St. Gorgeous

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St. George is America’s fastest-growing city, according to the University of Utah Kem. Gardner Policy Institute. They grew in population by almost 4% last year. Why is that do you think?

It’s certainly become retirement heaven for many Baby Boomers as the climate is similar to Arizona.  It still has a ‘small town’ feeling and a personality of old and new architecture, small local businesses and the inevitable chains. Plus it’s 120 miles to Las Vegas and 42 miles to Zion National Park.

The scenic area was named in honor of Mormon apostle George A. Smith. He was known as ‘the Potato Saint’ because he urged early settlers to eat raw and unpeeled potatoes to cure scurvy.  Come to find out, potatoes are a great vegetable source of vitamin C and eating the C is a pretty obvious cure for scurvy. The first people that inhabited the area were the Anasazi who grew crops along the Virgin River. I’ve hiked up a hill behind a gas station at the south end of town and seen many of their pictographs on boulders. The next people to settle were the Pauites and then various Spanish explorers and trappers. The LDS Church sent an experimental mission south of Salt Lake to see if the area was good to grow cotton (turned out, it wasn’t). Thus, the area was known as “Utah’s Dixie’ and still to this day has a nickname that reminds you of the cotton growing states in the U.S. The ‘Potato Saint’ actually never lived there but sent people to farm the land and set up businesses and run the church arms in that part of the state. The Church built a Tabernacle which opened in 1875 which can be seen by most of the people of the town today as a manmade landscape beacon of direction.

Since those early days St. George has just kept growing. If you’re not retired yet, big employers include SkyWest Airlines, Dixie College, the now-famous ‘Squatty Potty’ (best poop of your life!) are there, as is Walmart distribution, Sunroc, Costco and of course, many different home builders like Ence Homes, Sullivan Homes, Bangerter Homes and Sun River.  The housing crunch has hit the area hard for home buyers, and rental properties for blue collar workers are scarce. I have heard from several local REALTORS that there are ZERO rental properties available and if a sign or ad goes up there are 10 or 20 people trying to outbid each other to sign a lease with the landlord. AIRBNB is a factor that’s added to low inventory for people visiting nearby Zion National Park.  It’s a quick 5 hour-ish drive or one hour flight from Salt Lake City.

Rural Charm

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I’ve been selling real estate since before there were mobile phones or the internet and when homes around Liberty Park used to sell for $29,900. I sold a friend a home in the Bountiful hills back then-a big one with @3500 sq. ft. for $79,000.  She and her husband thought they were paying way too much but loved the view. Jump forward a few years and the LDS Church announced they were going to build the Bountiful Temple. Soon, million dollar homes were being built all around them and my friends were very very happy with their now high neighborhood value.

This month the same saints announced a Temple would be built in Tooele, Utah (known as ‘the last McDonalds stop before Wendover’).  As Tooele is less than a 30 minute drive from the Capitol City it’s been seeing a building boom of residential homes-homes that are much less expensive than new construction projects in the Salt Lake Valley. NOW their real estate market will improve even more-especially near the new Temple site and folks will move further west to Grantsville where new homes sell in the low $200’s and the average price for a home in the Salt Lake Valley is $361,000.

I love Grantsville!  I just took a listing out there and got to revisit the sleepy little town where I used to hunt for ghost towns, old dumps and treasures during college.  It’s just 12 minutes past Tooele on Highway 138 or off its own exit on I-80. They’ve got a newer city hall and great library in the tiny downtown area, a grocery store and plenty of homes dedicated to hair salons. South Fork Hardware has baby chicks on sale right now and ya gotta love when you buy hay at that store that the owner grew it himself. I asked a woman in the checkout line there why she lived there and she smiled and said ‘I got tired of big town Phoenix and the traffic. I have horses and this place is great and close to Salt Lake!’ Many folks live in Grantsville because it IS rural and because it’s not much farther than downtown to Herriman on a bad traffic day. It’s 33 miles to the Salt Lake Airport and even closer to the new prison and Inland Port sites. You bet as those projects get built both little cities will see massive influx of renters and home buyers. If you take the I-80 exit you’ll drive a two lane road past beefalo (‘steaks for sale’) ranches, cows, horses and dog kennels. It’s picturesque : a 1920’s rusty school bus parked in a field with a few black angus cows leaning against it for shade; sheep who are chewing away at grass while all the new lambs jump around in the spring sun; and mountains on both sides of the valley with the smell of cattle and hay in the air.

If you head from Tooele you’ll go past the historic 150 year old Benson Grist Mill,  past the Utah Motorsports Campus and the turnoff to the Utah FIRE Museum at the Deseret Peak Complex.  That place has groovy old firetrucks preserved and inside from the elements that young and old kids love. Take a trek some Saturday and see what’s west in the next valley. Now that a Temple is coming the rural charm of the area will slowly be going away.

Are you prepared?

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Springtime in the Rockies is terrific. We can get four seasons in one day, ski in the morning and golf in the afternoon. And we’ll always get some snow dumper of ultra-wet flakes that will bring down a branch from just about every other tree around.

A few weeks ago we had a doozy in Salt Lake City, where in just one Friday almost 2” of moisture fell from the sky. This is more water than we ever get in March of any given year and I predict with the trees sucking up sap to bring out leaves and global warming keeping us wet that we’ll have another one or two dumpers before the valleys can say goodbye to our famous white stuff.  As I drove to my office that morning I saw several cars smashed to smithereens under huge downed limbs and trees and knew way too many folk who lost power due to electric lines that came down during the early morning hours. Rocky Mountain Power reported that more than 19,000 residents in the Capitol City were without power as a result of the storm, and almost 4,000 didn’t get their power back until two days later.

Local saints are told to prepare for disasters and to assemble an emergency food supply in case of the end of days. Let’s just say most of us DON’T have more than a small cupboard of odd canned foods and cereal boxes and many frozen microwavable meals. Without power though, milk goes bad and you can’t nuke your dinner. Maybe consider the fact that even in summer power can go out, emergencies can occur and we all might do well in being a bit prepared. Sure, you can invest in a small generator for a few hundred to a few thousand bucks, but there are simpler things to do to prepare for disaster, such as:

1) call the power company to check on outages

2) try not to open and close your fridge/freezer often. Food should last 24-36 hours if you keep the doors mostly closed

3) keep fuel for your BBQ handy even in winter, but NEVER light your grill inside

4) keep emergency candles and a few flashlights with good batteries in an area where you all know they are stashed

5) check out on line or at local stores ’72 hour kits’ for your home that include food, personal items and survival items.

 

Go to www.redcross.org for suggestions on filling a preparedness kit for your home. Also, always have a dash kit in case you have to run from your home that will have an emergency stash of cash, copies of ID’s and or passports, batteries, cords, extra keys, blankets, shoes and clothes. If you’ve got to grab and go due to a fire, flood or earthquake make sure you have pet carriers close by, extra diapers, feminine hygiene products, toilet paper and food and water for three days for all. Don’t forget your meds either, and back up any important documents onto a USB stick.