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Epilogue The recession that began in 2007 enveloped the Great Basin as it did the rest of the United States and the world, tamping the buoyancy and exuberance and slowing the pace of growth that had been helping to shape the region’s cities. The economic downturn exposed once again the differences between the metropolitan areas on opposite sides of the Basin. Northern Nevada, historically more susceptible to the boom-andbust cycles of the mining, entertainment, and tourism industries, was among the areas hit hardest in housing-price declines and unemployment : By the end of 2009, the median sale price for single-family houses in the Reno area had declined by 50 percent from the peak of about four ears earlier, and over 12 percent of the labor force was unemployed. Farflung Lyon County was one of the nation’s most spectacular busts, going from being Nevada’s fastest-growing county in the middle of the decade to actually shrinking by 2008 and reaching 15 percent unemployment by mid-2009. Utah, on the other hand, with its low-profile but usually stable economy, slowed to a lesser degree. The Wasatch Front experienced housing-price declines that were minor relative to the rest of the United States and unemployment several percentage points below the national average. Overall, the populations of the Great Basin’s metropolitan areas still grew quickly relative to the rest of the United States. With its high birth rates, Utah became the fastest-growing state in the nation. Nevada was more affected by the economy and slowdown in immigration but was nevertheless eighth fastest growing. The slowdown in growth, population , real estate, and jobs offered local, regional, and state policy makers a chance to step back and formulate strategies for addressing the next wave of western growth and urbanization. 196 Epilogue And the Great Basin’s burgeoning urbanity lives. In the depths of the market downturn across the United States, it became apparent that the real estate that remained the most attractive to buyers was compact, mixed-use development, often built near to rapid transit. In its Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2010, the real estate industry’s Urban Land Institute noted that “next-generation projects will orient to urbanizing transitoriented development. Smaller housing units close to mass transit, work, and 24-hour amenities gain favor over large houses on big lots at the suburban edge.”1 Americans increasingly want urban—especially those belonging to my generation who are beginning to make their first home purchases and will carry the weight of demand in coming decades. The places of varying shades of urban in this book have found some success in the awful market. Daybreak, the large-scale, consciously new urbanist, master-planned development of diverse houses, jobs, parks, and transit was selling about a house a day in the spring of 2009.2 Although the future of the long-term West Bench Master Plan is vague, Kennecott Land actually increased the number of houses it planned to build in Daybreak from thirteen thousand to twenty thousand, as builders put up higher-density townhouses filling the need for smaller, less expensive residences in the downturn. It is filling in with a mix of houses, townhouses, and condos, and under construction is a shopping street called, fittingly enough for Utah’s sweet tooth, SoDa Row. And Daybreak’s populace is multiplying like cells: In Daybreak’s online forum, a poster noted that in the year and a half she had lived at Daybreak her Latter-day Saint ward had split “3or 4 times and will need to split again before the year is over.” Woodland Village in Cold Springs Valley, with its new neighborhood grill, is “a bright spot” in Reno’s otherwise slow new housing sales according to the Reno Gazette Journal. In Tooele County, Overlake won a $20 million judgment against the City of Tooele, and the victory may help to enable the narrower streets and better street connectivity laid out by its original plan. In downtown Salt Lake, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is building the City Creek Center. Condominium towers have begun to rise alongside the Temple spires and conference center conifers, signaling the next, mixed-use era of the Mormon headquarters. A realtor reported that most of the condo sales so far were from LDS Church members who were willing to pay almost $1million for a view of the Salt Lake Temple.3 I returned to Reno one hot July...

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