Next week, the Salt Lake City Council is scheduled to vote on an ordinance that would adopt the Ballpark Station Area Plan, a planning document intended to guide the Ballpark neighborhood’s growth, capitalizing on the Smith’s Ballpark as the neighborhood’s central asset.
However, the area plan misses two big opportunities to serve the neighborhood’s current and future residents and businesses if it isn’t revised prior to its adoption. The plan fails to address the need for greater safety in the area and the area’s lack of mature trees.
First, the plan should be revised so that public safety is made into a criterion for evaluating all building and planning proposals within the Ballpark neighborhood. I’m writing this on the same day we experienced yet another shooting in Ballpark, this time at 10 a.m. at the Wasatch Inn at 1416 S. State Street.
We know that public safety needs to be more than just good policing, and with this plan we have the opportunity to improve safety via deliberate urban planning. But currently the plan states:
“Although addressing policing and safety is not part of the scope of this plan, the success of many of the recommendations in this plan depend on perceived and actual safety of pedestrian and bicycle connections, public open space and plazas, and community events and activities.”
This doesn’t go far enough. While it’s useful to define the scope and purpose of any given document, that cannot be a pretext for avoiding crucial issues. A planning document should, by definition, make safety a primary consideration in guiding development choices in the Ballpark community.
You might already be familiar with crime in Ballpark, but it’s worth looking at a map of the neighborhood to see how these incidents cluster. In both 2020 and 2021, five, or 28%, of Salt Lake City’s 18 criminal homicides occurred in or within a block of the Ballpark neighborhood. The residential population of Ballpark is approximately 6,000 residents, or 3% of the residential population of Salt Lake City.
This means that a neighborhood with approximately 3% of the residential population is carrying 28% of the burden of the homicides in Salt Lake City. Put another way, per capita, the Ballpark neighborhood experiences nine times the rate of homicides compared with the whole of Salt Lake City.
Reframing Salt Lake City’s current public safety resources or making small adjustments to deploying those resources has not been sufficient to correct these inequities. Land use decisions can and should be part of crime prevention. Crime and public safety are the most critical issues facing the Ballpark neighborhood. Our City Council must use this opportunity to make public safety an integral part of the Station Area Plan.
The second big opportunity is to use the Station Area Plan to highlight and propose plans to remedy Ballpark’s lack of “tree equity.” While city leaders have noted westside inequities in our urban tree canopy, the Ballpark neighborhood has been curiously absent from those discussions.
The city’s urban forestry map clearly shows that the zones around 300 West, 400 West, 1300 South and 1700 South in the Ballpark neighborhood are some of the most tree-less, barren corridors in the city. While the 300 West plan that is currently being implemented includes planting trees, it’s not only 300 West itself. It’s the entire surrounding corridor, including cross streets. We need a deliberate plan to preserve the mature trees we have and plant a robust canopy of street trees for the future if we hope to reduce the urban heat island effects that Ballpark already experiences during our record-breaking summers.
Measuring the world can render us helpless — or show us how to help. Let’s use this plan to do just that.
Amy J. Hawkins
Amy J. Hawkins is chair of the Ballpark Community Council.