Most Utah ski areas expect to be open by the weekend
Utah’s ski resorts will be enveloped by a flurry of activity this week. By next Monday, all but five are expected to be open for the season. Snowbird will set off a second spree of openings Monday. The resort will require parking reservations for the first time this year as its method of limiting crowds and maintaining social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic.
Sundance will start its lifts turning Friday and Deer Valley will join in on Saturday. Solitude plans to open Dec. 7 after delaying its start because of lack of snow.
Eagle Valley, meanwhile, has set Dec. 18 as its opening date.
Brighton kicked off the Utah ski season on Nov. 19 to passholders only. Park City Mountain Resort, Brian Head Resort, Alta Ski Area and Woodward Park City all quickly followed suit. Snowbasin opened Wednesday for its 80th season.
That leaves Powder Mountain as well as many of the state’s smallest ski hills — Beaver Mountain, Nordic Valley and Cherry Peak — awaiting a little more help from Mother Nature before they begin welcoming guests. They may have a long wait. Little to no precipitation is in the forecast for the next two weeks, though temperatures should stay low enough to promote snowmaking.
All Utah’s resorts require masks inside all buildings and in lift lines and are asking guests to stay with their groups on chairlifts. In addition, most are requiring lift tickets to be purchased online.
Linda Secrist & Associates is the top selling team in luxury homes in the SLC Market. They have received countless awards over the past 20 years, including “Sales Team of The Year” for over 10 years including 2019! Linda Secrist is #54 in the top 100 Agents in the World in luxury residential real estate. If you’re searching for homes in Sandy, Salt Lake, Cottonwood Heights, Millcreek, Draper, South Jordan, Bountiful, Centerville, Farmington or anywhere in northern Utah, Linda Secrist & Associates are the real estate agents to call. If you’re buying or selling a home, don’t hesitate to text or call us at 801-455-9999!
Utah set to win big as big cities continue to lose residents
Even before the onset of COVID-19, big U.S. metro areas were losing the domestic migration war to smaller, midsize cities and suburbs in a trend reversal that dates back almost a decade.
Now, restrictions brought on by the global pandemic have only highlighted the downsides of big cities and the relative upsides of locales with assets like low cost of living, growing economies and easy access to outdoor recreation opportunities.
Sound familiar?
Utah could be perfectly positioned to become one of the top destinations for those fleeing urban residential settings that have become, for some, considerably less desirable amid the current public health crisis.
Two national experts on urban development, Joel Kotkin, presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, and Wendell Cox, senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, presented research and insight last week during an online discussion hosted by the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.
Kotkin and Cox said data shows residents, on a net basis, have been moving out of U.S. metro areas with populations of 1 million or more and finding new homes in smaller cities going back to 2012. And in the past several months, restrictions in place across the country aiming to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have functioned as a “great accelerator” of that migration.
Kotkin said amid crisis conditions, certain attributes of a place become even more prominent, and Utah was emerging as a clear winner on the attractor side of that equation.
“There’s a lot of really good stuff going on in Utah,” Kotkin said. “I think there are also many changes that may seem tragic, and are tragic, but really open us up to some new possibilities.
“The Utah model is something that is worth studying. I think that, in different ways, Utah is showing us some things we might think about if we want a more egalitarian society.”
Kotkin also blunted the long-running narrative about members of the millennial generation leading the charge back to urban living, noting large numbers of the group are now having families and encountering the functional realities that come with it.
“Millennials were on the move before COVID-19 to suburbs and smaller cities,” Kotkin said. “Part of it was related to cost.”
But the other part was “growing up and having kids and starting to worry about things like public schools.”
Cox said that before the novel coronavirus disrupted daily life around the world, people were moving out of cities in part to improve their lives by reducing time spent getting back and forth to work.
He noted that in most parts of the country, the far preponderance of jobs are located outside of city central business districts. While New York City is a minor exception to the rule, with about 20% of the state’s jobs located in the downtown area, in most places only 6% to 8% of the workforce is employed in urban areas.
Cox said it may be time to reevaluate a popular urban development strategy that prioritizes investment in projects that center on easy transit access and, instead, work to incentivize job center development near the places people prefer to live.
He noted that remote work situations and its attendant telecommuting has, under pandemic restrictions, essentially replaced physical commuting in the New York City area, where commuter rail ridership is down over 70% and in San Francisco, where the Bay Area Rapid Transit system is down nearly 90% in rider volume.
He also noted the ranges of commutes were continuing to increase with some expanding to 60 or 80 miles away from job centers.
Kotkin said the pitfalls of transit development can be seen in Southern California, where tens of billions of dollars in transit infrastructure investment failed even before pandemic conditions to meaningfully increase ridership.
“This insistence that we keep building these light rail systems and spending a fortune on them, frankly, we’d be better off with more day care centers,” Kotkin said.
Cox warned that while Utah was a high performer on many metrics that make it an attractive destination for those looking to exit urban living situations, the state needs to monitor affordability. He noted that Ogden, Provo and Salt Lake City were all rated above the national average based on a measurement that uses a ratio of median housing prices to median wages to determine a housing affordability quotient. While anything under 3.0 is considered in the affordable range, those three Utah cities are all above 3.8 and fall in the “moderate” to “seriously unaffordable” range.
That said, both men believe Utah is well poised to recover quickly from the impacts of COVID-19 and encouraged state and local leaders to stay the course.
“More than anything, keep doing what you’re doing in Utah and begin to understand that your intrinsic strengths are great strengths,” Kotkin said. “I assume that you’re not sending missions to Portland anymore to say, ‘this is how to run a city’ because Portland is giving San Francisco a run for its money in dysfunction and lunacy.
“I’d say, look at yourself and look at what’s happened and see how you can build on your strengths.”
Linda Secrist & Associates is the top selling team in luxury homes in the SLC Market. They have received countless awards over the past 20 years, including “Sales Team of The Year” for over 10 years including 2019! Linda Secrist is #54 in the top 100 Agents in the World in luxury residential real estate. If you’re searching for homes in Sandy, Salt Lake, Cottonwood Heights, Millcreek, Draper, South Jordan, Bountiful, Centerville, Farmington or anywhere in northern Utah, Linda Secrist & Associates are the real estate agents to call. If you’re buying or selling a home, don’t hesitate to text or call us at 801-455-9999!
2 Utah Cities Rank in Top 10 Best Places to Raise Kids 2020 Edition
Raising kids is a difficult task – one that has been made harder for many in recent months as a result of the COVID-19 crisis and the accompanying economic trouble. Finding the best place to grow a family is a process that involves many factors that often change depending on where you look. That’s why SmartAsset analyzed the data to find the best places to raise kids in America.
We compared the 200 largest U.S. metro areas across the following metrics: percentage of the population who are children, housing costs as a percentage of income, concentration of children’s entertainment establishments, high school graduation rate, daily average air pollution, child poverty rate, percentage of the children without health insurance and violent crime rate. For details on our data sources and how we put all the information together to create our final rankings, check out the Data and Methodology section below.
Key Findings
Midwestern locales are most favorable for raising kids. Of the top 10 places in our study, seven are in the Midwest, with a particularly strong showings from Wisconsin and Iowa. The Appleton, Green Bay and Madison metro areas in Wisconsin rank first, second and seventh, respectively, and have a high concentration of children’s entertainment establishments, favorable high school graduation rates and low child poverty rates. Meanwhile, Iowa’s Cedar Rapids and Des Moines-West Des Moines areas take the No. 3 and 4 spots, respectively, ranking very well for their low housing costs as a percentage of income as well as relatively low percentages of children without health insurance.
Insurance not necessarily ensured. With healthcare being an especially hot-button issue in America over the past several years, insurance is an especially important consideration when it comes to any family’s finances. The average percentage of children without health insurance across all 200 metro areas in the study is 4.97%, and while the majority of our top 10 metro areas fall below this rate, two areas in particular – Provo-Orem and Ogden-Clearfield, Utah – hover near or above it.
1. Appleton, WI
Appleton, Wisconsin is the best place to raise kids, according to the data we considered for our study this year. The Appleton metro area leads this list for housing costs as a percentage of income at 16.72%, so you are likely to be able to find an affordable but nice place to live with your family. It also has the sixth-lowest childhood poverty rate overall – at 7.9% – and the eighth-lowest violent crime rate overall – at 153 incidents per 100,000 residents.
2. Green Bay, WI
Packers fans, rejoice! Green Bay, Wisconsin is another very affordable option to raise kids, with housing costs representing 16.77% of income, the second-lowest rate for this metric in the study. Children’s entertainment establishments represent 0.28% of all establishments in Green Bay, the 12th-highest rate. Finally, the poverty rate among children in Green Bay is 10.6%, 22nd-lowest out of all 200 metro areas we analyzed.
3. Cedar Rapids, IA
Just 1.66% of the children in Cedar Rapids, Iowa are without health insurance, the seventh-lowest rate for this metric in the study. The metro area also has the 11th-lowest rate out of all 200 areas we considered for housing costs as a percentage of income, at 17.46%. Cedar Rapids’ violent crime rate is 226 incidents each year per 100,000 residents, rankings 17th-lowest overall.
4. Des Moines-West Des Moines, IA
The Des Moines-West Des Moines, Iowa area takes the No. 4 spot in the study. It has a population that is 21.3% children, the 25th-highest rate for this metric overall. This locale finishes in the top 25 for housing costs as a percentage of income, with the median person spending just 17.81% of their income on housing costs. It also ranks within the top 20 of the study for its low percentage of children without health insurance, at 2.15%.
5. Fargo, ND-MN
The Fargo, North Dakota-Minnesota metro area ranks within the top 10 of the study for its low average daily air pollution. The metro area also ranks within the top 15 for housing costs as a percentage of income, at 17.61%. Children make up 20.1% of the population – Fargo ranks within the top fourth of the study for this relatively high rate, meaning that children who grow up here will likely have more peers than in many other metro areas in the study.
6. Sioux Falls, SD
The Sioux Falls, South Dakota metro area’s population is 22.1% children, the 19th-highest rate for this metric in the study. The area has a child poverty rate of 8.1%, which is the eighth-best across all 200 metro areas overall. The percentage of children without health insurance – at 4.01% – ranks within the top half of the study, 98th out of 200 metro areas.
7. Madison, WI
The Madison, Wisconsin metro area ranks relatively low in terms of percentage of the population who are children, at 17.2%. Madison ranks better, though, in terms of its low child poverty rate, with just 8.5% of those children living in poverty, the 12th-best rate in the study. Madison places 18th overall in terms of violent crime, with a relatively low 227 incidents per 100,000 residents.
8. Provo-Orem, UT
Provo-Orem, Utah’s population is 28.1% children – the highest rate for this metric in the study. The metro area also comes in fourth-lowest for child poverty rate, with just 7.5% of those children living in poverty. While the Provo-Orem area doesn’t score as well in terms of health insurance, coming in the bottom quartile with 6.61% of children lacking medical insurance coverage, it does have the second-lowest violent crime rate across all 200 metro areas for which we analyzed data.
9. Kennewick-Richland, WA
Kennewick-Richland, Washington is the only metro area in our top 10 that is located in a coastal state. Kennewick-Richland’s population is 24.0% children, the 10th-highest rate for this metric in the study. The locale places 12th overall for its low violent crime rate, with 195 incidents per 100,000 residents. The metro area also ranks within the top 50 of the study for low housing costs as a percentage of income and high concentration of children’s entertainment establishments. Finally, it ranks 17th-best overall and second-best in the top 10 for its low percentage of children without health insurance, at just 2.12%.
10. Ogden-Clearfield, UT
Ogden-Clearfield, Utah is the final city in our top 10 and it has a population that is 25.6% children, the fourth-highest rate for this metric across all 200 metro areas in the study. The child poverty rate is 8.2%, the ninth-lowest rate in the study. The metro area ranks 20th overall of the study for its low housing costs as a percentage of income and 30th overall for its low violent crime rate.
Data and Methodology
To find the best cities to raise kids in 2020, we analyzed data for the 200 largest U.S. metro areas across the following metrics:
Percentage of the population who are children. Data comes from the Census Bureau’s 2018 1-Year American Community Survey.
Housing costs as a percentage of income. This is the median housing cost as a percentage of the median household income. Data comes from the Census Bureau’s 2018 1-Year American Community Survey.
Concentration of children’s entertainment establishments. This is the percentage of establishments in a metro area that are related to children’s entertainment. We considered bowling alleys, zoos, sports teams, arcades, museums and theme parks as children’s entertainment establishments. Data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2018 Metro Area Business Patterns Survey.
High school graduation rate. Data comes from the 2020 County Health Rankings (https://www.countyhealthrankings.org).
Air pollution. This measures the average daily fine particulate matter. Data comes from the 2020 County Health Rankings.
Child poverty rates. Data comes from the Census Bureau’s 2018 1-Year American Community Survey.
Percentage of children without health insurance. Data comes from the Census Bureau’s 2018 1-Year American Community Survey.
Violent crime rate. The number of incidents of violent crime per 100,000 residents. Data is from the 2020 County Health Rankings.
First, we ranked each metro area in each metric. From there, we found each metro area’s average ranking across all the metrics, assigning each metric an equal weight. We used this average ranking to create our final score. The metro area with the highest average ranking received an index score of 100. The metro area with the lowest average ranking received an index score of 0.
Grow to the next step with your finances – with a little guidance. If you want to have kids, you should get your finances in order as early as possible. A financial advisor can help you do that. Finding a financial advisor doesn’t have to be hard. SmartAsset’s free tool connects you with financial advisors in your area in five minutes. If you’re ready to be matched with local advisors, get started now.
Need more space? Thinking of buying your dream home in one of these locales? Make sure you use our mortgage calculator to see what you might be paying each month.
Master the ABCs of budgeting. No matter where you live or how big your family is, managing your money is important. A solid budget can be a good place to start.
Written By: By Ben Geier, of CEPF®, September, 2020
Linda Secrist & Associates is the top selling team in luxury homes in the SLC Market. They have received countless awards over the past 20 years, including “Sales Team of The Year” for over 10 years including 2019! Linda Secrist is #54 in the top 100 Agents in the World in luxury residential real estate. If you’re searching for homes in Sandy, Salt Lake, Cottonwood Heights, Millcreek, Draper, South Jordan, Bountiful, Centerville, Farmington or anywhere in northern Utah, Linda Secrist & Associates are the real estate agents to call. If you’re buying or selling a home, don’t hesitate to text or call us at 801-455-9999!
So far, 2020 has been a year unlike any other. With the end of the year just around the corner, the promise of going back to "normal" seems shaky at best. The Utah Housing Market has been one of the best on records. However, millions of Americans are facing massive income loss and widespread unemployment, and almost every industry has been forced to adapt in one way or another. How does the housing market look as we enter the last quarter of the year?
The Economy, Unemployment and the Housing Market
After a record period of expansion in the U.S., February 2020 saw the beginning of stay-at-home orders and business closures across the nation. The National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the U.S. officially entered a recession in February, or a significant decline in economic activity spread across national sectors. Unlike previous recessions caused solely by economic weakness, the current recession is specifically related to the impact of the pandemic.
A monumental decline in employment and production quickly spread across the country and continues to impact the various real estate market sectors. Although the unemployment rate appears to be slowly improving, the jobless rate is still higher than it's ever been in the past 70 years. Unemployment concerns and changing unemployment benefits are leaving a large segment of U.S. homeowner populations vulnerable to evictions, foreclosures or other issues.
Changes in the Real Estate Market
Despite economic upset and a clear slowdown at the onset of the pandemic, recent data shows that the U.S. is experiencing one of the most competitive real estate markets in recent history. Predictions for the rest of the year still vary across the board, but certain housing markets are seeing a monumental increase in sales activity and home sale prices.
Home prices are continuing to rise while inventory fluctuates in more desirable areas. The remote work trend has given many Americans the opportunity to leave high-density, metropolitan areas and relocate to areas with a lower cost of living and more leisure/lifestyle options. Other homeowners who may be struggling with mortgage payments or concerns about financial stability are on the move in search of better employment opportunities and/or more affordable housing options.
The months to come will tell us a lot about how the real estate market will behave in 2021, but some are predicting home price growth to flatten and see a lag in home prices as the impact of a recession catches up to many people. Many believe that mortgage forbearance and foreclosure moratoriums currently in place to protect homeowners impacted by the pandemic are keeping the real estate market afloat. As these policies begin to expire, we may see a minor housing crash as a result if additional legislation isn't put in place. Only time will tell.
A Note on the Rental Market
The American renter population has been one of the groups hit hardest by the pandemic as millions continue to struggle to pay rent. Thankfully, legislation exists to prevent struggling tenants from eviction during this time, but landlords and renters alike are left wondering what the future will hold when moratoriums expire and the economy begins to recover. Some experts predict rent prices will continue to fall and vacancy rates will continue to rise through the rest of 2020 as unemployment and income loss continue to impact the renter population.
Moving Forward
The whole world is working through unprecedented times, so predicting the future of any industry is difficult to do. According to realtor.com's Housing Market Recovery Index, the U.S. housing market has returned to January 2020 growth levels, meaning we've recovered from the immediate disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic—a start to recession recovery.
We may see many changes in the real estate space moving forward, like short-term or vacation rentals shifting to suit the needs of long-term, remote and corporate tenants. The industry as a whole benefits when policies are put in place to protect mortgages and provide relief for renters. Landlords are facing some of the greatest difficulties during this ongoing storm. While the national real estate market has proven to be a bright spot in an otherwise unpromising economy, the overwhelming challenges the rental industry faces will inevitably impact the industry as a whole, and vice versa.
Currently, it's impossible to predict the future, but the final months of 2020 will help us all further understand the impact of the pandemic on the real estate market and how we expect the market to respond in 2021.
Written By Brentnie Daggett and Posted on Oct 13 2020 - 4:27pm by Housecall
Linda Secrist & Associates is the top selling team in luxury homes in the SLC Market. They have received countless awards over the past 20 years, including “Sales Team of The Year” for over 10 years including 2019! Linda Secrist is #54 in the top 100 Agents in the World in luxury residential real estate. If you’re searching for homes in Sandy, Salt Lake, Cottonwood Heights, Millcreek, Draper, South Jordan, Bountiful, Centerville, Farmington or anywhere in northern Utah, Linda Secrist & Associates are the real estate agents to call. If you’re buying or selling a home, don’t hesitate to text or call us at 801-455-9999!
