A rendering of the proposed Salt Lake City Green Loop. (Courtesy of Salt Lake City Corporation)
Utah’s construction magnates are at it again, aiming to enrich their fraternity while dropping a few table crumbs to families suffocating in Utah’s desert-like financial brown zone. Excluding the Front’s East Bench, the brown zone encompasses the entire urban Wasatch Front, where low wages, high interest rates, and ineffective public education keep residents in virtually permanent debt servitude.
City planners want to use the building sector that has long ruled over the state legislature to throw a few green crumbs to the brown zone folks (middle class and working poor) living in Salt Lake City’s downtown neighborhood. They want to build rectangular “linear greenspace” around those hallowed blocks. In addition to enriching construction CEO pockets, this project will serve as a liberal environmental bauble to amaze and attract Winter Olympics visitors to our supposedly energetic and politically diverse community in 2034.
One wonders if this is the Democrat answer to Republican governor Cox’s statewide trail network announced two years ago to great fanfare, but little progress to date. Cox laughably likened his building project to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s post-World War II national highway system inaugurated in the 1950s. This sort of wild boasting falls right in line with Utah’s tendency to monumentalize its often less-than-stellar efforts to match up business and civic achievements with its religious achievements, regularly touted as the freest and best in the world.
For example, “Builder of the Year” and President of the Utah Senate J. Stuart Adams promised that Utah would “lead the nation out of the pandemic.” In fact, Utah arguably then led the nation back into another round of the pandemic with its anti-vax, anti-public health, anti-law libertarian mentality.
Republicans, with all their Adams-led muscle, today can project 60 miles of new paved trails, while Utah’s Democrats can boast only a few blocks of new trail in their political stronghold, Homelessville, Utah.
Adams also recently championed the successful SB240, another brown-zone program which provides $20,000 toward a down payment for first-time homebuyers, or toward paying down interest rates or closing costs. This constitutes a self-serving boost to the construction industry/banks and another reminder that Utah is in the business of bailing out corporations as much or more than the needy.
These kinds of new housing programs seem designed to replace the evaporating home-buying assistance traditionally offered by parents to their children who start up new families. It also serves to compensate for the traditional American ethic of regularly putting away some savings from one’s paycheck, which seems to have fallen by the wayside due to the outrageous spending habits of the American middle class.
Recently, presidential candidate Kamala Harris proposed $25,000 in homebuyer down payment assistance for families that have paid rent on time for two years, including a special assist for first-generation homebuyers. Affordable housing is a hot topic for Democrats and Republicans alike but leaves folks who have no homes at all out in the cold. They can’t find a place to get out of the sun or avoid the winter rain or snow. Soon, however, they will be able to watch happy people whisk by them on “the rectangle” and new homeowners who have cars they don’t live in leave their homes on their way to jobs.
There might be an additional benefit in store for downtowners. The proposed new khaki rectangle in Salt Lake City might just provide a quasi-Olympic recreational venue for local apartment dwellers and subsidized homeowners to participate in, and at the same time some new space for the homeless to rest their bones on. I can just imagine a future conversation between a plain-spoken downtowner and a friend: “I jogged the east side leg of the LGS on my lunch break, but I could have done it faster if I hadn’t run into all the homeless camps littering the route and if I hadn’t stepped into human poop along the way. Ugh!”