This month is the 30^th anniversary of a small little film shot behind several homes in Glendale, just west of downtown Salt Lake City. It is a story about kids who play baseball on a dirt lot back in the summer of 1962 that has become over the years a sweet cult film. The simple premise of the coming of age movie is that the character Scotty, a new kid in town, is encouraged by his mom to make new friends. He ends up joining a rag tag bunch of kids who play at the neighborhood sandlot. After one of the kids smash the cover off their only ball, Scotty gets his dad’s ball without dad’s knowledge, and it gets hit over a fence where a scary dog guards a house. He didn’t realize that he’d lost his father’s most valuable possession-a baseball signed by the one and only Babe Ruth and of course, he has to get it back before his dad finds out it was gone. And therein lies the plot.

Leigh von der Esch was the Utah Film Commissioner when the movie was being made here and remembers hiring a helicopter to find the perfect place for the sandlot and once it was identified, Leigh had to find a tree to be the treehouse in the film. She found a live tree on Beck Street that was dug up and moved to the site of the film. The director loved Vincent Drug in Midvale because the store had a real soda fountain they needed in the film. The drug store opened originally in 1911 as a saloon, but when Prohibition came Willis Vincent, the owner, was forced to convert the bar into a drugstore. The place was still open in 1993 and the young actors in the film could line up for shots as they ate ice cream in the store.  Some considered the long counter with about two dozen stools to be one of the best and most well preserved soda fountain in the state known for iron port and sweet or tart cherry phosphates. It was also used for scenes in movies made in Utah like Halloween 4 and 5, the Stand and Touched by an Angel.  Leigh also remembers that the film was going to be shot in Wichita, Kansas, but the needed mountains in the back ground. San Diego was also considered as a location, but lucky for Utah, we won out. The cast is still alive, as is the director, and they come to regular reunions here.

The dirt lot is located behind several houses on Glenrose Drive and is private property. Film fans often knock on doors trying to get access for photos and tons of folks would love to see the site preserved for future generations. Hook & Ladder Co. in Glendale has it’s own replica of the sandlot behind it’s business.

Do you remember during the Covid-19 pandemic when there were rampant shortages off and on of different types of foods, dry goods, building supplies, baby formula, new cars and such? Did you dare travel during those years and find that gasoline, airfare and hotel prices were nuts? When it came to foodstuffs, manufacturers adjusted quickly by sometimes raising prices due to lack of ingredients and decreasing the size of the final product.  As an example, Snickers bars downsized form 50g to 44 g-equal to about one bite per bar but they kept prices the same. During the same time we heard how lumber and plywood nearly quadrupled in cost. Wholesale prices for plywood increased form $400 to $1500 per thousand square feet, with average retails prices that increased from $12.80 to $48.00 per sheet.

Well that pandemic is basically over and the supply chain has improved across the country. The National Assn. of Home Builders estimate that 9 out of 10 single-family homes built in the U.S. feature wood-framed walls, ceilings, floor sand roofs. The prices of new homes hasn’t dropped since those masked-up days even though lumber prices have fallen, but what has happened is that many builders around the country are doing the same thing as Snicker’s manufacturer (Mars, Inc.)…decreasing the size of new homes. On average, the Builders group has seen a 2% decrease in new home size across the country, it’s own form of ‘shrinkflation’.

The U.S. Census Bureau and HUD’s August housing report for the country found that housing permits were up 0.1% in June but are still 13% below last June’s numbers in 2022. Housing starts in July were up 3.9%. We aren’t as a nation keeping up with demand and statistics also point to a continuing lack of affordable housing being built to fulfill demand of first time buyers and seniors who want to downsize. Home owners don’t want to give up mortgages they got during the pandemic with annual interest rates of 2.5-3% and this fact alone is what’s keeping housing inventory low nation-wide. The National Assn. of REALTORS reported last month that the U.S. housing market is short more than 300,000 affordable homes for middle-income buyers. They found that middle-income buyers can afford to buy less than a quarter (23%) of the listings that are currently being offered for sale around the country. That’s a lot different than five years ago when those same buyers could afford to purchase half of the homes on the market.

As a side note, the Census Bureau report found that Salt Lake County single family home prices increased by almost 60%  during the pandemic and that we had a huge population increase during the pandemic, with more than 23,000 folks from California moving to Utah for work which is three times more people than the next largest group of immigrants-8,300 from Arizona.