Growing Smarter: Residents Provide Recipe for Smart Growth

Developers and municipal leaders should give the people what they want
Urban Gondolas are inexplicably absent from the wish-list

By Curmudgeon

Interesting editorial up in the SL Trib this morning. Headline reads: "Growing smarter: Residents provide recipe for smart growth."

The editorial reports that a recent large survey of Utahns by HarrisInterative shows that residents of the beehive state are damn tired of air pollution, traffic congestion and urban sprawl. HarrisInteractive "convened focus groups and polled 1,262 Utahns, including 934 from along the Wasatch Front, and compared the results to a similar study in 1997."

The survey "painted a picture of what Wasatch Front residents envision as the 'ideal community,' a model that, if embraced by developers and planning officials, can help curb sprawl and address related problems. The people want a mix of lot sizes and housing types, primarily moderate-sized single-family homes and town houses. (Salt Lake County participants want some apartment buildings sprinkled in.) They want easy access to public transportation - buses, rail and TRAX - and open spaces: parks, gardens, playgrounds, recreation fields, nature preserves and trails. And they want neighbors who represent a mix of ages and family stages. Nearly three-fourths of the survey participants favored communities with the above attributes, which constitute a recipe for vibrant, diverse, livable, sustainable neighborhoods. Developers and municipal leaders should give the people what they want. "

Public transit. Parks. Open space. Public recreation areas. Playing fields. Trails. Reigning in sprawl and over-development. Be nice if Mayor Godfrey's Crack Development Team would take notice of the survey and what it revealed. Maybe when they get done with searching for the 275 public parking spaces that went missing recently and still have not turned up, they'll read the HarrisInteractive Survey and think about how it might guide Ogden's development policies. Maybe they'll convince Hizzonah to drop his opposition to a transit upgrade [trolley or BRT] between downtown and WSU and McKay-Dee [the Mayor's foot-dragging is now entering its third year], trying to protect that route for his flatland gondola obsession. Maybe....

Ok, ok, I know. But we can hope, can't we?