Remaking Salt Lake City

Remaking Salt Lake City
David Oka | director, Salt Lake City Redevelopment Agency

Point of View: The Salt Lake City Redevelopment Agency is a great example of what is needed to build on the past
successes and to overcome the past failures of this community.

By DUSTIN TYLER JOYCE | URBPL 2010 | THURSDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER 2004
ITIES AND BLOCKS AND NEIGHBORHOODS, like people, seem to have a sort of “lifespan”. They begin
on a small scale, then grow and develop into something vibrant, and then wane into only a shadow of
what they once were. And, like people, cities and blocks and neighborhoods need help at this late
stage of their life cycles.
This, of course, is where the Salt Lake City Redevelopment Agency comes in. They assist areas of the
city—from downtown and The Gateway to Sugar House—that have reached this last stage of their life cycles
and help them become new again. It is a process that has been done over and over again since the agency’s
creation in 1969 and has helped Salt Lake City remain a vibrant, healthy, sustainable city through all sorts of
tough times—suburban flight, economic recession, etc.—since that time.
When the agency was created in 1969, it wasn’t in response to any outside pressure. Unlike the
Wasatch Front Regional Council, which was created in response to the requirements federal transportation
acts in the 1970s, the Salt Lake City Redevelopment Agency was created in response to a self-assessed need to
have an organization that responds to urbanism’s problems in the last half of the 20th century.
The agency is also unlike many of its counterparts across the country. Elsewhere in the United States,
such agencies, explained David Oka, are private ventures, often non-profit, instead of a government agency
overseen by the City Council and endowed with certain powers exclusive to government, including eminent
domain and taxation.
So which model—public or private—is better? Cities certainly must adapt ideas to suit their own
needs, and one can only assume that the private, non-governmental model works well for many cities. But
there are doubtless many advantages to having a redevelopment agency that is a part of city government.
Among them would be the fact that, unlike private redevelopment groups, which must beg for public money
like a handout, the Salt Lake City Redevelopment Agency reports directly to the City Council, which is, in
fact, its board of directors. Because the City Council controls the city’s purse strings, the process of getting
public funds must be tremendously easier than it often is in other cities. Further, across the country city
councils can often be rather aloof from many of the real problems of the city, in particular redevelopment. The
arrangement of putting City Council members in positions of oversight over redevelopment forces them to be
familiar with and cognizant of the many important and vital issues surrounding it. Finally, the powers of
eminent domain and taxation—which a private group could never be given—prove tremendously instrumental
in many situations where redevelopment would benefit the entire community, and the Salt Lake City
Redevelopment Agency doesn’t have to go far to use them. Such an overall setup is a triumphant example of
the kind of concerned government oversight which should—yet so often doesn’t—exemplify the leadership of
our communities.
So, if the agency itself is a successful model, the question becomes: Have there been failures? The
answer to this question is undoubtedly yes, and I would like to hear more talk about that. We constantly hear
news of the city’s successes—Nordstrom, Delta, The Gateway, the Gallivan Utah Center—but, if we are truly
going to figure out where we are going, we must learn where we came from, and our past includes failures
just as much as it includes successes. What are those failures? Why did they happen? And what, then, will it
take to overcome them? I personally asked David Oka at least the first of these questions, and he couldn’t give
me a good answer. I’d like to see him and his agency be able to accurately and completely address those issues
in the future.
In the meantime, we can look at the city’s and the agency’s past successes and look forward to many
more in the future. And I would count among those past successes the foresight of city leaders in the 1960s to
establish an agency charged with the important mission of making sure this city’s life cycle continues on.
C