FrontRunner: The Cure for Urban Blight?

Waiting to see whether FrontRunner will be the magic bullet we're all hoping it will be

By Curmudgeon

I know Ogden is banking heavily on the restorative impact on downtown of FrontRunner arriving in Ogden. So, by the way, is SLC, where we are likely to get a pretty good read, and fairly quickly, regarding how much transit oriented development FrontRunner will spark. A story went up late this afternoon on the Salt Lake Tribune website, discussing the heavy lifting FrontRunner is expected to do in the old "stockade" district of SLC, where its terminal is located.

From the story:

Broken beer bottles, boarded buildings and bums peeing in weed-wretched lots. This long-forsaken patch of Salt Lake City borders a once-raunchy red-light district known as the "Stockade." And that was its high point.
Welcome to curiously named "Salt Lake Central," a new TRAX station near 300 South and 600 West that will serve as the nexus for thousands of FrontRunner riders whose first view of the capital could be disconcerting. Despite the neighborhood's nadir, the trains arrive next week, ferrying their cargo of debit-card carrying commuters.
Developers argue the gritty strip is gold. They have pledged hotels, restaurants, night clubs, a Starbucks and even a Ferris wheel - designed after the famous entertainment hub in the heart of Copenhagen, Denmark, called Tivoli Gardens. One builder envisions a Barcelona-like Las Ramblas - complete with commerce that flowers as often as its plants - across the street from the transit hub where debris and disrepair dominate the shadow of Rio Grande Depot.
But those promises came four years ago and seem farther off than ever. Now, people who lease or live in the area - many still are skittish over a crack-cocaine outbreak - offer mixed messages on whether the grand gentrification is realistic. Still, city bosses expect a transit-fueled rebirth of the squalid site that last thrived as an ethnic enclave during the heyday of the railroad.
Call it the boulevard of bottled hope that a westward-bound city desperately wants to recycle.

The Ogden FrontRunner station is not mired in quite that kind of urban decay, happily, but it also does not have a trolley connection to the rest of the city... and probably won't so long as Mayor Godfrey clings to his unfortunate obsession with a flatland gondola terminal there instead. But we are going to get, very short, some very real-world evidence on the potential for transit oriented development in both downtown the Ogden and downtown Salt Lake FrontRunner station neighborhoods.

Predictions of great development and the resurrection of the downtowns [which I hope come true and then some in both places] aren't going to matter much any more very shortly. In a couple of years we'll know... not think, but know... if FrontRunner is the magic bullet were all hoping it will be.