Business View Magazine | September 2019

299 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2019 SPANI SH FORK , UTAH Homes, and Flagship Homes. “Spanish Fork was a sleepy little town for a long, long time with, primarily, single-family, detached homes on individual lots. Over the years, there really hasn’t been a significant amount of multi- family type home construction here in the community, but we are starting to see that change. The city council approved the first apartment development in nearly 20 years, this past year. It’s called the Rees Apartments, and we’re working with some other developers now that, likely, will be doing some similar multi-family type developments, aimed a little more at workforce housing than the other homes that have been the backbone of what’s been built in Spanish Fork in recent years.” Spanish Fork’s historic downtown district has lost some of its luster over the past several decades, as the community has expanded outward, and in order to revive some of the area’s vibrancy, Anderson says that in 2014, the city teamed up with a group of volunteers called the Community Planning Assistance Teams, sponsored by the American Planning Association. “That was a wonderful experience for the community,” he recounts. “The city made a pretty significant effort to try to do things to help make sure that what was the center of commerce, not only for Spanish Fork, but for an entire region up until the 1980s, remain vibrant and active. It’s a part of the community that really hasn’t suffered greatly; we’ve never had a high vacancy rate or other things that might be telltale signs of an area that’s in distress. At the same time, I think most people here would agree that it really hasn’t lived up to its potential for many decades and that group that we worked with gave us a road map as to things that we could do as a municipality, and things that business owners and property owners could do to try to help our historic downtown be the best that it could be.” “With that being said, really the heart of Spanish Fork’s commerce, today, is at the junction of Interstate 15, which goes right through Spanish Fork, and U.S. Highway 6,” Anderson adds. I-15 travels through the intermountain west from