Raising a family in downtown Salt Lake City is an adventure, but shouldn't be treated like a pipe dream.
Small Lake City
By Tom Merrill
In her 2024 State of the City address, Mayor Erin Mendenhall made a statement that was music to my ears: "Downtown is for families."
That simple statement embodied a core theme of her address, acknowledging that—despite the recent explosion in development and investment in our urban core—the number of families living downtown remains relatively small and that needs to change. And depending on who you spoke to afterward, this was either the absolute right focus or an impractical pipe dream.
For my family, however, "families downtown" has been our reality since the early 1990s, when my single mother of four moved us from San Antonio, Texas to the Central 9th area. For an incredible $40,000, she bought a 1905 Victorian home on 200 West that was previously a crack house—which we did our best to renovate in the years that followed.
Most of the families in our neighborhood were not as lucky to own their homes and rotated between slumlords for years, often moving no more than a block or two at a time.
Within a few years of our moving downtown, SLC was awarded the 2002 Winter Olympics and, soon after that, our street became a construction zone for the incoming Trax light rail system. But beyond the Trax construction, the '90s were a relatively quiet period downtown, with minimal development and with few move-ins.
Crossroads Mall and ZCMI were mostly sleepy; Main Street the same. The homeless shelter was located in our Latter-day Saint ward boundaries, but so was the upper-class American Towers condo community. We got to see a diverse cross-section of those who lived in the urban core.
Now in my third stint living downtown, I somehow ended up buying a place in that same American Towers building—except now I am raising my own children here and my experience doing so has been extremely adventurous. I have lots of thoughts about why our downtown is currently great for families, but also why many families are hesitant to move here.
Some of the issues are obvious and already on the radar of city leaders. There are no public schools within walking distance, few child care options, only a handful of green spaces, ever-rising housing costs, pedestrian safety issues and the anti-social activity stemming from the drug crisis (often erroneously conflated with our homelessness challenges).
What is less obvious to those without direct experience living here is how these issues interrelate and exacerbate each other in unexpected ways. Also less obvious is how we should prioritize these issues in our ongoing efforts. But we can't afford to ignore these questions, and the future success of our city and its residents demands a downtown where families can thrive.
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