Wasatch Front suburbs booming

Not so long ago, if you asked Jess Gomez about Herriman, he'd draw a blank.

"We had never even considered Herriman," he said. "In fact, if you asked me to pick out Herriman on a map, I couldn't even get there."

Then, Gomez visited Herriman with his family and "We really fell in love with it."

A little more than a year ago, the Gomez family moved to the booming community in southwest Salt Lake County.

Herriman incorporated in 1999 with a population of 800, according to Mayor J. Lynn Crane. Now, it's the state's fastest growing city, according to population estimates released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The city grew by nearly 33 percent to 11,226 people between July 1, 2004 and July 1, 2005. Herriman has grown by an estimated 450 percent since 2000.

And Crane believes that's an undercount.

"The real population is over 16,000," he said. "We're certain of that."

Meanwhile, Gomez's hometown of Murray is shrinking. With a 2005 population of 44,555, it lost about 1.7 percent of its year 2000 population, according to the census. Salt Lake City, the state's largest city, also continued to lose people. The city's 2005 population of 178,097 was a drop of about 2 percent from 2000.

"It's a smaller city, a little bit slower paced and a very nice place to raise our family," Gomez said of Herriman. "It's absolutely beautiful."

As the Wasatch Front continued to suburbanize, other large Utah cities saw slight population declines, including Bountiful, Ogden, Sandy and Taylorsville.

It's part of a national trend. Bigger, older cities are losing ground as Americans flock to suburban open spaces and affordable homes, especially in the West and Sun Belt.

In California, another small suburban city, Elk Grove, is the nation's fastest growing. It's also new. Elk Grove incorporated six years ago. The Sacramento suburb grew by 11.6 percent in one year to 112,000 people.

The national growth rankings were listed for cities of 100,000 or more. The top five were all suburban cities with fewer than 200,000 residents.

Elk Grove was followed in the top five by North Las Vegas, Nev.; Port St. Lucie, Fla.; Gilbert, Ariz.; and Cape Coral, Fla.

Among big cities losing population were Boston, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Norfolk, Va.

In Utah, Herriman was once a small, rural community. Since it incorporated, "its population has just been skyrocketing," said Robert Spendlove, manager of demographic and economic analysis for the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget.