As Utah’s incarcerated community makes way for “Utah’s Innovation Community” in Draper, and as the rise of remote work continues to permanently disrupt the market for office space across the country, I think it might be worth pumping the brakes a bit on the official vision for The Point.
Where the public very clearly wanted a large regional park and more for-sale housing, the State of Utah is taking the initiative to plan a new downtown district for Draper, complete with tens of thousands of parking spaces, that will compete with the established downtowns and office parks for the increasingly-rarefied workforces and wallets of tech companies.
The line between “planning for growth” and “paying for growth” is about as fine as the tip of a pen in this state. The subpar LCC gondola solution comes to mind here, too, where real transit solutions have quickly been discarded in favor of a tourist attraction. Spending a billion dollars moving the prison to the sensitive wetlands of the capital city has gone about as well as you’d expect when building on a swamp, with significant cost overruns and delays. But the mosquitos are happy with their new diet, at least.
Now, despite cities like Riverton not even having a single UTA bus stop, UDOT wants to spend at least half a billion dollars to build either a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) or new TRAX line to connect the Lehi and Draper FrontRunner stations, exclusively serving “The Point,” where no one currently lives or works and which sits awkwardly across I-15 from the existing right-of-way.
Forget the long-promised TRAX Blue Line extension between Draper and Lehi, which requires no new land acquisition or bridges and would usefully connect the state’s two largest counties. No, instead we are going to get a new train between existing train stations to bring theoretical commuters from Lehi to their theoretical offices at The Point.
The initial renderings for The Point years ago showed a bustling downtown district, complete with tall buildings to rival downtown Salt Lake and potentially even a professional sports team. These plans have been scaled back in subsequent iterations, for whatever reason, but the intent seems to always have been to create a more sanitized, less interesting rival to SLC at the opposite end of the valley.
But if this new downtown is actually realized, complete with some kind of “iconic feature” to attract tourists, are Draper residents ready for the details and problems that come with big city life? I’ll just come out and say it: Will there be services and shelters for the homeless? Will there be bars at The Point? Will there even be bar licenses available for bars at The Point?
I just wish the state could take as much interest in supporting and connecting the “innovation” communities that already exist instead of throwing money at grand visions for green fields and gondolas.
Matthew Givens
Matthew Givens, PhD, lives in Murray, Utah and received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Utah in 2017. Although not an urban planner by trade, he is actively involved with the new urbanist community in Salt Lake City.