8/10/2019 Remaking Salt Lake City

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Remaking Salt Lake CityDavid Oka | director, Salt Lake City Redevelopment Agency

Point of View:The Salt Lake City Redevelopment Agency is a great example of what is needed to build on the pastsuccesses and to overcome the past failures of this community.

By DUSTIN TYLER JOYCE | URBPL 2010 | THURSDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER 2004

ITIES AND BLOCKS AND NEIGHBORHOODS, like people, seem to have a sort of lifespan. They begin

on a small scale, then grow and develop into something vibrant, and then wane into only a shadow of

what they once were. And, like people, cities and blocks and neighborhoods need help at this late

stage of their life cycles.

This, of course, is where the Salt Lake City Redevelopment Agency comes in. They assist areas of thecityfrom downtown and The Gateway to Sugar Housethat have reached this last stage of their life cycles

and help them become new again. It is a process that has been done over and over again since the agencyscreation in 1969 and has helped Salt Lake City remain a vibrant, healthy, sustainable city through all sorts of

tough timessuburban flight, economic recession, etc.since that time.

When the agency was created in 1969, it wasnt in response to any outside pressure. Unlike the

Wasatch Front Regional Council, which was created in response to the requirements federal transportationacts in the 1970s, the Salt Lake City Redevelopment Agency was created in response to a self-assessed need to

have an organization that responds to urbanisms problems in the last half of the 20th century.

The agency is also unlike many of its counterparts across the country. Elsewhere in the United States,

such agencies, explained David Oka, are private ventures, often non-profit, instead of a government agency

overseen by the City Council and endowed with certain powers exclusive to government, including eminent

domain and taxation.

So which modelpublic or privateis better? Cities certainly must adapt ideas to suit their own

needs, and one can only assume that the private, non-governmental model works well for many cities. Butthere are doubtless many advantages to having a redevelopment agency that is a part of city government.

Among them would be the fact that, unlike private redevelopment groups, which must beg for public moneylike a handout, the Salt Lake City Redevelopment Agency reports directly to the City Council, which is, in

fact, its board of directors. Because the City Council controls the citys purse strings, the process of gettingpublic funds must be tremendously easier than it often is in other cities. Further, across the country city

councils can often be rather aloof from many of the real problems of the city, in particular redevelopment. The

arrangement of putting City Council members in positions of oversight over redevelopment forces them to be

familiar with and cognizant of the many important and vital issues surrounding it. Finally, the powers of

eminent domain and taxationwhich a private group could never be givenprove tremendously instrumentalin many situations where redevelopment would benefit the entire community, and the Salt Lake City

Redevelopment Agency doesnt have to go far to use them. Such an overall setup is a triumphant example ofthe kind of concerned government oversight which shouldyet so often doesntexemplify the leadership of

our communities.

So, if the agency itself is a successful model, the question becomes: Have there been failures? Theanswer to this question is undoubtedly yes, and I would like to hear more talk about that. We constantly hear

news of the citys successesNordstrom, Delta, The Gateway, the Gallivan Utah Centerbut, if we are trulygoing to figure out where we are going, we must learn where we came from, and our past includes failures

just as much as it includes successes. What are those failures? Why did they happen? And what, then, will it

take to overcome them? I personally asked David Oka at least the first of these questions, and he couldnt give

me a good answer. Id like to see him and his agency be able to accurately and completely address those issues

in the future.In the meantime, we can look at the citys and the agencys past successes and look forward to many

more in the future. And I would count among those past successes the foresight of city leaders in the 1960s toestablish an agency charged with the important mission of making sure this citys life cycle continues on.

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