To meet cost realities in the current economic and cultural environment, the arts and culture district needs a “big rethink.” It needs to be “big” in that it examines and rejects some of the prior assumptions and actions of City Hall and calls on leadership for some courage. Some of these are as follows:

• Local artists need more accessible venue support than affordable housing support. To the extent they need affordable housing support, it does not have to be at the district.

• The district cost has been bloated by high-cost amenities. Eliminate them and replace them with low-cost amenities.

• Transit evolution will make the district a much more logical and useful transit hub than the Marsac transit hub. There is a hidden opportunity here for affordable housing.

• It is inevitable that Main Street will become mostly, if not wholly, pedestrian only. View the district as the primary access gateway to Main Street. District anchors and tenants will love that.

Details:

As the Park City government gets out of mass transit beyond its borders, regional transit will bring riders in on S.R. 224 and S.R. 248. It needs an accessible and robust target transit hub, and the Marsac hub is not that. A much better hub can be built at the district, and it can also play well with peak transit for special events. It is also near the bus barn, where regional transit will likely contract its bus maintenance. Expand and repurpose the Main Street Trolley to be a high-frequency shuttle from the hub to Main Street. Later, when Main Street is pedestrian only, operate a Cabriolet-like people mover from the hub to Old Town. Noise and right-of-way will be minimal issues as the route can be almost entirely over public land. Terminate it near the Town Lift to make it skier friendly. Its uniqueness will make it a tourism amenity.

Eliminate affordable housing from the district, which will massively reduce costs and make space for the much cheaper transit hub. Because the Marsac transit hub would now be surplus, donate or deeply discount its land to a developer to build deed-restricted affordable housing. Perhaps incorporate the Flagpole parking lot. This approach makes such a project profitable for the private sector. Affordable housing is now a consequence of the arts district but not part of its cost. And with a downtown location, it is a centerpiece of social equity.

Meanwhile back at the district, don’t mess with the anchors, the Sundance Institute and Kimball Art Center. Provide space and infrastructure for “food truck row,” which will become a destination as multiple food trucks lease a footprint to gain access to all that foot traffic. City Hall will have to find the courage to see this as an asset to the city’s culinary scene, rather than a threat. This will also relieve the anchors of having to provide food service. Also, build an amphitheater for outdoor performances with capacity up to 500. Park City Institute, Deer Valley and Park City Film can undoubtedly find ways to use it to enhance their performance offerings, as well as the obvious synergies with Sundance and Kimball programs. Both “food truck row” and the amphitheater are pretty cheap to build.

Any plan to save the arts and culture district is going to require rethinking, backtracking and boldness. Parkites have stated that boldness is their middle name, however, and this is the chance to walk the talk.

The post Guest opinion: Parkites say they want boldness. The arts and culture district is a chance to walk the talk. appeared first on Park Record.

Has it occurred to Parkites that tech innovation centers and resort economies don’t work well together? Apparently not, judging by the number of letters and statements supporting the existing Summit Research Park as opposed to the new Dakota Pacific Real Estate development plan. It should be possible to easily defend the research park concept by citing the research parks in similar communities like Aspen, Jackson Hole, Tahoe, Vail, Sedona and so on. Wait, you say there are none? What could that possibly mean?

It means two things. First, there is something mythological about our notions of how the tech innovation sector works; and second, diversifying not will solve our growth/development/traffic problems and build community resilience.

We have this image of tech entrepreneurs arriving with buckets of venture capital they spend lavishly to attract brilliant minds that demand a resort lifestyle. Nothing else matters. But apparently it doesn’t work like that. Growing tech firms want the same things other businesses want — cheap land and infrastructure; low facility costs; low-cost, well-educated, mobile labor living in affordable housing. Tech wants immediate adjacency to major universities where it can turn expiring student visas into J-1 visas.

It should be clear that little of the above exists in Park City. But it does just down the hill, along the Wasatch Front, where this thing called Silicon Slopes has popped up. In other words, Park City can’t compete with urban Utah for tech business. Never could, and it puzzles me how the idea ever went forward.

We actually possess one small piece of data about how tech employment works in Park City: Skullcandy, the only Summit Research Park tenant. People in a position to know tell me that 70% of Skullcandy employees commute from Salt Lake City, and they do so because they like their affordable, high-amenity housing in engaging neighborhoods. In other words, Skullcandy dumps a bunch more traffic onto I-15 and Kimball Junction while its payrolls get spent in the valley. Great, let’s do that 15 more times. The new Dakota Pacific proposal tries to build that kind of diverse, walkable, high-amenity community locally, where its adjacency to transit won’t generate new traffic, and its income will get spent locally. If the enemies of traffic realized this, they would love the idea.

And then there’s the idea that diversification reduces Park City’s vulnerability to recessions that damage tourism and travel — such as the 2008 real estate meltdown. We recovered from that, of course, and you can argue that the local power for that recovery came from — wait for it — real estate. Now we have the 2020 pandemic recession, whose story is still unfinished. But recovery is on the horizon, and it is pretty clear the community’s resilience has been enabled by the nonprofit sector, the philanthropy that supports it, and intelligent government. Neither 2008 nor 2020, so far, support the idea that diversification is a magic recession bullet.

A telling fact is that in developing Park City’s Bonanza district, a higher-density, affordable, walkable, diverse, transit-oriented development with a strong community feel makes sense to a great many people. So why, when Dakota Pacific proposes that for Kimball Junction, does it become a traffic-generator and community-killer? Beats me. So let’s be bold — dump this outmoded notion that a Summit Research Park will solve any of our problems when the evidence is that it would do nothing and possibly worsen them. We are lucky, actually, that it was economically unfeasible in the first place.

The post Guest opinion: Tech centers and resort economies don’t mix appeared first on Park Record.