Civil Municipal Magazine - Dec 2023

213 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 4, ISSUE 12 SOUTH SALT LAKE , UTAH Salt Lake serves anyone who lives, learns, works, plays and prays within the city. Getting creative Weidenhamer also cited the city’s craft industries, arts and cultural aspects and community resources. One is Mural Fest. “We have 54 murals in a very small area,” he says, “that area that we deem as our downtown. There’s also a ‘Craftoberfest.’ We have a number of breweries and distilleries. The reason these folks are here is that it was too expensive or too fancy to do business in some of the other surrounding cities. They ended up picking up real estate that was cheap five and 10 years ago, and now it’s grown into its own brand.” Weidenhamer reveals that this creative industries zone is a place wherein the city is starting to see a lot of adaptive reuses. Many older manufacturing and industrial buildings are seeing new life because of this, as he points out. They are, he adds, “primed and ripe for redevelopment in a lot of ways. Again, we have this basis of a true, authentic resident base. The real estate and prices in Salt Lake to the north are really driving a lot of opportunity for us here.” Wood shared her colleague’s assessment. The City, she notes, is purchasing property to be repurposed, and the downtown is seeing a real renaissance. It means going up and in more ways than one. “The only way that we can do it as a built- out city, surrounded by other cities, is to go vertical,” she says. “We put a lot of thought into that, because we have I-15 and I-80 in our downtown area. We also have the S-Line (public transit) streetcar and the UTA (Utah Transit Authority) track—the light rail in that quadrant of the city. We thought this is absolutely where we should fill density. With that coming, we had to do a quick pause and develop a public