Demand high for downtown housing

Carl Warren has lived in Paris, Singapore and New York City, but the former senior executive at IBM decided Salt Lake City was the best place to spend his retirement years.

Warren is not alone in choosing Salt Lake as a residential destination.

Over the next 20 years, Utah will witness a 140 percent increase in the number of people ages 65 and older, according to a November report by the Brookings Institute. This "age-wave," according to the report, will have profound effects on America's cities, shaping how and where baby boomers and seniors live.

Those changes will be felt strongly in Salt Lake City, where a rush of new residential housing is planned.

The city already has roughly 3,400 residential units in the central business district, providing housing to 6,000 people, according to James Wood, director of the University of Utah's Bureau of Economic and Business Research.

Over the next five years, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' estimated $1.5 billion City Creek Center project in downtown Salt Lake City will add five new residential towers to the skyline, with about 430 new residential housing units.

But if market conditions and demand are strong, the number of residential units in the project could be as high as 700, according to Dale Bills, spokesman for City Creek Center.

According to Wood, the demand for owning a piece of the City Creek Center is already beginning to outstrip what is planned.

About 500 people have expressed interest in the towers, according to Mark Gibbons, president of the church's real-estate arm, Property Reserve Inc. And Gibbons has noted that units will not go on sale for at least another two years.

"I've had people call me and ask, 'How do I get on the list?"' Wood said. "If you're a real devout Mormon, to have that sort of address and location is very appealing. There's not many of those around."

Wood calls the church's plans "the most significant transformation" the city has ever seen in downtown Salt Lake City.

"There certainly are a lot more people that would like that address than there is going to be available units," Wood said. "I'm sure that some of those units will be in the same family for generations."

Had the City Creek Center been finished in 2005, when Warren and his wife, Laura, were looking to buy, the couple today likely would be living in a suite overlooking Temple Square. The proposed residential towers, Warren said, could be a catalyst to get his out-of-state friends to move to Salt Lake City.

"We have a lot of close friends in the New York City and the Washington, D.C., areas," Warren said. "Most of them, when they get to retirement age, they head back here. The ones that will be coming will look very, very seriously at those apartments."