But unlike my friends to the north, the un-welcome mat has not been unfurled to my ilk by Salt Lake's mayor. At least not recently. I seem to remember the mayor floating the idea of a "commuter tax" during his first state-of-the-city speech. In other words, the city would tax businesses for every employee who didn't live within the city boundaries. It was a political no-starter.

Still, we suburbanites started to feel unfairly singled out.

The reality is, some of the state's largest employers are in Salt Lake City, the University of Utah being one of them. Somebody has to fill these jobs. These employees have to live somewhere and if they're anything like my family, living in the city isn't an option.

All of this debate, of course, is about the Legacy Highway. The mayor's position is clear. He doesn't want it built.

I'm not going to debate the respective merits of the Legacy Highway. I will say that I've become convinced that the demand for affordable housing has more to do with Utah's urban sprawl problem than the building of highways. Along the Wasatch Front, there's sprawl where there are no roads to accommodate the growth. Who a decade ago could have imagined the massive housing developments on the west shore of Utah Lake? While the Legacy Highway project has stalled, housing units have multiplied exponentially in Davis County.

What I'm talking about is what the mayor, the City Council and the Board of Education can do to encourage more people to live in Salt Lake. What can be done to improve schools and public safety and to ensure that families who want to live in Salt Lake can afford to live in the city? Wouldn't that be a more productive debate?

---

Marjorie Cortez is a Deseret Morning News editorial writer. E-mail: marjorie@desnews.com