SALT LAKE CITY — As young families stray from Utah’s urban core in search of more affordable homes, 20-somethings are settling in.
Those ages 25-29 contributed more than 15,100 newcomers to Salt Lake County over a decadelong period ending in 2010 — enough to pack the University of Utah’s Huntsman Center and spill onto the basketball court.
Yet still more of those in the county, including parents and grandparents, packed up and moved away, according to the numbers released this week by the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.
“A lot of people think about Salt Lake County as a huge migration driver, and it is, but only for really a very particular kind of population,” said Emily Harris, a Gardner Institute demographer who co-authored the new paper. Harris and her colleagues attribute the shift in the county of more than 1 million residents in large part to an affordable housing crunch on the Wasatch Front.
Kristen Sherlock and her family are familiar with the rising home costs. In 2017, they decided leave their bungalow in Salt Lake City’s Marmalade district when her son who has epilepsy had a seizure on the stairs near his basement bedroom. With his safety top of mind, they began looking for a one-story house in the nearby Avenues or surrounding neighborhoods in the foothills.
“We quickly realized what was available in public was grossly outside of our budget,” said Sherlock, 36. “For a young family of six, a $650,000 fixer-upper is just not feasible.”
Instead, her family moved about 15 miles north to Farmington, a community of about 22,000. Her three sons and daughter — which range in age from 5-13 — love having more neighbor kids to play with in the suburban community, though their parents sometimes miss the convenience and vibrancy of the bigger city, she said.
A real estate agent and landlord with a background in urban planning, Sherlock has seen the transformation in Salt Lake County bear out in her own work. Her clients buying homes for the first time have largely settled just outside its borders, many along public transit lines they use to commute to the capital city on weekdays.
“It’s not that they don’t want to be near an urban core. And it’s not that they want to necessarily be farther out, but they’re going where the housing is cheaper,” Sherlock said. “And not many people want to be on the train, but this is what they’re choosing, to still feel like they’re having that urban lifestyle in a suburban community.”
The report confirms the outflow. Those considered family age — adults in their 30s and 40s or with elementary and middle school children — are heading into suburbs outside Salt Lake County, including to Sherlock’s Davis County, in addition to Wasatch, Morgan and Tooele counties, the researchers found.
From the time of the 2000 census to a decade later, Salt Lake County logged a net loss of 15,400 residents in the family age category. It lost about half as many older adults, those ages 50-74.
Sherlock’s renters in Marmalade, however, fit a different profile — young professionals who pair up with roommates to stay within walking distance from bodegas, restaurants and their jobs, she said.
Many of the county’s fresh faces have moved for job opportunities, noted Harris, the demographer.
Among them is Brandi Maull, a chemist and Delaware native who arrived in Utah five years ago to work with a startup that creates polymers used in mining. Maull, 35, had never seen the Wasatch Mountains when she took the job but recalls thinking, “I’m up for the adventure. If you have a job, how bad could it be?”
“I told my dad I was moving to Utah, because I was in Tennessee at the time,” she said. “He’s like, ‘Brandi, we’ll see you in a couple months.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, well, he’s probably right. But let’s just see.’”
Once in Utah, she had one coworker, a man several decades her senior, so she searched out social gatherings online and came across the Young Professionals Salt Lake City page. Now president of the organization, she helps put together karaoke night and volunteer efforts in soup kitchens. The group works with the Downtown Alliance on issues important to its members, like affordable housing and homelessness.
Though several in the group are from Utah, most are transplants seeking out the same connections Maull had.
“We try to connect them with the local community, whether that’s in getting involved in civic engagement or professional development, or just connecting socially,” she said. “Because if you have that network, you’re more likely to stay.”
It’s too early to tell whether her efforts have paid off: The 10-year timeframe considered in the report predated her arrival and the formation of the group in 2014.
Its authors point out that the window includes the 2002 Winter Olympic Games that raised Utah’s profile, but also the Great Recession, which stalled migration in Utah and around the nation from 2008-10.
Within the decade, Utah County welcomed the most newcomers, in large part due to an influx of nearly 41,000 college-age newcomers — those who arrive at Brigham Young or Utah Valley universities, or the Missionary Training Center operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In the future, Harris said, she has a hunch Utah County’s new residents will include more families seeking less expensive homes and those working in a bustling tech corridor.
The figures released Tuesday don’t pinpoint where the newcomers hail from, though the researchers plan to dive further into the details in coming months and examine gender, race and ethnicity, education levels and other characteristics.
For Harris, the numbers illustrate a strong tie between economic health and mobility. She notes rural counties with fewer job opportunities, like Carbon, Emery, Millard and San Juan all saw more people going than arriving.
“Within certain constraints, there’s an ability for areas to plan around these migration patterns and potentially change them as they want,” Harris said.
Other takeaways in the report:
- Utahns in general move often: 1 in 6 changed homes in 2016, following a national trend of high mobility, the analysis says.
- Washington County welcomed more older adults, ages 50-74, than any other county — a net total of nearly 14,000.
- The state as a whole has a different profile than its neighbors, according to the report. While Utah largely welcomed college students from out of state, neighboring Idaho drew in more families and retirees, while Colorado drew more young adults.