SOUTH JORDAN, Utah — It’s a plan for development that will take more than 50 years from start to finish, on the largest piece of privately owned land next to a U.S. metropolis for an expected half-million residents.
This megasuburb, twice the size of San Francisco, will be the work of Kennecott Land, the real-estate sister company of Kennecott Utah Copper Corp.
Kennecott Utah Copper Corp. is a subsidiary of London-based Rio Tinto, a mining multinational and avowed convert to environmentalism, which decided to make a showcase out of its surplus Utah lands instead of just selling them off for cookie-cutter subdivisions.
Home builders were skeptical when the Salt Lake valley’s biggest landowner laid out the plan for a 20-mile string of densely packed, “walkable†communities framing the rural west side of Salt Lake County. The communities would be laid out along a planned highway and light-rail lines connecting to Salt Lake City.
Interesting concept, but they’ve got real problems to solve with environmental cleanup and concerns about tainted groundwaters. Sounds great if built as planned – or at least, as dreamed. But a lot of things have to right, and at the right time, or they’ve got themselves a half-built townlet out in the middle of nowhere.