Nontraditional planners are now touting high-density, mixed-use walkable communities as the way to manage growth. It's a planning theory known as "new urbanism" and was included in the BYU study.

Sellers said a downtown plan based around "new urbanism" could benefit the city. But residents may view it as a threaten to established growth patterns.

"Syracuse is unique in the fact it wants to preserve as much as they can the old-town feel," he said. "With such a surplus of growth lately, many are just seeing the city being taken away from them with new urbanism. They view that as a threat."

Envision Utah has been working with several Davis County cities — Farmington, Layton and West Point — to utilize a new planning concept called transfer development rights (TDR). It has been received with similar skepticism.

With TDR, landowners with sensitive property (like farmland along the Great Salt Lake ) can sell their right to develop to another landowner, or "receiver." With the help of creative zoning, those rights can be applied to another parcel of land, where the city can give the developer permission to build at higher densities.

Higher density developments offer greater profit. But there must be demand for development and public interest in preservation for the plan to work, said Envision Utah planner Tim Watkins.

"Part of the struggle in west Davis is that those areas have been rural for so many years, and suburbs are replacing those at such a fast pace, that the tendency is to subscribe to larger lot zoning in the hope they'll sustain rural character," said Watkins.

"They could structure zoning in Syracuse such that there would be a great need for TDR."

Officials say TDR is not right for Syracuse. The city already adheres to plans for preserving open space, said Panucci. And high density can be more difficult to provide policing services and other protections, said Worthen.

"Some of the City Council went (to Envision Utah presentations) and didn't feel they wanted to participate because they didn't want to deal with high-density receiving areas," he said.

But the city could use more variety in housing, he said.

"A lot of people have the misconceptions about high-density housing," he said. "I think it's all needed. Everyone in their life fits into a different style of housing, whether you're in college and need one room or recently married and renting a house, or retired or with four to five children."

Overall, residents are pleased with the planning for growth Syracuse has already initiated, according to the BYU study. While there is room for improvement, Worthen and Panucci say the city has done "B-plus" work in responding to growth.

"Do we have challenges? Absolutely. The challenges are getting tougher and tougher as the growth continues and the imbalance between commercial and residential continues," Panucci said.

But commercial is on the way. The key question, said Panucci, is how to manage that development.

"You can't stop growth because landowners have the right to develop property," he said. "That's going to happen. The question to ask as we're growing is, how do you want to grow? We want to make sure all the growth is quality."

The BYU study was completed by six students from the Romney Institute of Public Management. All are seeking a master of public administration degree.

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E-mail: nwarburton@desnews.com