is going to get, I believe, a bit of tougher, fairly frankly, as time goes on.”

An optimistic tackle the way forward for the lake, and downtown

Some media protection has framed Salt Lake’s looming environmental disaster as one the place the area has to decide on between development and environmental stewardship. Salt Lake Metropolis’s downtown, nevertheless, truly gives the street map out of that binary.

Particularly, the Salt Lake Metropolis metro has a landscaping downside: Most properties within the arid desert area have lawns, and greater than half of all of Utah’s residential water use goes to landscaping. However each new rental or residence downtown means one much less garden. And with town’s development concentrated there, water use has been falling. The inhabitants of Salt Lake has grown by about 10 % since 2000, however the metropolis has diminished its water use by greater than twice that over the identical stretch of time.

That lower alone received’t be sufficient to chart a manner out of the Nice Salt Lake’s disaster, but it surely’s nonetheless vital. If town can efficiently transition away from water-guzzling lawns that have been by no means meant to exist in that atmosphere, it can set the stage for exhausting conversations about water use throughout the state.

To me, this story resonates in two methods. First, I believe Salt Lake’s downtown transformation can present a template for different cities that need to reenergize their cores however lack the legacy of bustling city life that cities like New York have. If these adjustments can occur in a conservative state with a deeply ingrained driving tradition, why can’t they occur wherever?

Second, city points typically look like they exist in a zero-sum world: blue cities versus pink states; the Northeast versus the Solar Belt; new growth versus defending longtime residents or the atmosphere. Salt Lake Metropolis’s trajectory is a useful reminder that it doesn’t must be this fashion.

“We’re an instance of how including inhabitants in the correct manner truly diminished our water consumption, permitting our metropolis to develop,” Mendenhall stated. “I don’t know a metropolis or a city on this nation that doesn’t need to develop.”