High Rises on Utah Lake?

10/20/23 Watch or Listen time is 4:20, Story by Tom (Treyeshua) Tomeny

Is New York City coming to Vineyard?

Have you seen the recent stories about something called Utah City?

It is 700 acres on Utah Lake in Vineyard. The developers are touting it as a model development, that new urban core of Utah County.
It is featured in an article by the Congress of New Urbanism, which says, “Planned for up to 17,000 residential units on under a half square mile of land, the development would achieve the density of a major big city downtown.”

Let me say that again, “Planned for up to 17,000 residential units on under a half square mile of land, the development would achieve the density of a major big city downtown.”

And that’s not 17,000 people, that’s 17,000 units. Two people per unit is not unreasonable to estimate, so they are proposing well over 30,000 new residents, concentrated in a tiny area.

How do you even get so many people in such a small area? The only way is to build up. Up and up and up, we’re talking skyscrapers on the edge of Utah Lake. And their own website hints at that, as the drawing includes at least one massively tall building, and perhaps ten other buildings that each exceed ten stories.

And their website is deceptive. It says the location in Vineyard is 35 minutes to the SLC Airport, 20 minutes to Sundance Mountain Resort, and 12 minutes To BYU. We checked those numbers on Google Maps, at a time of minimal traffic, and they are all understated. So if the developers choose to deceive us like that at the very beginning, what other deception is coming?

That website promises us that Utah City is “set to redefine the future of urban living in the western United States.” Do you live in the Utah Valley so that you can be part of this experiment?

This smells, to us, a lot like the proposal to pave Utah Lake. That got shot down, and now this springs up. We have a great thing going here in the Utah Valley, and there appears to be no shortage of those who want to exploit it.

Perhaps as bad as the development itself, this may amount to name stealing. Vineyard is a wonderful name for a wonderful community. But, as the skyscrapers rise, it is pretty much inevitable that the world will know the area as Utah City. Do you want to live in the shadow of Utah City?

And that shadow is very real. Everyone in the Utah Valley enjoys the great views of Utah Lake and the surrounding mountains. Only now, if this comes to pass as planned, those views will be obscured by the giant buildings of this Utah City.

Part of what we all bought into when we chose to live in the Utah Valley are those views and a certain lifestyle associated with suburban living. To allow such a development that takes away those things may, at least in spirit, violate the takings clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Of course, the property belongs to the developers and there is a strong argument that they should be able to do with it as they please. Is their freedom as important as each of ours?

What do you think, lets discuss this right here in the Youtube comments section.