--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm Noel King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, we're talking about Salt Lake City, Utah. Miles Bryan, our reporter and producer, has been exploring the city's downtown area and has some good news to share.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Yeah, I'm here today to bring you a downtown that's become near and dear to my heart. Which is it, Miles? Is it Portland, Maine? Is it Portland, Oregon? Is it Miami, Florida? It is Salt Lake City. In Utah?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mm-hmm. Salt Lake's downtown isn't just recovering from the pandemic. It's thriving.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I want to tell you about it because it's doing nearly everything a downtown should be doing right now. And because there's one thing that might blow it all up.
--:-- [Support for the show comes from ServiceNow]
--:-- Miles Bryan: Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Didn't know that.
--:-- Miles Bryan: While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business.
--:-- [Support for the show continues]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I just started thinking, you know, Salt Lake ain't that bad.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I know, no, no. I mean, I know it sucks and all, but you know, this is life.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today explains Sean Ramos for him and And Miles O'Brien here.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Miles, Salt Lake City, really?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, it seemed weird to me too.
--:-- Miles Bryan: But when I started reporting on cities earlier this year, I came across this research from the University of Toronto. It tracks how busy downtowns are by monitoring cell phone activity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Creepy!
--:-- Miles Bryan: I know it's weird, but it's helpful if you wanna understand how cities are doing right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the data goes up to May of this year. And most cities at that time were way less busy in their downtowns than they were in May of 2019.
--:-- Miles Bryan: New York was at 67% of its pre-COVID downtown activity. Phoenix was at 72%. But downtown Salt Lake City was at 139% of its pre-COVID activity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Yeah, so Salt Lake was already growing really fast before the pandemic. It has great access to nature, and it's been attracting tons of tech and finance jobs recently.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But when I bounced all of this off Tracy Lowe from the Brookings Institution, She said there's one area where downtown Salt Lake really stands out.
--:-- Miles Bryan: So lots of U.S. metro areas are growing, but mostly they're growing at the edges.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What really struck me about Salt Lake City was not just the high rate of population growth, but that the growth is at the center of the region, in and around the downtown area, which is just really different.
--:-- Miles Bryan: There were more apartments built in downtown Salt Lake City last year than in downtown New York City.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Say what?
--:-- Miles Bryan: Yeah, it's kind of crazy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I wanted to see for myself how all this new housing can change the feel of a downtown. So in late August, I took a little trip.
--:-- Miles Bryan: So as you look around downtown Salt Lake, I mean, there's just cranes everywhere.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's Benjamin Wood. He's a local alt-weekly writer in Salt Lake and bike and walk advocacy guy.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Most of these have some residential element. There's a lot of mixed use going in.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It means there's customers for the restaurants. there's eyes on the street so it doesn't feel so sketchy when it gets dark, and it's bringing bodies downtown.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Ben and I biked around on e-bikes, though my battery conked out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's tough.
--:-- Miles Bryan: You need the throttle that I got.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We might need to switch bikes.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I'm good. If you don't mind going slow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not at all.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Which was a little humbling.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we were biking around, which is kind of surprising if you know the history of Salt Lake, because the city was very much not laid out to be bike-friendly or even pedestrian-friendly.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Mormon leader Brigham Young settled the Salt Lake Valley with his followers in the mid-19th century.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, the church and its followers were looking for a refuge, and they felt like they found it in this valley shielded by mountains and bordered by the massive saltwater lake from which the city takes its name.
--:-- Miles Bryan: But they had some kind of zany ideas about urban design.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Righam Young wanted to be able to do a U-turn with a team of oxen, right?
--:-- Miles Bryan: And that was probably a good idea in 1850, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But in 2023, we don't have a lot of ox carts going around.
--:-- Miles Bryan: We don't have a lot of teams of oxen we're trying to turn.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What we're left with is nine-lane streets.
--:-- Miles Bryan: So not only are the roads super wide, the blocks are extremely long.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not exactly ideal for walking around.
--:-- Miles Bryan: But Wood tells me the new development that's going into downtown is actually helping to fix those 19th century design flaws.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When new development comes in, they're the ones that are putting in mid-block crossings and walkways and paseos.
--:-- Miles Bryan: So as things start to turn over, we're starting to cut these walking paths where we've needed them for a long time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They just haven't been possible.
--:-- Miles Bryan: The city has put in a decent amount of bike lanes downtown.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Public transit downtown is free and very well used.
--:-- Miles Bryan: They're at basically 100% of their pre-COVID ridership.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Nice.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Yeah, and this is all happening in the capital of a red state in a very car-centric community.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, you know, if it can happen here, I think it's possible it can happen anywhere.
--:-- Miles Bryan: All right, so the city is making downtown a nice place to live.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A lot of cities are. How are they getting people to move there in the first place?
--:-- Miles Bryan: I think the city has done two big things right to encourage dense residential development in the downtown core.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: First, they laid out a long-term plan for the area before there was a lot of demand there.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And second, they just made it really easy to build.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So taking a step back, affordable housing is a huge issue in Salt Lake.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Single-family homes cost an average of more than half a million dollars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there isn't really anywhere for the city to sprawl.
--:-- Miles Bryan: The city's sort of hemmed in by the mountains and the great Salt Lake.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The state of Utah has been the fastest-growing state in the nation.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I talked about this stuff with Erin Mendenhall. She the mayor of Salt Lake City
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we have a major shortage of missing middle housing and certainly like a lot of other parts of the country affordable and deeply affordable housing
--:-- Miles Bryan: About a decade ago, the city planning department in Salt Lake started changing regulations for what can be built downtown and in the immediate surrounding area.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They allowed more density and reduced parking requirements.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And a lot of times when city officials try to make these kinds of changes, neighbors get super mad, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like, they don't want to give up their parking spot.
--:-- Miles Bryan: New high-rise buildings are sprouting up all over Hillcrest, but that's leaving some wondering where all of the new residents are going to park.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But crucially, Salt Lake did this stuff before the boom in downtown development, which officials say has made it far less of an issue.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And since that time, the mayor says the city has been super focused on just making sure Salt Lake is an easy place to build new housing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're doing something that wasn't happening consistently before, And that's inviting in the permit holders and the developers to sit down with our teams.
--:-- Miles Bryan: We'll pull up their permit. We'll look at the process and where the hangups were, which is how we've been able to achieve faster approvals and permitting and inspections.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Since 2016, the time it takes for the city to review a building permit has fallen by two-thirds, even as the number of permits being applied for has gone way up.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And the result is Salt Lake City now builds a ton of housing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Last year, it built more housing per capita than big, expensive cities like New York and Los Angeles, as well as more than their other fast-growing Western piers like Phoenix or Denver.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Okay, but no offense to Mayor Mendenhall, but it's her job to say the city's functioning really well and made all sorts of good decisions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did you talk to anyone else involved?
--:-- Miles Bryan: Yeah, I definitely ran everything I heard from her by experts and advocates and by residential developers, including this guy named Dan Lofgren.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's a longtime developer in the area.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Very nice. Very Utah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is a box of cookies. Ruby snap gourmet cookies.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I met him at one of his recently finished apartment buildings.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Exotic's the wrong word because they're all common flavors you would expect, but that's a s'mores cookie, for example.
--:-- Miles Bryan: So you've got to try one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh, yeah, I'll definitely try one.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Is this like a Salt Lake City specialty or why are these cookies?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, it's just our way to say welcome.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Glad you're here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Everyone's trying to buy you, Miles.
--:-- Miles Bryan: But anyway, you know, he told me what the mayor was saying jives with his experience.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He called the situation in downtown Salt Lake over the last couple of years a, quote, virtuous loop.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Our job growth continues to be pretty robust.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, job growth means new households in the market.
--:-- Miles Bryan: New households mean a demand for housing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And many of those households who are coming to the market in response to that job growth have had experience living in a downtown.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Well, what's the natural impact of that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Those residents have capacity and demand for additional services.
--:-- Miles Bryan: So more restaurants come. So more services come.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So now downtown becomes even that much more attractive place to live.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And it starts to build on itself.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It starts to kind of gain its own momentum.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And, you know, there's one other factor in this virtuous loop we got to talk about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Mormon church.
--:-- Miles Bryan: They own about a quarter of downtown Salt Lake's land and buildings.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The church has different incentives than a normal property owner, right?
--:-- Miles Bryan: Like that's sort of intuitive.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're interested in the long-term vitality of downtown Salt Lake because, you know, that's the location of their most sacred space, their sacred temple.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And the church actually helped kick off downtown Salt Lake's residential boom years ago when it converted an old shopping mall into a mix of stores, offices, and apartments and condos during the Great Recession when, you know, not very much else was getting built.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The downtown City Creek development sponsored by the church is a vast undertaking.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Forbes magazine calls the Salt Lake City project the ancient ideal of building a city around its essential sacred space, referring to its close proximity to the worldwide headquarters of the church, Temple Square.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does it feel like a neighborhood, Miles?
--:-- Miles Bryan: Because my experience in downtown Salt Lake City is that it's sort of quiet come nighttime, not a lot of activity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I thought it was pretty lively for a mid-sized city downtown these days.
--:-- Miles Bryan: But Sean, I, like you, am old and uncool.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so maybe we're not the best people to answer this question.
--:-- Miles Bryan: But I found someone who is a good person to answer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Her name is Macy Weeks, and she moved to the edge of Salt Lake City's downtown a year ago.
--:-- Macy Weeks: I'm 20 years old, and yep, that's about it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So this is a pretty residential feeling street.
--:-- Macy Weeks: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Macy grew up in a suburb of Seattle.
--:-- Macy Weeks: I'm an aspiring songwriter.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Teenagers since like the dawn of time Yeah
--:-- Macy Weeks: Who are into music have wanted Have met up and made plans to move to the city
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But not to Salt Lake, right?
--:-- Macy Weeks: To Seattle or New York or
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How did that happen?
--:-- Macy Weeks: Well, Seattle's dead, basically
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And California's too expensive
--:-- Macy Weeks: So if I was going to find a place that Was going to be like affordable-ish and, you know, have a good bar scene. Yeah, it's here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's basically just here.
--:-- Macy Weeks: There's like, there's so many young people here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow, RIP Seattle.
--:-- Macy Weeks: So do you think this is going to last?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does the future of Salt Lake City seem bright?
--:-- Macy Weeks: You know, Sean, there is one other thing that came up in all my interviews that kind of casts a shadow over that future.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I think everything we're talking about comes back to the lake.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Salt Lake City's namesake, the Great Salt Lake.
--:-- Miles Bryan: It's in trouble.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Heavens yes, I'm worried about the lake.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I'm worried about what the lake means for my kids and grandkids.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if there aren't big changes, the whole region's success is in jeopardy.
--:-- Miles Bryan: The economic, the health impact, and the identity impact of that on the state of Utah would be incredibly tragic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, I know you hate saying that's coming up, but what's a good turn here to the break?
--:-- Miles Bryan: No, I hate saying after the break.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Say, I'm going to tell you more about the lake when we're back or something.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I going to tell you all about the lake when we back
--:-- [Support for the show comes from Adio]
--:-- Miles Bryan: Support for today's show comes from Adio.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is Adio?
--:-- Miles Bryan: Adio is an AI native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
--:-- Miles Bryan: According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, and within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes to seize so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more.
--:-- Miles Bryan: You can go to atio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.
--:-- Miles Bryan: We need more rain, and we need it now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's why I'm asking Utahns of all faiths to join me in a weekend of prayer.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Today Explained is back with reporter-producer Miles Bryan, who just got back from a visit to the urbanist paradise of Salt Lake City, Utah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Unfortunately, the city's namesake is a bit of an issue.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Miles?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: To get a sense of the problem, I drove out to the edge of the Great Salt Lake and I met up with this guy named... Kevin Perry.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I'm a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, if you haven't been to the Great Salt Lake, it's weird.
--:-- Miles Bryan: It's not like any big lake that I've spent time at before.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's marshy with these long salt flats that stretch on forever.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And even though the lake is huge, the whole thing looks kind of shallow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There used to be an annual swimming race, a marathon swimming from here to Antelope Island.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I can see the island, but it looks like you could walk to it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can now.
--:-- Miles Bryan: There's no way to swim from here to there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right.
--:-- Miles Bryan: When you hear Great Salt Lake, you might be thinking lots of water, but that's not the case here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Remind people why that is.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Well, the Great Salt Lake is a terminal basin, right, meaning water from streams and rivers flows into it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And for decades, Utah has diverted that water away from the lake to grow crops and to fuel the growth of its cities, which means the lake isn't getting enough water.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And what happens if and when the lake really dries up?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, the consequences of the lake drying up are already here.
--:-- Miles Bryan: It's already been happening.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The first tipping point was when we started exposing vast stretches of the lake bed to the air.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And then we had dust plumes that were coming off of the lake.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's been going on for more than a decade.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And then, as the lake continues to get lower and lower, last year they had to pull every single boat off of the Great Salt Lake because the marinas were dry.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Utah's Department of Natural Resources is now planning to dredge the marina so search and rescue teams can get their boats out in the event of an emergency.
--:-- Miles Bryan: So we reached the dust tipping point a decade ago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We reached the boating and recreation tipping point basically several years ago.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And then in October of 2022, we almost reached the salinity tipping point, which is the most dire.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's the death of the ecosystem.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Every year, more than 10 million birds stop by this lake in order to gorge themselves on the brine shrimp and the brine flies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As the lake shrinks, it gets saltier and saltier, and last October, the salinity levels reached 19%, which is well out of the range of what the brine shrimp and the brine flies can tolerate, and they started dying en masse.
--:-- Miles Bryan: What would it mean for these birds to not have this lake?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they've got to get from central Canada to central Argentina or southern Mexico without a stopover.
--:-- Miles Bryan: You just can't do it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At which point, you're coming very, very close to the entire ecosystem collapsing.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Now, I should say that since last fall, there's been a ton of rain and snow in Utah, and that really has helped refill the Great Salt Lake a bit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it's still on a long-term trajectory of collapse.
--:-- Miles Bryan: There's a worst-case scenario, then there's a worst-worst-case scenario.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, let me get them both.
--:-- Miles Bryan: So from an ecological perspective, the loss of the brine shrimp and the brine flies is the death of the lake and the death of millions of birds that would otherwise come through here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But if the lake keeps drying up, it would also decimate the companies that extract minerals like salt and magnesium out of the lake and generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the state's economy every year.
--:-- Miles Bryan: It would decimate Salt Lake City's skiing industry, which relies on lake effect snow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And perhaps most importantly for the residents of Salt Lake and the whole region, it would make those dust storms a whole lot worse.
--:-- Miles Bryan: You also have massive dust plumes, which are coming off the lake and moving into the surrounding communities and exposing the two and a half million people that live adjacent to the lake to everything that is in the dust, including arsenic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I asked all my interviewees what they thought about the lake and the potential for these arsenic dust storms.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And for most of them, it was a really pressing existential concern, except for Macy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That wasn't true at all for her.
--:-- Miles Bryan: So many natural disasters all the time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The world is literally exploding.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Like, of course here is going to have some awful impending doom event.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Fair, honestly.
--:-- Miles Bryan: But I don't think the looming threat of the Great Salt Lake means Salt Lake City is going to have to start shrinking or rolling back some of the changes it's making in its downtown that has made it so much more vibrant than it has been.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In fact, I think downtown Salt Lake's growth is actually probably helpful for solving the water crisis.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Really?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Okay, I know that's gonna take some explanation, but let start on an alfalfa farm
--:-- Miles Bryan: Which farm Sorry Alfalfa
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Alfalfa and hay farming in Utah sucks up more than two of the state diverted water Two-thirds.
--:-- Miles Bryan: So saving the Great Salt Lake mostly means getting those farmers on board with water conservation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that requires legislative action.
--:-- Miles Bryan: For many years, the legislature wasn't super interested in that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, it's dominated by Republicans, and it wasn't really taking this problem seriously.
--:-- Miles Bryan: But in the last few years, that's really started to change.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At a wetland preserve near the Great Salt Lake, Governor Spencer Cox held a bill signing ceremony for legislation aimed at saving the lake.
--:-- Miles Bryan: The legislature made big changes to the state's water laws.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in 2022, passed bills dedicating hundreds of millions of dollars to improving water efficiency in agriculture.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Now there's an incentive to use less water.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's that's a big deal.
--:-- Miles Bryan: To be fair, lawmakers have mostly just grabbed the lowest hanging fruit here so far.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And lots of people will say they need to do more and they need to do it faster.
--:-- Miles Bryan: In fact, a bunch of environmental groups are suing the state to force them to do just that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The suit filed by Sierra Club, the Utah Rivers Council, and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment and others seek to force the state to create a plan to raise water levels.
--:-- Miles Bryan: But I got to say, I was surprised to find that there seems to be a bipartisan consensus that this is a serious problem.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you know, this consensus is exemplified by one guy, Utah Speaker of the House.
--:-- Miles Bryan: His name's Brad Wilson.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He's a conservative Republican, lives in the Salt Lake City exurbs.
--:-- Miles Bryan: He actually just announced he's resigning in November to make a run for Senate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But over the last couple of years, he's made saving the Great Salt Lake his marquee issue.
--:-- Miles Bryan: The politics of Salt Lake City are different than the politics of where I live.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But we care a lot about the city, and a lot of it goes back to our pioneer heritage.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I mean, the first real city that was settled was Salt Lake City by our pioneer ancestors.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we care about it as a community because of that.
--:-- Miles Bryan: This goes back to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and the gang.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Exactly.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And the church, which is a leader in so many ways, has been a leader in changes downtown, is also on board with water conservation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has donated thousands of shares of water to the Great Salt Lake.
--:-- Miles Bryan: But even so, Brad Wilson told me the politics of this effort are still tricky.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Cities have to find some water savings as well.
--:-- Miles Bryan: I think that tension between growth and agriculture, slash water use in general, is going to be the tug and pull that will happen over the next decade.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Over the next decade strikes me as a little optimistic, considering, as we just heard from your scientists, this is happening right now.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Does this right now mean that this idyllic picture you painted of Salt Lake City and its growth is going to slow down, is going to stop?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, now we get back to the optimism, I promise, because I think downtown Salt Lake is a model for how the region can keep growing while shrinking its water usage.
--:-- Miles Bryan: And the key to that is where cities' water goes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kevin told me half of all the water that Utah cities use goes to landscaping.
--:-- Miles Bryan: It goes to the Kentucky bluegrass lawns that you notice when you visit and then fill the region outside of downtown.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Every apartment or condo built in downtown Salt Lake has meant one less lawn.
--:-- Miles Bryan: We are an example of how adding population in the right way actually reduced our water consumption, allowed our city to grow.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't know a city or a town in this nation that doesn't want to grow.
--:-- Miles Bryan: You know, what are we supposed to take away from all this?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One obvious lesson is that cities running low on water, and there's a bunch of them in America these days, should look to density as a way to grow sustainably.
--:-- Miles Bryan: But there's a bigger one, I think, too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, it often feels to me like we live in this zero-sum world when it comes to growth right now.
--:-- Miles Bryan: You know, it's like cities versus states.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In urban areas, it's new development versus protecting nature or not displacing long-time residents.
--:-- Miles Bryan: To me, the thing that makes me optimistic about the Salt Lake City story is that it points towards the possibility that we can break out of that zero-sum world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That, you know, it's maybe possible to get all the benefits of a growing population and economy and still care about the environment.
--:-- Miles Bryan: But Miles, one thing that occurs to me here is you're saying, the reason Salt Lake City and its environs have managed to sort of find a common purpose here is because they all share this history, this religion even, that ties a lot of them together.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What about all the cities that don't have that?
--:-- Miles Bryan: Sure, they maybe have a bigger challenge in getting on the same page.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But nearly all American cities have their own housing crisis, right?
--:-- Miles Bryan: And the whole country faces an existential threat from climate change.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So to me, the Salt Lake story is a nice reminder that cooperation is possible.
--:-- Miles Bryan: That this kind of story doesn't always have to end in doom and gloom.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So are you moving to Salt Lake City?
--:-- Miles Bryan: I was convinced.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My wife, not so much.
--:-- Miles Bryan: Miles Bryan, Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Miles was edited by Matthew Collette and fact-checked by Serena Solon and Laura Bullard.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our show was mixed by David Herman.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Go Utes!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you.
--:-- [Theme music fades in]
