Moving from Raleigh to Salt Lake City - Mormon Stigma (Park City: 2009, to buy)

[drwnorth]

Arrowjess.

I think your answer lies in item #3 of your original post.

[jarson04]

I too would love to move to SLC. I have four children and want to be in a place a little outside of SLC.I would like maybe 5 acres with about 2000 living space( I need to be at least a half hour away from the city becuase I am an ultrasound tech and need to be within a half hour when I take call).
I have looked into Grantville and Park City,,though PC seems a bit to pricey for me.
I have seen so much talk about mormuns on here but I encounter alot of people everyday and there are some rude people and sometimes there attitudes make bad attitudes so I wonder if maybe alot of the bashing about the reigion is just from miserable people themselves.
I am a non LDS. But it is so night and day what is written on here about it.
The point is,,,SLC seems like a nice place to settle down and raise a family ,,and thats what I would like to do. Im from Florida and one of my Doctors there was a mormun. He was the nicest guy youd ever meet.
So if I have a neighbor that a mormun Im ok with that. I just really want to be in a place thats ok with me,,,me and what I beleave I am a christian not a mormum but I love my family and love people.

So can you tell me about Grantsville or some place that would fit my family. One in high school, One in middle school One in elementary.
A place that I can to write on this forum that Utah is a great place..despite all this chat..
I do understand that there are places with heavy religion,,I guess it would be like going to church and not expecting to here about God ,,that s just there town.
Well anything would be great,,OH YEAH my husband and I are in are early 30"s. Do they not pay a good wage in the hospital..???

[Nomianca]

Religion is only an issue as long as you make it one. Are there nice LDS? Yes. Are there some LDS that are jerks? Absolutely. You will also come across those that just want to raise their families and be good people and you will come across those that are more of a zealot. I think the same thing could be said about Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, etc.

Yes, there is a strong LDS influence in the state, but that is also changing. There are a lot of companies coming in from out of state and settling here and bringing a non LDS workforce with them, at least partly.

I could go on and on about the LDS .vs. Non-LDS, but I won't. I do think that it is sad though that that seems to be such a concern for some people. I say come and form your own opinions instead of listening to every one else's bias. You may find that this is a perfect place for your company, or you may find that you would rather relocate elsewhere. But form your own opinions and leave the preconceived notions at home.

Like I said, it's only an issue if you make it one.

[WhyNotSki]

I moved here from Socal 4 years ago with my wife...Although I was lucky to move to a part of Draper where most my neighbors are not mormon, some are, but seem to be pretty nice, just not my cup of tea....

I work in the tech industry, and yes...Utah has a lot of technology companies, tons of programmers here (Neumont University is graduating pretty good programmers). My neighbor is a Java programmer, and has plenty of opportunities. Disney has an interactive company here that makes games, Move Networks has created a pretty good entrance for themselves. You will luck out as the Utah PAY SUCKS....Most Utah businesses pay below the national average, but for some reason idiots here are willing to take it.....Me, I work for a Canadian company that pays me REALLY WELL.....

If I were moving here to start a business, I would pick Park City. QuickSilver (the clothing company) has offices there, as does BackCountry.com. It cost more to live there, but your employees could commute from Salt Lake City. Heber City is nice and commercial real estate is affordable compared to Park City, but a little bit more mormon than Park City, but still a very nice place ( I own land there).

Heber City is 25 minutes from Provo so you could get a pool of employees from there, but could not pull from Salt Lake as the drive would be a bit much for people in the winter. Another option is Jeremy Ranch, which is just before you get to Park City, there is some commercial real estate there, but it is 20 minutes from downtown SLC and it right off I-80.

Ogden is growing and trying to clean its image up, and several Ski companies have moved their HQ there from other cities nationwide. Snowbasin Ski Resort is actually my favorate in the state and is only 20 minutes from Ogden and Powder Mountain is another 15 minutes further.
Commercial Real Estate is cheap in Ogden, and the city has redevelopment funds to bring in businesses such as yours. It is 45 minutes from the airport, and there is now a commuter train from downtown Ogden to Downtown Salt Lake, which makes that commute a little better.

If I were to open a business in Ogden, I would do it downtown...There is a pretty cool micro brewery, and several other restaurants, and like I said before they seem to be trying to clean things up...Some crime, but just like any major city......I would STAY CLEAR of UTAH County (Provo, Orem, American Fork, Lehi), just a "Different World" down there. I live in Draper, and it is pretty cool and very business oriented. The Art Instutute just opened a campus, Ebay, CSC, Davinci, and several other business have offices there. There are several start-ups in Draper as well, Control 4 and several interactive gaming companies. Draper is 20-25 minutes from downtown Salt Lake, 30 minutes from Snowbird or Alta Ski Resorts, 25 minutes to the Airport, 10-30 minutes from Utah County cities so that you could have a pretty good pool of potential candiates.

There are plenty of IT savy people in the state, just do not plan on keeping your doors open on Sundays and you will be ok. It takes a little to get use to the culture, but most Mormons do Mormon things, and the rest of us, do what we do....So I do not see it as a problem. If you are ultra Liberal, I would not consider it here...If you a moderate (like I am) then things are ok....The government is a bit screwed up, but the drinking laws look to change soon, and since I have been here a lot has changed. Shoot I remember hardly any restaurants open on Sundays, now almost every one in Draper is open on Sundays.

hope that helps

[ciguy]

Please don't move here... for young professionals this place would be a true punishment.
I hate it here. The mormon stigma is not only true but understated.
There are better places to live...

[EddieFknD]

Hey,

I lived in SLC twice. I went there, and moved to South Carolina and moved back and lived there for about 6 months. Every time I told someone I lived in Utah they'd ask me about the mormons, etc. Honestly, religion was pushed more on me in South Carolina than Utah. Every mormon I did meet didn't really talk about being mormon unless asked. It was NEVER pushed on me, and everyone was above and beyond nice. I made a lot of friends out there and some were mormon, some weren't, but they were all cool. There's actually a lot of culture out there. They have wiccan coffee shops, wiccan festival, gay pride day, etc. It was actually really laid back. I will probably end up back there some day. Definitely the cleanest city I've ever been on. It does have a large homeless population, but like I said there isn't much pollution. The air is clean and it isn't very humid, which is a plus. The job market doesn't seem so bad either. If you have any other questions please don't hesitate to email me. Anyways, I very highly recommend SLC. I think your business would do great out there.

[skrit]

THIS IS A LONG POST BUT I FEEL VERY IMPORTANT TO WRITE ABOUT

Having lived and worked in the Triangle all of my life before moving to Utah last year, I will be the one to answer this question most precisely. I am also an electrical engineer though not software or computer based. I get paid more here than in Raleigh so I can't say Utah pay "SUCKS" like a previous poster. I posted a long post comparing NC to SLC yesterday. Might want to read that one.

The SLC area has 2 major universities to pull electrical and computer engineering grads from. There is a huge pool of talented engineers and programmers chomping at the bit for jobs. In fact, there is a huge population of young people here period! The place is great other than a few things.....if you move here with preconceived notions of Mormonism from what people joke about, then you are going to have a hard time. I had those notions and at first thought Mormons were so weird and I wanted to move somewhere else. I never even had a bad experience with a single LDS person, I just was being way too judgmental and ignorant.

Mormons (LDS) are like Southern Baptists. You would never know they believed in Mormonism other than the fact they don't drink coffee or alcohol and have large families. There a few other nuances of the religion but unless you set up shop in a deeply entrenched Mormon area, you will never experience these - polygamy being one of them which is practiced far away from the city like a bunch of incestuous Appalachian rednecks (I come from a slight RN extended family so I can say things like that!) .

Do yourself a favor and DO NOT DWELL ON THE MORMONISM THING. Ignore any post complaining about LDS people b/c those posters have a chip on their shoulder. Maybe it is different if you moved to the middle of Utah County which has a very high concentration of LDS people - I didn't do that. To be honest, I had a chip on my shoulder about a certain type of people back in NC which now that I think about it never affected my life in the least. I made it more of a problem than it really was so I can tell when people are bitter for no reason. People love to dwell on LDS topics kind of like racial topics in NC. It does absolutely no good. I work with several "Mo's" and they are the nicest people I have met. They work their asses off for their families and their church - what's the problem with that? So what they believe in Joseph Smith and big families, big deal... I believe in the Law of Attraction in addition to the Bible, I guess that means I am one of those "scary" people that believes in something "different" other than being a Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Catholic (insert religion) so Heaven forbid you move here!!!! How ridiculous!

Unlike Raleigh, people do not move in and out of the area very often, so many (not all) of the people doing all of the complaining are from here and are just bitter because they have never moved anywhere else. BTW, I am not LDS, I am a progressive, green-collar, outdoors-loving individual. Sure this is a "red" state but not so much that is is stifling. The city is actually quite liberal much like Moab and Park City. There is more of a punky / indy youthful subculture (really sort of mainstream) here instead of fake cosmopolitan like downtown Raleigh.....though there is some snobbery here too, just not as much.

Why would you set up shop in Silicon Valley where you will have to pay outrageous property rents, salaries and taxes? That just doesn't make financial sense. There are a ton of start-ups here and you will find lots of peers and like-minded entrepreneurial tech folks to relate to. SLC also has mass-transit unlike Raleigh so if you lease a building near TRAX, your employees will love you for it.

If you move out here I will start a NC support group..ha, ha! Again, I have only been here a year and I live downtown so I have fresh eyes and ears which will be much more helpful than someone with a chip on their shoulder. I am actually looking to move from downtown b/c I am not so much an Urbanite. I would rather live up in the mountains.

My biggest gripe.....the inversion days. Its pretty smoggy sometimes - like today, though the mountains are immune. It coincides with weather patterns so its not like that all the time. In the Triangle, they called them "ozone action days" and for the longest time I didn't realize it meant smog. I always thought the haze was just humidity in the air. Here, you can see so much farther because there are a lot fewer trees and the mountains are in your face so it makes it look a lot hazier than you will be used to seeing in NC even though the pollution level is just a smidgen higher.

[markg91359]

I would have some concerns in your situation. Salt Lake City is more cosmopolitan than many people give it credit for. Yet, single non-Mormons often do not stick around. I think of all the non-Mormon friends I had in high school and in college. For one reason or another, almost all have departed to another area of the country.

There is some nightlife in Salt Lake City and there are certainly plenty of things for young single people to do. Skiing, of course, in the winter. In the summer there is plenty hiking, bicycling, and summer sports. However, there is probably less for young single people to do in Salt Lake than in most major cities and there is no question that *some* find it too socially conservative and stifling and choose to leave.

Its a hard question to definitively answer. I think some of your employees will be glad they moved and enjoy the transfer. Others will be put off by it and choose to find another job. However, I imagine not everyone liked Raleigh either.

[frogandtoad]

Originally Posted by skrit

My biggest gripe.....the inversion days. Its pretty smoggy sometimes - like today, though the mountains are immune. It coincides with weather patterns so its not like that all the time. In the Triangle, they called them "ozone action days" and for the longest time I didn't realize it meant smog. I always thought the haze was just humidity in the air. Here, you can see so much farther because there are a lot fewer trees and the mountains are in your face so it makes it look a lot hazier than you will be used to seeing in NC even though the pollution level is just a smidgen higher.

I think most of this post was great, but the pollution info. is not correct. You can go to the epa website and check it out for yourself. First, ozone and the inversion are not the same thing. Ozone is an issue in SLC in the summer, not the winter, and it's nothing to do w/the winter inversion. The smog from inversion and the issue w/ozone are two separate things, and both are an issue in SLC. Also, the smog is not a "smidgen" worse in SLC. Raleigh and SLC may have similar ozone issues (acutally SLC's are worse, again you check the epa website for their detailed info) but the smog during inversion earns SLC an "F" for small particle pollution. Raleigh does not have an issue w/this type of pollution at all, and gets an "A". The inversion is ususally the worst during January, and the ozone is usually the worst late July/early Aug. in SLC.

(BTW, I lived in Chapel Hill).

But I totally agree w/the rest of the post and think it makes some great points. I did do extensive research on the pollution issues in SLC though and they are FAR worse than the Triangle of NC. All that said, I still think 2 months of smog/ozone is worth it for what you get!!

[runnerguy45]

Originally Posted by arrowjess

I own a small software development company and I am considering moving it from Raleigh, NC to Salt Lake City, UT. I like the idea that skiing is close by and Salt Lake is a large city. So many ski resorts are far away from large cities and SLC seems to be a good fit.

I have 12 employees all under the age of 30 all single guys and all are very liberal. I will also need to hire as our company grows probably from outside SLC mainly from California and Seattle.

My main concerns is the Mormons. To me, there is a negative stigma with moving to a city that seems to be so heavily religious. In the south, there are primary baptists, but there are so many other large religious groups, that religion never comes up in my daily life.

I will also need to hire employees and I am worried that they will not want to move to SLC because of the religious undertone.

So some of my questions are:
1. None of my employees are religious, is this going to effect their ability to make friends and form relationships there?
2. Has anyone else moved from larger cities to SLC and been negatively effected by the LDS?
3. Am I completely putting too much emphasis on the religion of the City? Is SLC just like every other city, where there are a variety of people and it doesn't matter what religion you are?
4. Is there a nightlife in SLC?

Thank you so much for your help.

Why do people accept bigoted post like this, can you imagine if people posted on the NY forum asking about being around Jews ?

Since you have already judged Mormons and do not seem to like them stay away from Utah, btw also stay away from San Diego, Idaho,Az and many other western states. You also may want to stay away from Cary in NC because there are plenty of those Mormons living there !