non-sprawl areas to live near salt lake city?

[kaytidid]

Originally Posted by SouthernBelleInUtah

15th and 15th has that.

I love that area!

[frogandtoad]

I don't get it. Isn't that exactly what you can do if you live in The Avenues or Sugar House??? Walk to town with a local diner for great breakfast or hang out at a coffee shop with character? It's right there and yet people are driving around the suburbs looking for it? I never understand this.

[SouthernBelleInUtah]

I think out-of-towners picture a city like Chicago or NYC, where being in the city is crowded and noisy. The Avenues and Sugarhouse have houses, very few apartment buildings (and those are usually 2-story), pocket parks, and locally owned shops every mile or so. Those areas have the feel of a small town. Of course, the houses are anywhere from 30-125 yrs old but to me they have character. No cookie-cutter neighborhoods and no HOAs. Most of the houses are kept up very well and many have been modernized. I wouldn't live anywhere else!

It's not to everyone's taste, you can't have an "open flow" concept in most of those houses without spending VERY big bucks. If someone wants a new house, they have to look outside the city itself. I think people get an idea in their heads w/o actually touring some of the houses for sale and then refuse to look at the very areas that would suit them.

[codymartens]

To agree with SouthernBelleInUtah, there are many places in SLC that have a great close community feel that are not urban sprawl. One of the best ways to explore neighborhoods and start to see which ones are in which neighborhoods is to contact a local Realtor who can send you lots of information on local areas. That's what we're here for!

<-- Please do not advertise your personal Real Estate site-- you may indicate in your profile you are a Realtor and respond via private messages if asked-->

There are a lot of interesting characteristics about each neighborhood that you will need help exploring, especially if you're coming from out of town.

[Susan Brei]

Salt Lake has a sprawl problem, and there are very few places to live with the kind of characteristics you are describing. Other than a (very small) handful of neighborhoods IN the city like 9th and 9th, Sugar House and the Avenues/South Temple area (sorta), there is a marked LACK of anything walkable, unique, or rich in character. If you're okay with the most meager (and I do mean MEAGER) of non-sprawl options, try Holliday (there's an old little downtown area surrounded by sprawl), Murray (there's an old little downtown with the freeway-like State Street running through it) or Daybreak (a brand-new subdivision being built like a small town with a fabricated lake, retail district, and a future stop on the light-rail). Provo and Park City are self-contained communities with a nice historical feel, but with Provo you have to be okay with heavy Mormonism and with Park City you have to have at least 2 million in the bank. Downtown Ogden isn't bad.

Salt Lake, and Utah in general, have done a poor job of respecting their urban environments and have expanded their urban environments in a way that is ugly, uninspiring, boring and unsustainable. Main Street SLC is a mess of glass towers with no ground-level retail, parking lots where buildings used to be, and very uncentralized small business. They're working on that now, and have done a good job with lightrail, FrontRunner and the Gateway/City Creek downtown developments. Still, downtown feels "dead" (at least compared to cities like Portland and Seattle), and the lightrail stops are adjacent to parking lots... not thriving pockets of mixed-use New Urbanist development like many other cities.

It will take a lot of work in Utah to destroy the misconception that it's "safer" to live in the burbs, and that people move there because the "want" to. The real reason for this kind of development is that it's 1) ordained by our zoning laws, 2) it's what people are used to, and 3) it's the cheapest possible way to puke houses/box retail onto the landscape and maximize your profits when they sell (externalizing the cost of fuel, cars and roadbuilding to the public, of course). When we get rid of those unAmerican, anti-free market zoning laws, and Utahns realize that density does not equal crime, maybe you'll find the kind of neighborhood/town you're looking for.

[dcisive]

You certainly get a real wake up call when you visit crimereports.com as it is rather revealing where the concentration of crime by type is. Seems to be an awful lot of assault types of crime in Salt Lake proper, with a lot of theft and burglary in West Valley City, West Jordan, Midvale and South Salt Lake. The further south you go the less there is, but that's no real surprise. The Unified Police out that way are doing a pretty good job of keeping junk at bay. WVC has their hands full as does South Salt Lake. I happen to work in the security industry so I hear it daily. We have very tight relationships with a good number of law enforcement agencies so not too much slips through the cracks for us as we need to stay informed. I do feel that Sugarhouse and the areas east of there are quite nice indeed and ideal for the person who would like that small town feel without the big city hassle. As time goes Sugarhouse is perhaps one of the most aggressive at improving it's merchantile status as well. There is so much so close there now and more coming into new developments replacing old ones. A very well thought out plan if I do say so. Unlike the spew it out and fill it in mentality of the burbs.

[InSandy]

I think part of the reason for the growth along the wasatch front is that the area is a desert. There are no little places that are sustainable by themselves. You need the city infrastructure in order to get the water. So it all grows around the central structure. You don't have that problem in other areas of the country.

That said, I agree that you might find what you want IN Salt Lake City. There are distinct neighborhoods that work hard to keep a distinct flavor.
Either that or Park City which is only 30 min from downtown.
And I thought of Daybreak as well, when you talked about master planned communities...take a look there.

I would have enjoyed a little town myself, but economics are what they are. You live where you have a job and that is the bottom line.

[Lamborgotti]

Originally Posted by Susan Brei

Salt Lake has a sprawl problem, and there are very few places to live with the kind of characteristics you are describing. Other than a (very small) handful of neighborhoods IN the city like 9th and 9th, Sugar House and the Avenues/South Temple area (sorta), there is a marked LACK of anything walkable, unique, or rich in character. If you're okay with the most meager (and I do mean MEAGER) of non-sprawl options, try Holliday (there's an old little downtown area surrounded by sprawl), Murray (there's an old little downtown with the freeway-like State Street running through it) or Daybreak (a brand-new subdivision being built like a small town with a fabricated lake, retail district, and a future stop on the light-rail). Provo and Park City are self-contained communities with a nice historical feel, but with Provo you have to be okay with heavy Mormonism and with Park City you have to have at least 2 million in the bank. Downtown Ogden isn't bad.

Salt Lake, and Utah in general, have done a poor job of respecting their urban environments and have expanded their urban environments in a way that is ugly, uninspiring, boring and unsustainable. Main Street SLC is a mess of glass towers with no ground-level retail, parking lots where buildings used to be, and very uncentralized small business. They're working on that now, and have done a good job with lightrail, FrontRunner and the Gateway/City Creek downtown developments. Still, downtown feels "dead" (at least compared to cities like Portland and Seattle), and the lightrail stops are adjacent to parking lots... not thriving pockets of mixed-use New Urbanist development like many other cities.

It will take a lot of work in Utah to destroy the misconception that it's "safer" to live in the burbs, and that people move there because the "want" to. The real reason for this kind of development is that it's 1) ordained by our zoning laws, 2) it's what people are used to, and 3) it's the cheapest possible way to puke houses/box retail onto the landscape and maximize your profits when they sell (externalizing the cost of fuel, cars and roadbuilding to the public, of course). When we get rid of those unAmerican, anti-free market zoning laws, and Utahns realize that density does not equal crime, maybe you'll find the kind of neighborhood/town you're looking for.

Did you not see that the thread was started in 2007? I doubt you're really going to be of much help to them now.

[hilgi]

Originally Posted by Lamborgotti

Did you not see that the thread was started in 2007? I doubt you're really going to be of much help to them now.

But she got her digs in, for some that is all that counts.