By Curmudgeon
The Salt Lake Tribune reports this morning that another high-end real estate development on steeply sloped land has bitten the dust, the Sun Crest Development in Draper.. Headline: "Ritzy Developer Bankrupt."
From the story:
The housing-market slump was one issue, but the development also was being built on steep slopes peppered with ancient landslides. That, plus it had been sued more than a dozen times. Many of the suits sought claims for allegedly unpaid bills, and one alleged city-developer collusion that damaged neighboring property. Some of those claims will disappear, but suits relating to the land - such as a suit that sought to prevent expansion of a detention pond - likely will remain.Last week, we had the high end resort in Park City going under. And of course, the [prospective] developer of Ogden's Gondola Station Towers Downtown Hotel and Parking Plaza withdrew when it became known the company could not pay its subcontractors on a similar project in Orem, was it?
Was Ogden lucky in that Mayor Godfrey's two year relentless campaign to sell Mt. Ogden Golf Course to his developer associate Chris Peterson for development as a high end gated community of vacation villas on mountainside lots... lots the Mayor announced were in the end too steep to build on anyway when he backed away from the project to save his re-election bid? Seems like a real chance that if Ogden citizens [often denounced by the Administration and its tub-thumping lackeys in Lift Ogden and the Ogden-Weber Chamber of Commerce as "naysayers"] had not organized against the scheme... and thank you Smart Growth Ogden and others who helped organize that opposition... and if the Mayor and his associates had thus succeeded in their scheme, Ogden might now be looking at a bankrupt half-built development on what had been the city's largest park. [Full disclosure: I was and am a strong and active supporter of Smart Growth Ogden and its thoughtful, evidence-based approach to city growth, development and improvement.]
Comments, anyone?
