National Perspectives: A Rail Line Drives Development In Utah

MURRAY CITY, Utah

This week: Microsofts $3 software for the poor, spending it on Beckham, and the stock market surge.

Birkhill at Fireclay.

TWO years ago, this Salt Lake City suburb began collaborating with a local developer to turn industrial land into a neighborhood of town homes, condominiums and offices. Now the project, known as Birkhill at Fireclay, is finally being built.

The 30-acre $140 million development by Hamlet Homes, one of this regions largest builders, will have 420 units of housing and 200,000 square feet of retail and office space; the company expects to begin construction in a month. The idea is to give homeowners easier access to their jobs or to stores.

Murray City and Hamlet Homes are taking advantage of growing buyer interest in living and working near the regional TRAX light rail system, which has operated in the Salt Lake Valley since 1999. The Murray North station, one of three TRAX stops in Murray City — population, 50,000 — serves as the centerpiece of Birkhill at Fireclay.

People can go where they want and wont have to get in a car, said Keith Snarr, the director of Murray Citys economic development office, who helped negotiate the agreement with Hamlet Homes. It may not be the lifestyle for everybody, but there are a lot of people around here now that understand what it means to be urban and find this attractive.

Salt Lake City and its closest suburbs built the $520 million, 19-mile, 23-station TRAX system, which carries more than 55,000 riders a day, well ahead of ridership projections. Voters have also repeatedly passed sales tax increases, including one approved last November, to spend $2.5 billion more in the next decade to complete 26 additional miles of light rail, 88 miles of heavy commuter rail line and nearly 40 extra station stops. The only American metropolitan area that is building more regional rapid transit capacity is Denver, which is constructing a 151-mile system.

Birkhill at Fireclay is the first development in a 97-acre district that Murray City has established around the Murray North station. And it is one of a growing number of transit-oriented developments in the Wasatch Front, an urban area with a population of more than two million that is looking for new ways to get around — less by car, and especially by rail. A host of other metropolitan regions, among them Minneapolis, Denver, Dallas, Sacramento, St. Louis, Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle and Portland, Ore., have invested billions of dollars over the last decade to pursue the same idea.

Mr. Snarr says he is convinced that the confluence of fast-rising energy and land costs, static incomes and the regions swift population growth are producing the market conditions for a successful new neighborhood on land along Fireclay Avenue that has served as his citys industrial backyard.

The existing and planned rail stations offer developers dozens of opportunities to design and build transit-focused home and business districts at the center of the Salt Lake Valleys towns and cities.

The basic reason that transit-oriented development is working in Utah and other places is largely demographic, said Gloria Ohland, vice president for communications at Reconnecting America, a national transit research group based in Oakland, Calif.

American households are older, smaller and more diverse, Ms. Ohland said. Singles are 41 percent of the population. People who are single and couples that have no children — those are the people who gravitate to cities.

Even with a new tide of people heading their way, transit-focused builders say there are plenty of impediments. Assembling parcels large enough to be attractive requires considerable work in city and town centers. It took Hamlet Homes more than two years to amass the 30 acres for Birkhill at Fireclay.

And in most communities, including Murray City, the zoning regulations that directed homes and businesses to be spread far apart have to be rewritten. Murray City passed a transit development ordinance in 2005 that allows narrower streets, encourages trees and pocket parks, and is designed to produce a new district that is not too densely built, but also wont look or feel anything like a typical single-use suburban subdivision.

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?