A common saying goes, “Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.” Yet, it seems we Utahns haven’t taken that lesson to heart.
Growing up on the Wasatch front, a familiar guiding principle of Utah’s ideology and politics was not becoming a “California.” The catch-all term describes unaffordable, hot, traffic-heavy, polluted cities mixed in with housing crises, violence, wildfires and droughts.
Yet one uncomfortable truth has become clear during my upbringing, Utah is becoming the environment we once prided ourselves on avoiding.
Ask any car commuter in our two most populous counties; the traffic is slow. A recent Business Insider article described two Utah newcomers who said what many Utahns have known for years: high living costs and low salaries.
In 2021, the Bureau of Economic Analysis found that annual expenses were $42,653, and the Census Bureau found that median income was just $33,378 in July 2022. Worse yet, in 2021, Utah had the highest increase in personal consumption costs in the US at 16.3% from 2020.
We are on the brink of environmental disaster threatened by the Great Salt Lake drying up and stirring up toxic chemicals into our air, and yet it feels like we are doing nothing about it. Instead of helping Utahns with the cost of living, we focus on appeasing political whims, such as canceling federal unemployment insurance during COVID-19 and taking $300 a week away from people who most needed it. Instead of working on lowering the cost of housing, we provide tax breaks to luxury housing reserved for new developments.
While we continue to ignore the key issues — the cost of living, water crises and air pollution — we pat ourselves on the back for “not being California.” Yet we have continued to choose policies that put us on an inevitable track towards having the same issues as the place we claim to oppose.
Utah’s population boom isn’t, per se, a bad thing, but the boom or bust cycle of neighborhoods is hurting our existing citizens. If you’re reading this thinking, “That hasn’t happened to my neighborhood,” give it 20 years.
Growing up in Cache Valley, I witnessed our communities undergo this cycle twice. New developments pop up, new schools get built, and new wealth moves into the neighborhoods. The school sees years of prosperity with successful sports and academics but, once property taxes dry up, there’s a newer and nicer development.
Bigger roads cut through communities and make traffic pile up and more dangerous for our neighborhoods, cannibalizing the same desirable qualities that brought people there in the first place. Instead of investing in our existing communities, we decide new ones are preferable. But what happens once we run out of property to develop?
This isn’t an article lamenting the destruction of our community. Quite the opposite, it’s a call to action. Quality of life, safety and protecting our citizens from crises (whether that be homelessness, environmental disasters, safety in our schools, and poverty, to name a few) is a non-partisan issue.
We can welcome our new Utahns while helping our current ones, but that doesn’t mean it’ll come without cost.
We need more affordable housing options, not on the outskirts of the counties, but in downtowns and near good schools. We need more transportation options with busses and trains and making our cities walkable to ease traffic and pollution. We must understand that tying welfare funds to religious affiliation isn’t working.
We should strive to hold our state government to a higher standard in protecting those who lost a loved income earner, had an accident or need help raising children rather than cancel unemployment insurance.
You may not want apartments near your $450,000 family home, or to wait for pedestrians at a crosswalk. If we only accommodate the wealthy commuter or ski-bum by building expensive highways or gondolas that don’t benefit our citizens, our communities will suffer.
I’ve often heard the phrase, “At least we don’t live in California,” while growing up in Utah. Our notion of the place is undoubtedly negative, but unless we invest in our communities for real change in addressing cost-of-living, we will live in California in all but name.
Toph Cottle
Toph Cottle was born and raised in Logan, Utah, but resides in Washington, D.C. He tweets @tc_elk”
