By Curmudgeon
Today's Salt Lake Tribune has an interesting story about what happens when developers are allowed to run amok with few or no restrictions on their conduct. In Draper, developers, out of cash and with the new homes market sagging, are simply walking away from half-finished projects, leaving half built houses or foundations behind them. Which is tanking property values in the surrounding homes. Draper city government is now trying to close the barn door way too late. But still, the city seems now to be embracing the heretical idea [in Utah's legislative majority] that government regulation of developers can be a good thing and might be a necessary thing.
Here's how the story opens:
Draper doesn't want to turn into a graveyard of unfinished homes.The full story can be found here. As I read it, I couldn't help wondering this: if Mayor Godfrey and his developer cronies had gotten their way, and they'd sold Mt. Ogden Park to build a couple hundred high-end vacation villas, would we all now be looking at benches filled with half completed homes and holes in the ground?
In effort to brace itself for fallout from a slumping housing market, the city is targeting builders who walk away from unfinished projects, leaving behind skeletons of would-have-been homes. "This does create a safety concern and an eyesore," says City Councilwoman Stephanie Davis, adding that the city could at least require landowners to fence off their unfinished-home sites.
Several Draper residents, who already live next to long-abandoned shells, would welcome such a change. Take, for example, the Satre's, who are dazzled by the sweeping view of the Salt Lake Valley from their east-bench home's back windows.
But a glance out the front door tells a different story. A massive dirt mound and abandoned concrete foundation - peppered with unsightly graffiti and rusty concrete reinforcing rods have stood abandoned for three years atop a trio of would-be home lots in a neighborhood where many houses have sold for more than $1 million.
Second, the lead article in the Salt Lake City Weekly this week is about how, in Utah, developers and utilities get to do pretty much what they damn well please, with, often, unhappy consequences for the cities involved. Good account of how SLC permitted the destruction of a historic building in Sugar House, forcing out several successful non-chain small businesses, so a mega condo and commercial block could take their place... only to see the project stall in the weakening market, leaving a raw and gaping construction site where thriving businesses in a historic building used to be.
The City Weekly article can be found here.
