435 Podcast: Southern Utah
Explore the heartbeat of Southern Utah with the 435 Podcast, your go-to source for all things local in Washington County. Stay ahead of the curve with our in-depth coverage, expert analysis, and captivating interviews. Whether you're a resident or visitor, our podcast is your key to unlocking the latest happenings and trends in St. George and the surrounding areas. Tune in now to stay informed and connected with our thriving community!
435 Podcast: Southern Utah
Downtown Revitalized Including Bonrue Bakery
What does it mean when a community evolves? From Farmstead's transformation into Bonrue Bakery to the complex urban planning challenges facing St. George, this conversation explores how Southern Utah is navigating its adolescence as a growing region.
Chris Conners shares his entrepreneurial journey, including how his French-inspired bakery found its footing in downtown St. George and the unexpected positive response to rebranding. His story illuminates the broader evolution happening across our community – businesses creating other businesses, talent attracting more talent, and new ideas reshaping what it means to live in this desert landscape.
The discussion dives deep into the barriers preventing innovative solutions to housing and transportation challenges. With over 16 different residential zoning classifications alone, even experienced developers spend countless hours navigating regulations that often prevent common-sense development. As City Council member Danielle Larkin notes, "People are fearful. Change feels scary, it feels threatening." Yet this fear often leads to contradictions – residents simultaneously want charming, walkable neighborhoods while opposing the very zoning changes that would create them.
Perhaps most fascinating is the exploration of how self-driving vehicles will transform St. George within the next decade. Are we investing millions in parking structures and road infrastructure that may become obsolete? As one participant observes about his nine-year-old son's reaction to autonomous vehicles: "He's like, 'Why would I ever have to drive a car?' And I think as a kid I was so excited to drive a car because self-driving wasn't an option."
Join us for this thought-provoking conversation about finding balance between preservation and progress, between suburban comfort and urban vitality, and between the St. George of yesterday and the community we're building for tomorrow. Subscribe to the 435 Podcast for more insights into the people and ideas shaping Southern Utah.
Looking for the best bakery? Visit their webpage here: https://bonruebakery.com/
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[00:00:00] Intro.
[00:10:45] Bonrue Bakery: The Rebranding Story.
[00:26:25] Growth Challenges in St. George History.
[00:41:20] Downtown Development and Public Perception.
[01:00:32] Zoning Restrictions and Urban Planning Issues.
[01:18:25] Transportation Evolution and Self-Driving Future.
[01:32:40] Housing Solutions and Downtown Redevelopment.
A lot of people talk about not wanting change and seeing growth as this negative thing and wanting to keep things the same as the way that they are and, at the same time, people are born to be creative and create things right. It's a human nature thing is that we want to create something.
Speaker 2:When you're a small business owner, when you're an entrepreneur, all you do is change. That's all you do. Every day is something different.
Speaker 3:It's true there's so many people that revolve around this industry that that 18% is the construction, but then the layers beyond. That is much, much higher.
Speaker 1:From the Blueform Media Studios. This is the 435 Podcast, the pulse of Southern Utah.
Speaker 1:If you're looking for a nice cup of coffee and you're in downtown St George, fs Coffee Co, that's where you're going to want to stop. It's right there on the corner of Tabernacle and Main Street in downtown St George. So if you've got a bicycle, ride it on down there and grab a drip of coffee and tell them the 435 guys sent you. We got a treat, a literal treat for everybody. We treat, a literal treat for everybody. We got a little treat, treat for everybody. Chris conners, with the newly branded bonroo bakery, formerly known as farmstead.
Speaker 2:you're here, I'll take a sip as the bonroo is branded.
Speaker 1:It's beautiful you got sweet hats. You brought us swag. You brought us some, uh, bond room swag. I love it. Yeah, yeah, um, it was. This was a, I think. Were you nervous about the brand change a little bit? Oh, I was. You gotta get in, you gotta get in there. I was terrified, you were oh my god, I was yeah because of my thought is because of like the facebook whenever there's like changes, people like panic, like what's happening or what. What was the fear coming from? I?
Speaker 2:think my biggest fear was it somehow going to saint george word of mouth first. Yeah, right, um the positive comments on always saint george word it's very uplifting if you go to that um uh, I mean the. The response we received on our own page was insane. Yeah, um, it was a hundred percent positive. There wasn't one negative comment.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was shocked.
Speaker 2:It was. It was crazy and I was, and we did so much research behind it. On, I love the name, I think the name's great and I think it's more fitting. I hate to say this and I think it's more fitting. I hate to say this, but I think it's more fitting than farmstead, because when people and and we've said this before when people come to bonru, they say you know what?
Speaker 2:this reminds me of a, of a bakery in france, or you know, in europe and so it has some some european feel to the name and so, yeah, I was terrified, A lot of sleepless nights and and, like I was telling McCray, I'm so sick of names, I mean I'm terrible with that, I'm not the creative type with any of that stuff. So, um, someone coming in with uh, uh, I just, I just kind of left it in the in the hands of more of of more creative and more talented people than me, which isn't hard, you know, being more talented and more creative than me, because I'm not that person, or even being smarter than me.
Speaker 2:But, McRae hated it right out of the gate. Mcrae hated it. No, I didn't.
Speaker 3:No, I just couldn't get it to roll off my tongue. I was saying that day in the focus group I kept saying to myself hey, let's go to farm or farmstead, right, let's go to Bonne Rue. And initially I was like I just can't get it to roll. I can't, I don't know like farmstead I I've I've seen farmstead since before it was farmstead, you know, and it's just farmstead. And uh, so that day I was like, oh, I liked it. But in me I'm that you know that NIMBY or that not NIMBY, we're going to talk about NIMBYs that person that doesn't want change, right, I was like, but after some thinking, and now I'm like let's go to Bonnaroo. It's like it just flows, it's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's good, I love it.
Speaker 3:And what's funny, flows it's great yeah, I think it's good, I love it and, what's funny, everyone's resistant to change.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we're all resistant, all resistant, and you're gonna definitely have people who are like I hate it. What have you done? And then, two months later, they'll say they'll forget about they'll forget about it.
Speaker 2:Well, isn't it funny too when, when you're in, when you're a small business owner, when you're an entrepreneur, all you do is change, that's all you do is change you are.
Speaker 2:Every day is something different and you're always dealing with that adversity. And to me it was like it's weird because I've this is my seventh concept, my seventh restaurant and every five years I've actually opened a restaurant and sold a restaurant and I I was like I'm never doing that again. After farmstead, I'm like this is my baby, this is my child, I'm going with this. This is my meal. Ticket and literal meal ticket literal meal ticket.
Speaker 2:And then five years later, I'm like we changed, we changed the name. I didn't sell anything, but we changed the name. So I'm like, yeah, for me it was kind of a little bit easier. But, um, yeah, I'm glad you guys like it, I love it. So, and and the response from the community has been fantastic. So, and I, I, I, I just love this community so much because it's just a such a positive community. It's just fantastic, yeah.
Speaker 1:Support yeah it's very european. Uh, it was inspired, it's, it's a. It was a french bakery to begin with, right, french style pastries to begin with, and so to really have it match when you walk in, I I think makes the most sense because, for, for all of us that know farmstead from before, like the americana I made made this comment when we were talking in the focus group about like this Americana feels that does this take away from the Americana feel? But I think it. You know it's a made up word, right, and so when we think of, like, what is America? It's a melting pot of all these different cultures, and Southern Utah has become a place for people from everywhere in the world, right, and so I think it.
Speaker 1:I think it's really fitting, and I think you're going to look back, probably even just a year from now, and be like, why did we ever go with farmstead? This doesn't. You know what I mean. And I I think, uh, especially new people coming into the area will feel St George isn't just, uh, this small town trying to be a big town. It, there's going to be a lot of these elements that will keep cropping up to where it makes us, really continue to make us unique Right, not just the landscape.
Speaker 2:I think we need to continue to push that envelope. I mean we push it. Yeah, I mean we could use Bonne Rue as an example, but we should continue to kind of push for little, small incremental improvements. Yeah, especially with our just, with our community. Yeah, in general in my opinion. Yeah, especially with our just, with our community in general in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and not everybody has that opinion. I think it's easy, especially for the people that are born and raised here. You know the city didn't change from, you know, 1920 to 1970. And then from 1970 to 99, it really didn't change a whole ton. And then you know, since basically 20, I bet you 2017, I think it was right, after that big five marketing campaign through greater Zion, to bring people to the national parks at least because we moved here in 2015,. We went up to I've sold the story before. It was Christmas day and nobody was in Zion. We drove up, we we maybe saw two other cars up there on Christmas day in 2015. By 2017, they were running trams and there were lines like down Springdale Boulevard, right, or the yeah, it's Springdale Boulevard, and it was just packed. You know it was like the word was out the St George wasn't this little hidden gem anymore and so and we've just been on an upward trajectory ever since 2017.
Speaker 4:Right, that's the big five advertising, right. But I want to push back a little bit on what you were saying about the. It didn't change from like the 1920s to the 1970s because in reality it was always in decline, like financially, economically, it was just a fight to stay alive here. So like if you talk to my husband's family that started here.
Speaker 4:All their business was out of town. Every kid who grew up had to leave town right to be able to make it economically, to be able to find a job. So even though we say, oh, it didn't change and we loved it and it just stayed the same, it's this remembrance that is clouded because you're forgetting, or we're all forgetting, that, like when a town stays that small my, my mom, grew up in parowan. Parowan has stayed like 2 000 people. It was 2 000 people when she was a kid, it's 2 000 people now. I think it might be 2 500, but it stayed very small for now, yeah, and they'll probably expand right.
Speaker 4:But all this time, what you did if you grew up in parowan is you left, so there's, there's a difference and most people wanted to leave too.
Speaker 1:It wasn't even just like they. They could probably stay, but there was no people to build businesses and and grow and they probably were like we would like to stay but we can't. We have we got to go. And the kids younger kids they always want to. I want to leave my small town and go to the big city. And then they have kids and they're like I want to move back right, which has kind of happened which is happening massively here which is everyone I talked to that doesn't live in saint george wants to get back to saint george?
Speaker 1:where, when they were growing up, they were probably like I gotta get out of here and same with my.
Speaker 3:My mom also grew up in parowan and my family's from parowan and and uh, so it's interesting. It's the, the. The comparison is interesting and even I'll push back on, even from 80, from 70, 80, that's really when I think the incline really started was yeah, the i-15 was connected in 71, right, so, like they, they cut through the gorge in 71, and so that was like we've had steady, like pretty steady upward trajectory since then until, obviously, the crash.
Speaker 3:But then I think you're I mean the. It's like we had this up up trend and then around that time when Instagram and every you know all that marketing and all the you know St George Zion National Park at all, it all hit the mainstream. And then since then it's just up. Yeah, it's been up Even more straight up.
Speaker 2:Do you think that there's still more people leaving St George because of what Danielle described as like going? They have to go and get jobs somewhere else.
Speaker 3:I think it's becoming less and less. I think it's still, I think it's still out there.
Speaker 2:Is our economy diverse enough to where we can offer all those? Not, yet it's getting there. It's getting there.
Speaker 3:It's not there yet. I mean, compared to 10 years ago, absolutely there's a huge difference, a lot more diversification. But I think we still have a ways to go.
Speaker 1:So I would say, from a diversification standpoint because I ran this research on how diverse is our economic base as percentages of the economy Because it's one thing to say, do we have enough jobs, is there enough total jobs to where you know somebody graduates from high school or college Can they find a job here? We don't, we don't have enough of that, but we do have a diverse enough economy to where there's options for a lot of different things for people to do right. So, like, if they want to get into manufacturing and engineering, there is, there's jobs here, where 10 years ago that wasn't necessarily as true right. Where, if they want to get into marketing, there's marketing options. If they want to get into health, there's health. If they want to get into government.
Speaker 1:So I think the the diversification, especially since the nineties, is significantly different. In 2008, 30% of the entire economy was built on construction, just construction alone, and in the, at that, 30 percent and right. This is like 2005 to 2007 and so when the market crashed because of the bloated housing inventory that just devastated the local economy, where, uh, and I was going to pull it up, so I had the exact number, but I think it's about.
Speaker 2:I feel like it's about 15.
Speaker 4:Oh, it's 15. I think it's like 18 is the last number that I heard. Oh, that's interesting, yeah, but it's still huge.
Speaker 3:It's still huge, it's still maybe 18 that's still a big that's still a big number, which is why you know the whole, the whole conversation of people that are, you know, complaining about the building. If you cut off building, you cut off 18 of our of our local economy, which is which spreads very. I was talking to a builder about this the other day because he was like, too, he's like I bet you two or between two or 300 people touch every home that I build, from my crew to all the subcontracting crews, the engineering, everything, and it falls down into the realtors and lenders and title companies. Like there's so many people that revolve around this industry that even that, that 18 percent is the construction but then the layers beyond that is much, much higher it also falls down into food trucks and people picking up their breakfast at bonru, like it's exponentially affecting all of our economy.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely so. It's actually mining, logging and construction, which construction you can classify in a couple of different ways, because this is Bureau of Labor Statistics for the US. This is St George specifically, it's 11.1% of the economy as of January of 2025. Interesting, Exactly. So there's some tangent stuff, because I think other services is 2.6%. Some of that stuff trade transportation utilities I think some of that could be, depending on how you mix it in Trades might fit into construction, where it's like the electricians and the HVAC and plumbing, and some of that stuff might get lumped into trade transportation, which that's the biggest one.
Speaker 1:Trade transportation utilities is 18%. So between construction, trade transportation utilities, which is probably mostly construction and development type stuff, is 18%. So those two things combined is 29% of the local economy. But utilities has grown quite a bit, transportation's grown quite a bit and I know that's just going to with the new inland port that's going to grow even more. There's going to be lots of jobs there. Our unemployment is about four and a half percent, so it's higher than the state and it's higher than the national average. But that comes into this secondary category, which is transition is finding places for people to live. You know it's like you can, especially as restaurants, right, and you know the leisure happens.
Speaker 4:Well.
Speaker 1:Robert as I understand it.
Speaker 4:Unemployment is actually affected by our retirement community because if you retire early, you are actually counted as unemployed, even though you're choosing to be unemployed.
Speaker 1:So that does actually affect our numbers in St George? Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:That's got to be a huge effect Because, as an employer, I can't find enough people Right and I think most people can't.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we definitely counted our business. I think that number is like I mean 4.5%.
Speaker 2:I think it's closer to maybe 2%.
Speaker 3:It has to be right and that's an interesting. I didn't realize I wish to be employed, which is weird.
Speaker 1:We count unemployment and we keep changing the way we count employment. I feel like they change, like what's the…?
Speaker 2:They change the field goal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they change the goalposts Exactly. Well, and the interesting thing with employment too.
Speaker 3:Now you know, we see all the work from home or the remote. You don't have to have a job in St George to live here either, which we see a ton of A lot of entrepreneurialism in general in St George. Whether you have so many people that have found ways to not have to depend on a job in St George.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and they still want. They don't want to necessarily have to work out of their house, they prefer to go to some kind of office and have the networking piece to it. So they've really found this because there's a large community of that so. So I think when we're we're we kind of started in congratulations on bonroo man, this stuff I have to point this out before we keep going. This is called a what.
Speaker 2:That is incredible a s'more sandwich, so this is a s'more sandwich of 10.
Speaker 1:That is a graham cracker cookie with.
Speaker 2:I've never seen that one um, and then dipped in chocolate. I can't wait to eat that I can't wait, I mean it. You know I'm, I'm not. I'm not a baker, I'm not, I'm, I'm an operator. You know, I just try to find talented people and we spoke about that on the last podcast. Is is finding talent.
Speaker 2:So like doing all of this stuff and the piping that it takes to do our our filled chocolate croissant and artists man, I mean it's just, it's unreal, and you just kind of, I mean, you find talented people and you're like, okay, go off. And you know, be, be wild, go off and great. It's like, go off and do your thing, I'll leave you alone. Let me know what you need to succeed and I'm here if you need me. And you know, it's just, it's. It's been fantastic to see kids, too, in our local community. 18 year olds, 20 year olds come in no, absolutely nothing about food, and then they just catch on and they're just like man, they their eyes light up and then they're doing stuff at home and you know we have four people that started their own business, oh yeah, from from farmstead.
Speaker 2:That's awesome, um, you know, uh, and, and they've all been successful yeah, which is so, so rewarding for me to see yeah you it's just it kind of brings a tear to my eye when they come in I was like, how's your business? And they're like, oh, it's going really well, it's. It's awesome to see.
Speaker 1:And and, and this is the cool thing, right, Going back to um, you know, empowering, thinking of St George being on life support for you know, a hundred years. Right, no water, tough, tough environment to live. Right, we get H, we get AC, and it makes it a little bit easier. Right, we get a freeway, and it makes it a little bit easier, and then we start to move on. But then you have these businesses that create businesses, and that's that's one of those.
Speaker 1:You know, a lot of people talk about not wanting change and seeing growth as this negative thing and wanting to keep things the same as the way that they are and, at the same time, people are born to be creative and create things.
Speaker 1:Right, this, it's a human nature thing is that we want to create something, and having businesses create other businesses is what helps really have this compounding effect in in every aspect of life, and it also gives people roots in St George to where they want to take care and love their community even more. Right, when they're able to stay here. It's not a lily pad to somewhere else. It's as beautiful as it is, as it tastes, right, and, danielle, you had mentioned how. You know it can look pretty, but it might not taste great, but it always tastes as good as it looks, which is a cool combo. How have you been able to attract? Thinking of St Georgeorge being this smaller town, has it been difficult for you to attract talent because you're bringing talent from every man everywhere. Yeah, like you're bringing people from not just vegas, but like europe and it's incredible all over the place.
Speaker 2:You know it, it recently it has. At the very beginning it was, it was fairly easy to recruit from Las Vegas. Now, from Las Vegas now we've become very popular, right, fortunate. I mean I thank God every day that how popular we've become. So now I mentioned the name and they're like yeah, I'll apply. Yeah, you know things like that. At the very beginning it was a little bit more difficult, but I would just call some contacts in Las Vegas and say, hey, we're looking for this, we're looking for this. Do you know anyone?
Speaker 2:And fortunately, through our uh, one of our founders, chris Herron, who passed away a year after we, we opened um, he had a huge name, um in Las Vegas. He was the most talented pastry chef in las vegas. When he was there, yeah, um, and so he, he would make calls and stuff like that. So we were able to recruit talent. Now, the first it's funny because the first year I you know we were making absolutely. I was making absolutely no money because I was just paying people to get here. Yeah, right, I was just like dude, I will give you, and all of them stayed at the jewel uh, which is right above farmstead, because it was the only place that I could get, I mean 2020 to 2025, 2024. I was like, where did they stay?
Speaker 2:they stayed at the one place where the uh, the psychic is on, yeah, yeah and I was like dude I kind of like I need to find you something else, so you know, and then jewel would give us some deals because we had at one time, I think we had six apartments oh wow, in jewel oh dang, you know, and uh, and now we've gotten to the point to where it's like, okay, now you, I could pay you enough to where you can afford your own apartment, but it's still.
Speaker 2:that's one of the things that is holding us back is the cost of living, or the idea of maybe not necessarily pushing that envelope, but saying, hey, we need a little bit. We need to think of a different way to do something different with housing so I can recruit more people. We need to think of a different way to do something different with housing, you know, so I can recruit more people. Right, you know? I mean, I started at 15, I'm at a hundred people. Yeah, I want to. I want to be around 200. Probably by the time we're done with expansion in Southern Utah, we'll probably have 200 people employed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, which is incredible by the way.
Speaker 2:And I can't just say you, 200 people employed, yeah which is incredible, by the way and I can't just say, you know, go to the apartment behind the psychic and give that lady 100 bucks or whatever it is, you know, motel looking we need a solution for that, in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Um sorry, to go off on changing those because I think it's a good transition, because what I, what I wanted, what we wanted to talk about, because talent.
Speaker 3:That's what you need is the downtown plan.
Speaker 1:the general plan we've been it about is the downtown plan. The general plan We've been. It's been a working plan for about two years, right, because I think the first working plan was about 2022, 2023.
Speaker 4:About five years ago. Believe it or?
Speaker 1:not, was it? Was it that far? Ok, so and then you had, you know, people come in consultants saying, ok, let me look at your demographics, let me look at the way the city is designed and let's come up with a plan. How do we zone out the city of St George, but then more specifically the downtown sector? Right, that's right. And so then they fire consultants and then they think that consultant doesn't know what they're talking about. So we take that plan and maybe we send them away and we twist that plan and it seems like it hasn't changed a whole lot in the last two years at least, from like the original downtown plan.
Speaker 4:It hasn't changed hardly at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it hasn't changed, hardly at all. How do you feel, like, um, the struggle to go through it? Where do you get do you get the most pushback from inside city hall? Or do you get the most push pushback from the public feedback like where do you, where do you get that pressure? Because we we have to evolve, right, especially as we're growing businesses, but the city's changing and you have all these different opinions. Where do you find that the biggest friction point in this general plan? Where have you seen it anyway?
Speaker 4:you know it's interesting as we're talking about change. People are fearful. Right Change feels scary, it feels threatening. How's this going to change my way of life, my quality of life, how my family exists here? So when you do things like make a general plan, it feels threatening to people at times. So to your question I feel like generally the biggest pushback comes from the general public just not being educated on. Well, what is a general plan? Why does it matter? It's really just this bubble, this overview of how can we continue forward, and even just that word forward, it's funny. And even just that word forward. It's funny. When we were doing the general plan. There are all these trigger words.
Speaker 4:You know, progressive forward move, building high density. All of those words are trigger words that in reality, they are what we need because we are an ever-evolving people like we. There's no such thing as sitting still you, we don't sit still.
Speaker 4:We change every single day. We can pretend and say I'm the same as I was 10 years ago, not even close. I'm not the same as I was yesterday, but it just feels scary to people. So I feel like our best opportunity to move forward in an intelligent way so that all of us who own businesses can progress and help our employees to find housing. I mean, this is a big issue with my business also. I have people driving as far as from Parowan, from Apple Valley, from Hilldale, coming in because they can't afford housing here and they're coming to work with us. It's education and I know we all share different education things because we all know each other and sometimes we'll text like, hey, have you seen this? Have you heard this?
Speaker 4:If there was a way for us to get our general public to start listening to podcasts, right, I mean, that are really about what do you do when you live in a city that is growing rapidly. What does that look like? Like what does incremental development that's healthy for our economy look like? What do streets that make sense at a human that look like? Like what does incremental development that's healthy for our economy look like? What do streets that make sense at a human scale, look like and that actually grow wealth for people? What does a street look like that grows? Well, if people understood that, then it wouldn't feel frightening. When they see a bike lane coming in or a wider sidewalk or a trail, they would say, oh, that's about building business instead of um, oh, that's for people in Lycra you know and we don't like them and they're obnoxious and we're going to have a lot of them in town this weekend and you know,
Speaker 4:some of them are obnoxious, they're humans and so, you know, you run into a couple of jerky guys on bikes and then you don't like people on bikes anymore, and and so we just have these weird conflict points that don't really look at the actual issue, which is, over time, we want people to be able to live here, and we want people to be able to live here in a healthy way that they can build wealth, build generational wealth and just have a healthy quality of life.
Speaker 1:So I think back and you probably don't know this, know this at least, and I don't think the three of us other than you might know anything about this, but I'm thinking about the last time they built a general plan. I think that the demographic and the cultural setup of St George, coming as a LDS community, primarily LDS community, you know the organization within that LDS communities. You had wards, you have stakes, you have these communities built into the culture that are outside of government, right, and so you had this ability to collaborate in large groups, and it's less so now. I think it's about 50% of the county is really active LDS, and so you have just the smaller portion of the culture that has this community effort into it.
Speaker 1:And we you sent me a podcast, uh, on strong towns and he was talking about you know how do we? How do we collectively get communities that are, um, that can organize themselves and saying, hey, this is what we want in this small community, and this is what we want in this small community, cause I, I think there's this one size fits all general plan when the population isn't one hundred and ten thousand and it was only at fifty thousand. Yeah, you could make a general plan and have some pretty good consensus, but it gets more and more difficult as you get bigger and bigger. Do you think the consensus building is really all that different from before, that it is today, and does that question make sense?
Speaker 4:I feel like consensus building is a little different, and I personally think one of our biggest problems is social media. It's such a blessing and it's such a curse because, instead of people actually sitting down and talking through issues in a diplomatic and intelligent way, they just fire things off.
Speaker 1:I mean.
Speaker 4:I shared with you guys last night one that just kind of made me laugh. I mean, this lady was just furious that someone had built a home next to her, on the property next to her, because it was just rude. Is what she wrote? It's rude, it blocked my view and that post just made me I'm like, okay, we need to really break this down because we live in a place where people really believe in personal property rights and they believe in independence.
Speaker 4:You should be able to come here and build a business like Kristen and just bring your wares and market them. But then in the same breath you hear people say things. I bet if I asked that lady she would be like I believe strongly in personal property rights for me, but not for you. Who's building next door? And so I feel like social media has made us into like reactors, these fast reactors where we just like spit out. If she'd had a few days to think about that is my point and someone to talk it through with and say, hey, I know you, I know you believe in personal property rights, so let's talk about what this house next door really means to you. Like if you were the one building it, would you want me restricting you and having that conversation, I feel like could have dialed back her emotion and it wouldn't have gone out on St George word of mouth and become this explosive dialogue that doesn't even make any sense and doesn't go anywhere.
Speaker 1:Well it also. There's this friction point between she has property rights as well and she might be thinking they're infringing on my own property rights, as I was here already and now, because of what you're building, it's affecting my quality of life and my vision and expectation of what my property rights are Right, and so she's like it's your property rights versus my property rights are right, and so she's like it's your property rights versus my property rights. And so when you get into that headbutt, you're both shouting the same thing at each other with what solution comes in right, and so it's a non. You end up at a stalemate, right?
Speaker 4:Totally, and I mean what you're bringing up is a really good point, because what it speaks to is zoning. Like why did we create zoning? We created it because we were like well, the people in the 5,000 square foot houses don't want to live by the people in the 1,000 square foot houses, and not next to a Costco or a Costco.
Speaker 4:And so we created these zoning plans that now, in a sense, are really like counterintuitive, because we are like saying we, everything belongs in a exact space. But if you go back to the way communities were built originally which is the thing that something like Bonne Rue speaks to, right You're, you walk into Bonne Rue and you go oh, it feels like I'm in a French village. Well, what does that feel like? It feels like craftsmanship, it feels like neighbors. It feels like community.
Speaker 4:It feels like I come in and you're the owner of the store and I know you and I talk to you, and so people are like I don't want apartments next to me, I don't want commercial next to me, but actually I want to live in a charming neighborhood where I know my neighbors and I feel safe in my community and those two things are contradicting, because we've created such strong zoning that separates people in ways that if you went back to the early building of St George downtown where the shops are, a shop on the front we had our business Larkin plumbing was where Capoletti's is right now and then there's like an apartment behind it.
Speaker 4:And then that's how you would build is you would just kind of like add on as needed. But we've gone so far away from that with zoning and with plans.
Speaker 1:And I think, evolution of people's expectations, right. We go from retirement community life support to retirement community to tourism right and a resort community, and so we keep evolving tourism right and a resort community, and so we keep evolving. And so the expectations of the, of the new people that are here, um, supersede that of the people that were here before. So it's like it used to be okay that you wanted to. You didn't want to have to get in a car and drive, you want to be able to walk to work, so you wanted commercial and your housing to be connected. But then you get to this point where I know now I'm in retirement and I want it dead, silent, quiet with no lights when the sun's down, and their expectations of life. So finding balance is like there's an area here where this is the type of life you can have here. This is the type of life you can have here, and that's where I've come. I used to beat up Ivans pretty bad about being a bedroom community like this, like they're not carrying their weight of, you know, the expectations on the community because their prices are the highest in the County. And when now I live out there and I'm like, oh, I think there's a place for a really quiet, just neighborhood community, right, so like being able to have that, that different, um, different villages, so to speak. You want this kind of lifestyle. It's over here.
Speaker 1:But now downtown is, it's a downtown, it's urban. Right, we're like pre-urban as we're growing. And I look at that downtown plan and there's this, these different scales. Right, there's lively, there's interconnected, where commercial and residential mix, there's the lively which is basically all commercial, not a whole lot of residential, and then there's the traditional neighborhood zone. So you have these different zones within the downtown and in my mind I'm thinking, no, downtown is like it's an urban area. It's kind of all lively at this point, right, no matter where you drive. Now there's a few places, like you know, off 400 and 400, like as you get a little bit closer to the freeway but further from main street and St George Boulevard. But that evolution of how do we create an urban St George that feels good, and is it the government's job to do that or is it the neighborhood's job to do that? Who gets to have that? Say, and that's that's. The tough thing is that I don't know. I don't really have an answer to it.
Speaker 4:Well and we've talked about this before I mean, at the end of the day, if we wanted to do the smartest thing we could possibly do, maybe we would just like literally end zoning right Like just blanket state, blanket over the entire city, just say, all right, we've already built a framework, now go. What do you want to do with this framework? Because the framework's already there. That's so just unconscionable to them because, it's like well, what if I end up with a pig farm next to my house?
Speaker 1:Those are the arguments you start to hear You're going to undo zoning. Just a ridiculous yeah.
Speaker 4:Right. So I feel like the general plan and the downtown general plan is a city's attempt, hopefully not to discourage but to encourage creativity and hopefully it keeps evolving. That's the danger in creating those kinds of plans is that you do to your point like you put these spaces oh this is the lively space. Well, what if the lively space inches over a block? It should, if it naturally, you know, if someone naturally wants it to. So it should be looked at as bubbles and it should be ever evolving and it really should be dictated by the people who are building downtown, who are running businesses downtown. That's where it's so challenging for cities to actually collect feedback and implement it in a way we set up. I would love for us to be able to go backwards from that and do it differently. And I don't blame the people at city hall, like they're all doing their very best to really make St George.
Speaker 2:But they're just abiding by the rule Exactly, and and every time like I looked at the city um, ordinance and and the permits and stuff, it's crazy, it's crazy. It's crazy. Like I, there's so many different zones Right, and like I built in downtown Right and I was lucky enough to find like an empty lot. And thanks to McCray McCray helper.
Speaker 3:You're welcome.
Speaker 2:I was. I was able to to buy that empty lot and I kind of wanted to build a home that fit in downtown. And then I'm like I want to build an ADU back there but I have enough room for two ADUs small, so I could rent them out to my employees. That's not allowed, right?
Speaker 2:And yet it's not allowed yet but it's like, but I feel like I've only been here for five years, little more than five years. I feel like every time I go to the city and ask for something, it's like well, we're working on this and I feel like it's.
Speaker 2:It's constantly kind of moving, but I feel like it should be community driven with that like I can't believe how much, how much stuff the the bike lane got on university I thought that was a great idea and, like people, I was like, yeah, that seems like a solid idea, like a bike lane all the way through main street, like a dedicated bike lane where you could just put it on one side of the road and it could be both traffic with bikes, cause I, I, I ride that with my boys, my family, that my boys are eight and six.
Speaker 2:I don't want to ride on main street, just with a a little line, I mean, a car could just come up and plow us, you know, but a little median it slows traffic down. All that kind of stuff I'm even afraid to bring that up. Yeah, you know, but it would be great if we could ride from our house, which is right off of main street, all the way down main street on bluff, hit the virgin river trail and go on. Yeah, great bike ride, because that's what's special about saint george what?
Speaker 1:what's the negative feedback like? What do people say about that?
Speaker 4:it'll slow down cars, it'll get in the way of cars parking parking there'll be, there'll be a couple cars that can't park on that side of the street. See, this is where the conflict. This is where I see that we have feedback from the community that people just aren't understanding what they're saying, because we're getting feedback saying we hate traffic, we're so frustrated by the traffic. So the solution in a lot of people's minds is all roads need to be for only cars and we need to widen them and we need to make them fast, and that will do away with traffic. We know full well that is exactly how you make traffic worse. You induce demand. More people drive, more people drive aggressively. You have increased death. You have increased you know frustration. You have decreased quality of life. You have decreased air quality. You have people who I mean.
Speaker 4:The numbers that I've seen are that 40% of people in our society can't don't have a driver's license right, so it's either they're just too young or they're too old, or they have some reason why they can't drive, or they just can't afford a car. So there's all these reasons why you just might not drive. So almost half of our society. But we're saying like the only people that we're going to really focus on are people who are able to afford a car and we're going to put all of our money into our infrastructure that is for cars, basically forcing you to have a car to be able to be one of the people who works for Chris to get to the bakery.
Speaker 4:And so when we get that kind of feedback that people just want to be able to drive fast and they want traffic to go away and their solution is one that excludes anybody who's outside of a car, well then we're headed down this dangerous road where we all of a sudden are the exact thing that everybody says they don't want to be, which is Los Angeles. We don't want to be LA, and yet we head down that road and do the exact same pattern that they did. And how do we back out of that? So to me, it's all education, because I don't think anybody is saying this, because they are trying to harm our community. They want our community to be great, and their idea of how our community would be great is absolutely no bike lanes. You know, I need you out of the way of my car. If you ask that same person when they're standing on 700 East with their grandkids trying to go to the Cox auditorium, they're going to say man, I wish people would slow down.
Speaker 4:I wish there was a safe place for me to walk and I think that that 700 East was kind of advertised poorly. It really is an extension of our trail system so it connects to the trail system up on Red Hills Parkway. You'll be able to go all the way up and connect.
Speaker 4:It will be a connection down to the lower trail system once we get the street going underneath I-15. Awesome, so you can actually walk on it. It'll be striped Like you can ride your bike on it, but you can walk on it like any of our trail systems. So it really is just a separation for humans outside of cars to be able to safely access the university.
Speaker 3:And it gives people more options other than a car, because that's the thing is, if you give people other options than driving, then that's part of what helps reduce the traffic, the parking concerns and whatnot, because then not everybody is like I've got to take my car to that area, you can walk to it, you can bike to it and that's yeah. That whole discussion is super interesting and, with zoning in general, the reason why I sold that lot to you, which I'm glad, I'm glad it worked out. But I own a little townhome complex, two parcels down that are fantastic and they're like, they're always in demand, they're we're able to keep the price because they're small and you can't really find many small, affordable things in downtown. Your vacancy rate is pretty much zero, basically zero, yeah and uh.
Speaker 3:So we, when we got that, we also got this lot. That's the exact same lot, the exact same, pretty much exact same dimensions and everything. And our idea was okay, we're gonna get this lot and we want to do the exact same thing. It's six little townhomes that are two bed, one bath, 750 square feet. Perfect, because we, because we the university is growing, college students could could rent it, young people could rent it, people we want.
Speaker 1:Elderly people that don't need a Sun River Villa. Yes, right, like it's, $500,000 for two bedroom.
Speaker 3:So Arthur Ott was like that's perfect, it's two lots down. Well, no, because of some Arbitrary line, arbitrary line that was on the same block two parcels down. There's this from 1995, there was some zoning thing put there that no more townhomes. And so now 25, 30 years later, I'm glad, 30 years later I'm glad they did a traffic study and this traffic study is very scientific.
Speaker 1:Okay, they have somebody sit there and they count every car that drives by, because that never traffic, is that?
Speaker 2:literally the study, the traffic studies.
Speaker 1:They literally sit there and they'll have their little umbrella and they'll sit there and they'll count every car. Because you know, you know and say george, exactly you know and say george, that one weekend versus another weekend you're going to get two completely different you know, scenarios, right?
Speaker 1:what oh this? This thing's going on in town, so over here it's busy and then it's it's crickets over here. Right, these traffic studies drive me insane, but but these are the reasons why we have these arbitrary zoning lines, right? You talked about it before as well. Well, so, thinking about this is the primary election results for 2023. So the last election you ran this is primary election. So if we were to compare the primary election of local government to, let's say, this year, because it's an off-election year for the national elections we're probably going to get a similar result in this election as we did in this primary race. There was a total turnout of 35% in St George. Total turnout 35%. So 37,000, yeah, remaining turned in. Yeah, turned in ballots. This was at the end of. It was 13,000 people voted in the primary 13,000 out of 110,000.
Speaker 1:So when you think of like education, I feel like we're yelling into a void. Yeah, nobody, nobody wants to get educated. They want to wait until they hear about this thing and see the public hearing sign and then they just say the thing that's on their mind. So what's? What's the government's role? Is it their government's role supposed to just listen to those? That small neighborhood that comes out and is not paying attention to anything? Or are they supposed to step back and not be reactive but proactive and say you might not, you might not like this, but this is what we think, based off of everybody who does this on a daily, daily basis. This is the direction that we want to go, because I think of the bike lanes. How does a local government even craft a city? Because we end up just getting whatever is left over, right?
Speaker 2:I feel like that's how it isn't a cool part of a downtown, kind of like the funkiness of it too like well, photoshop shop. Someone's living right above it like Like that's awesome to me, I mean. And sometimes when I talk to people, I talk to everyone who comes into the bakery. If I'm there, right, and sometimes people say, oh, I just got back from vacation. I'm like where'd you go? And it's always a place where we're kind of talking smack about Right. It's like always like a San.
Speaker 1:Francisco, we're in New York or.
Speaker 2:San Diego or something like that. But when you go to those downtown areas like San Francisco if it were, you know obviously some political things need to change in San Francisco and the homelessness and drugs and things like that. But what's cool about San Francisco is being a foodie like me. I could walk anywhere in that city and find a good restaurant and it's a little funky, it has a weird layout, things like that, and that's what's cool about crave.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's what's cool about uh Bonru is, you know it's underneath all these apartments and I'm sure you know those apartments. I I came here right when jewel opened, so to me I was sure you know those apartments. I came here right when Jewel opened, so to me I was like, wow, this is really cool, all these apartments. And I lived in Jewel for two years, while you know, I owned Farmstead for the first two years. So to me that was kind of a cool little spot and I thought that was a really nice step in the right direction for downtown, same with City View. A really nice step in the right direction for downtown, same with uh city view. But I, I've heard now that that's that's a fight with building an apartment complex like that.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you have no idea the fight that you think about, we would not.
Speaker 3:Even we wouldn't have I mean, maybe you would have figured it out somewhere else, right, but we would not have what we have sitting on this table if you hadn't moved here for one which we have a lot of people that move here, and that's one of the things that people always bring up ah, too many people moving here. Well, we had a uh, the best restaurant tour we ever could have imagined that moved here. Then jewel plaza was built, with a perfect spot for a farmstead and for two or three different types of farmsteads right like yeah and it's.
Speaker 1:It's a law office, a mortgage company and a title company and a title company. And then you have a restaurant and and my thought was like why didn't other restaurants? Why have is it?
Speaker 2:is it? That was kind of weird. It's still weird to me because even even city view.
Speaker 1:There's still vacant commercial space. High, high, four, three, five has has done a pretty good job. I think they've stayed busy. Every time I drive by it's busy. It's its own little unique niche. But I just can't. It's surprising to me that the success that you've had isn't duplicated. Why haven't other businesses done it in those other spaces? But anyway, keep.
Speaker 3:And then also if we hadn't built a jewel Plaza, if we hadn't built city view, farmstead would never have been able to be created in downtown St George, like that. Because if you think about the existing infrastructure, where could Chris have gone to put such a cool? I mean, there's a few places that you could rebuild, of course, and whatever. But I just think, I just think about that. I'm like if chris hadn't, if chris wouldn't have 100 employees, he wouldn't have four locations, he wouldn't have the warehouse in leeds, if there wasn't a good opportunity for him to be able to come in here, live very, very strapped in an apartment yeah, above his bakery, that where he could, doesn't have to travel to every day, it's just walking downstairs.
Speaker 3:Like, because people complain about the jewel plazas, they complain about all these things in downtown that really make the downtown a downtown like I love. Over the last five years, more people walking downtown there are. There are so many things we have to still improve about downtown, but there's, I think it's getting better and better and better, and yet there's so many people in the community that for some reason, more housing downtown or more apartments, more things that will get people downtown or is somehow a bad thing, and I just don't, I just don't understand that.
Speaker 4:I think it's a suburban mentality that a lot of us grew up with. I did. I grew up on an acre in Sandy, utah, out in the suburbs, and we lived on these sprawling acres our entire street. And you get that suburban mentality and then you try to overlay that onto a downtown and because for so many years downtown St George wasn't growing, it became a suburban space and so there are still people who feel like this should just be single family homes downtown and there really is a push for that. I wish that I had been prepared for this and brought actual conversations that were had when Joel Plaza was trying to build.
Speaker 1:I don't do a good job preparing my guests. I'm just telling you that it would be.
Speaker 4:It would be so enlightening for you to hear some of the I mean just absolutely extreme.
Speaker 3:Like this will ruin downtown.
Speaker 4:It will be, you know, brothels and crime and drugs and it will be a complete disaster and everybody will have to move out of downtown. Downtown's dead because Joe Plaza is coming in. I am not exaggerating.
Speaker 2:You know what's crazy.
Speaker 1:It's the same thing for town square. There was like a huge uproar about town square putting in the waste. What a waste of money of putting in a uh uh a park in the middle of town you know what's crazy, though.
Speaker 2:That's why we moved here like so many people love it, being from las vegas it is so suburban it is, and I hated it. I hated the living situation in Las Vegas. I there was never. I couldn't walk to work, I couldn't bike to work without the fear of literally being killed, because there is just it's four way traffic and it's 65 miles an hour, you don't know who's driving drunk around and all that kind of stuff, you know. So we had to literally drive to a trail to go for a walk. Yeah, like, think of that. Like that's just to me that just sounds crazy. Right, but we looked at city view first. We looked at city view with our Magusa tacos concept. We looked at city view first as it was being built and city view didn't have a hood. And I said, well, why are you, why do you? You can't have a restaurant here, you need a hood. And they were like, oh well, we've never done this before.
Speaker 2:We kind of made it as though they literally had to make a hood, but they wanted us to to pay for it the early, like you know, uh tenant improvement or whatever it is, and I'm like well, I'm going up four stories and I'm going in people's apartments and they're like, okay, let, let us get back to you and think about that. And now there's a restaurant there.
Speaker 2:Uh, you know, two years after we looked, at it yeah right and luckily the the uh owners of jewel were like we need food and we'll do anything to get you guys in here with, like, your track record and initially that was supposed to be in magusa tacos. Then danielle knows that, yeah, that was supposed to be in magusa tacos and they actually messed up on the the build out with the hood. They originally the owners of that gave us um an apartment hood, so they gave us an apartment for a microwave, like for a microwave.
Speaker 4:they gave us an apartment hood, so they gave us an apartment for a microwave, like for a microwave.
Speaker 2:They gave us an apartment hood and I'm like this is not going to work. This isn't going to work. And they said, okay, we'll do anything to make it right. How should we do it? So we got the engineer in and we, we made it work. Yeah, and that and, and they said and they said you can't do two concepts, because it was supposed to be a Magusta tacos and Farmstead donuts. Okay, so we were supposed to change. It was supposed to be two concepts in one building, basically one unit. And they said, but we could only do one concept with this new way. That we did it and our chef, chris Herron at the time, was like you know what? Let's just do an awesome bakery. And I was like, dude, what? Let's just do an awesome bakery.
Speaker 2:And I was like dude, I am a thousand percent in and that's how Farmstead came about. But it would have never happened that way if we didn't look at the traffic and say St George Boulevard is too much traffic for us because people are flying by. We want somewhere where people are going a little bit less miles per hour and see our signage and see people in and see the energy of people going in there and people could park on the street. And we knew that people, if we had a product that was great, people would park and just walk. Yeah Right, and that's kind of like what we created. Yeah Right, and that's kind of like what we created. But now I don't think you could even build a jewel because you have to pay. How much is it for a parking spot?
Speaker 4:Well, if you build a parking garage right now, the parking spaces are averaging about $40,000 per parking space in a parking garage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Wait $40,000 per parking space to build a parking garage so so I know that sounds like a fake number so so for the space just for one space to do the engineer, like when you, when you build it up, like when you boil it all down of all the costs that go into it.
Speaker 2:So how much is a? Do you know this number off in a just a regular parking garage.
Speaker 4:The parking garage that the city is building right now is costing $10 million.
Speaker 3:That to me is crazy, it's crazy.
Speaker 1:It's insane and ridiculous.
Speaker 2:Do you know what you could create for $10 million for a building, Not to say is it warranted? I'm just asking.
Speaker 4:To me it's insanity. I mean we do need places, right, like we need places downtown, but the imbalance to me is so insane because if we were putting that same kind of energy, I mean I can. I don't want to get on my soapbox about transportation, Cause that's a whole nother conversation, but you start looking at the amount of money that we put into roads. We are supplementing every single person who drives a car.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:When people are like why are you putting in bike lanes? Those people don't pay taxes. It's like well, roads are only covered by less than 50% gas tax. If you drive a car, you're being supplemented by the rest of the community that doesn't drive cars with general taxes. Roads are our most expensive thing that we do, and the concept of wanting to widen them is not a conservative ideology.
Speaker 1:This is another thing, though, because I do want to talk about transportation just briefly, but before I go to transportation I'll come back to the government shaping the community for the future, right? So without the fight to have Juul, we might not have had Farmstead in its current form. Right, we might have had a Donuts and a Magusta Tacos right, we might have had that right. So there's some of this that happens where we're all a part of a trend. Nobody's really in full control. Not one person or a group of people can really control the direction we're headed. But when we have this collaboration of effort towards moving this general feel and vibe, I think st george done a really good job with that is like making parks, open space, community type spaces, has always been really important, but it also has always been a fight and it's going to continue to be a fight. So organizing it's funny thinking of, like, the northern corridor, this, this argument of like okay, we don't want to have a road that goes, you know, over and spills into this open space because of the tortoises, maybe, because it's, you know, the native American land that's there. This, this, uh, this battle between, uh, environmentalism and also this urbanism, right, this, this crash between the two. And also we, we, we want the open spaces, we want the parks, we want the trails, we want people have other routes so we're not congesting traffic into one space. So like we're all yelling at each other about these conflicting opinions, where do we agree?
Speaker 1:I think in general we agree that we want these community spaces, we want these trails, this you know 13,000 people that vote in the primaries. You know they're going to make their voice heard. But the city still has to kind of shape and the people that work in the city that or have a deep knowledge and understanding of that same vision which you go through. The general plan and the vision of saint george is very clear. It's very obvious like this is the direction we're head. But then then, as stuff gets put on the agenda to approve, now it chips away at these general plan things or we fight against what this vision is. So I feel like this is my opinion the general plan is a good framework, but then the government has to sit back and let the community then adopt what how they feel that vision is, and we battle over that all the time.
Speaker 4:I agree with that, robert, and I think you have to remember at a city there's administrative and there's legislative right and then there's executive. So the administrative is the people that you're hiring, that are the experts that are studying these things out and hopefully learning, like, the latest and greatest knowledge on how to best build a park that will last for 30 or 40 years, those kinds of things. So you get your general plan and your vision built, mostly by them. Then you elect people into the legislative space and if they are always countering that, this is where it gets very tricky, right, like, who are the people who are elected? Who are we listening to?
Speaker 4:I tell people all the time and this is sad, but the truth is like somebody gets real loud, gets real angry, gets real aggressive, and they're repetitive. They almost always get heard by the legislative and sometimes that means that things change that shouldn't have changed and you're like why did you do that? Why did you vote against a bike lane on 700? Well, I heard from all these residents. Well, tell me exactly how many residents you heard from.
Speaker 4:Well, it was five, but they emailed me every day.
Speaker 1:You see what I'm saying, and so you need like an order of magnitude on the flip side in favor of something to negate something negative that was said, right. You need, like you know, eight to 10 more people for every one person that doesn't like it. You need, you know, almost 10 times that amount just to feel comfortable with making a decision that feels unpopular. Right, Because that loudness is makes it feel like it's way bigger than it really is.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I also think, as humans, like if I'm mad about something, I'm gonna, I'm gonna call, I'm gonna tell you. If I'm like, no, I support this, then I just sit back and think, well, good they're, they're headed in a direction that I support, I don't email and say I need you to know that I support you and I want you to keep doing this. So, as a council, what we hear is the people who want to burn it down, Right. We don't hear the people who are like, actually we're all out here supporting it, we're all out here building businesses and actually please keep going the direction you are building businesses and actually please keep going the direction you are but, like, take a little feedback from us too, and you have, you're a part of the downtown business alliance.
Speaker 1:You guys created a downtown business alliance, is that right? Yeah, so like these coalitions, so tell me about. Uh, is this kind of like a, an ability for you to to voice?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I think, with the downtown business alliance, our, our goal is to just focus on almost like that, Main Street USA. So like when you go to Main Street in St George, it is primarily, like you said with Juul, it's title companies, real estate, you know things Law firms accountants, Law firms, law accountants.
Speaker 2:And when I look at a space, when I'm looking at a space and doing my work, before I go into a commercial space for a restaurant, I look at number one, traffic flow, traffic count and how many appointment-based businesses there are. For me that's really important, like hair salons, and stuff like that are super important. Barbershops, things like that, um, and now real estate offices they don't necessarily have that Maybe, maybe title, things like that. People are coming and going, um, but in main street right now that doesn't happen. So, uh, the business Alliance, downtown business Alliance, is with the St George chamber and our our goal.
Speaker 2:What we're trying to focus on um is, right now, what. What's important to us is how people, how the flow of traffic, specifically foot traffic, can, can go through main street and right now, I think it's, I think it's kind of archaic with with just a traffic traffic stop. I think that traffic stop is dangerous to me. It just seems really dangerous because that it almost gets overflowed at times, because that correct me if I'm wrong is that the most populated and used stop crosswalk, yes, downtown or in the only other one that compares is 100 south and 1000 East because of the high traffic from the university.
Speaker 3:The university. Yeah, there's so many people that are walking right there too, which? Is yeah, the other thing that we could use as a use case. Those two are the perfect for what I think you're going to tee up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so our main goal is to actually get a pedestrian scramble. And when you mention pedestrian scramble and you show a picture of it, people automatically think it needs to be the biggest city in the world in order to do a pedestrian scramble, and it doesn't. Could just be a very thoughtful way to treat our economy, the people who come and visit right a little bit better, because the flow is going to be better. It's much better for cars. It's much better for cars. Everyone stops for 20 seconds while people go whichever which way. So the pedestrian scramble is.
Speaker 1:It's like an X right, it's like an x.
Speaker 2:Right, it's like an x yeah, so so you could go to uh the furniture store from from uh the advenir, you know, and then when you're at the, at the bank, or going up that way from the parking structure, right, yeah, you could go up there you go cross instead of go this way, and then go this way Because the problem is right now.
Speaker 1:From I'll see if I can get a picture of it to put in overlay.
Speaker 2:I've been there so many times because I just live down the street, so we're always walking down there, we always go for a walk after dinner. So when we're there and you're crossing, what is that west to east? That person going on St George Boulevard actually has that yield Right. So it's a flashing yellow, so they're. They're not necessarily looking at the pedestrians, they're just looking for the cars and that's. That's a tough turn too. So like they go, and I've seen so many times where it's like hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, and the the pedestrian like literally has to sprint, yeah, and then they almost get hit you know, and I just think it's it.
Speaker 2:You know, as a business owner and a restaurant owner, I look for energy. Energy is like the number one factor that I have to put in my and energy. You can't pay for energy. You either have it or you don't. Yeah, it's somewhat created, you know. So, like that energy going and being used at a pedestrian scramble is that flow? Is is just better energy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in my opinion, well, I think it goes back to and I know you, you got somewhere, you got to be mccray it goes back to creating what is the type of environment that we want to create, what's the the local government's role, but then what is also the the people that live in that neighborhood, and I think there needs to be much more collaboration. So I like the Downtown Alliance, the idea that that is a collective voice for these things that will help drive pedestrian walking traffic to make a downtown that prioritizes the individual pedestrian in a community space. Take it out of just the park, put it into the commercial, allow there to be more lively space for everybody in the community, not just the tourists. Put it into the commercial, allow there to be more lively space for everybody in the community, not just the tourists, right, this is everybody that can live and work and and play all in that same space.
Speaker 1:And it could be a model to where we could do it in spaces that haven't been developed, you know, in different cities, cause St George has always been well, what is St George doing and what have they done wrong? And then let's take that to our city, right, whether it's Washington or it's, you know, tokerville, right, who has this, this massive growth opportunities like what can they create out there? And they're looking to St George to to keep that innovative thinking alive. But do you have anything? Last last thing you want to say, mccray, before you jump off? I want to talk about transportation, for like five more minutes if we can.
Speaker 3:No, I mean honestly, this whole conversation is part of the drive that I have for the platform that I do what I do, because it is all about education and the more that we can just keep having these conversations, it goes back to like the Geobon last year. I wanted to do a specific video on the Geobon because I felt like most people just had no idea even what it was. It was just that was one of those big narrative discussions that people just took and kind of ran with. However, and I think that the more that we have these kinds of conversations and we build these local platforms so that people can actually get educated, I think and that's why I love the four, three, five podcasts, because just local issues and we just need more people having the conversation. Having the conversation, having the conversation and more people learning.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because it really is just these sound bites, it's this or these, not these words that trigger people and they don't go anywhere. They, and it's always after the fact. It's always oh, I just heard about this. It's been in the works forever, but I, I had this word put into my head and now it, you know, I gotta go, I gotta go show up, and the people that show up are the ones that are not always the most thoughtful.
Speaker 4:Thoughtful, yeah, it's all and I think beyond that, I mean in defense of people also not knowing like sometimes the government hasn't done a good job sharing the actual information, so that people can be educated, and so McCray a lot of times shares things that the city could have shared or the county could have shared, but we just haven't.
Speaker 4:A really good example just this week Celeste Malloy got a bunch of land. The city has not purchased it, the county has not purchased it. The way it was written by the media isn't exactly correct. So she has this land in this bill that is now available for the city and the county to take over. That's federal land. Well, I hadn't heard about it and I'm on the city council and I read this article. So I send it to our city manager and to the mayor and the mayor's mayor says I don't even know what this is. So we start investigating and we realize what it is is actually small parcels of land that we've been asking for for years. Most of them sit over the top of wells that we need to protect the water.
Speaker 4:So there's a bunch of them that are gunlock well, number one, gunlock well, number two. There's like 15 of those. There's some land. It would be the land for the Western Corridor if that is ever built. It's very specific parcels that are just kind of spotted all over. But you write an article because that's how it was written in the bill 11,000 acres in Washington County, that's going to the city of St George, and that just makes people furious.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Right, and the city's just buying this land and we're just going to sprawl into the desert and we're going to, you know waste all the water, waste all the water and go, and so even I had to learn about it because the communication wasn't there.
Speaker 4:So now we're having, instead of being proactive, we're having to be reactive and say, oh, hey, hey, hey, this is what. This is where it would have been so much better if we had been able to proactively say, hey, this is coming next week, just know. In fact, here's a map that will show you the exact parcels that could be purchased by the city to protect these water resources. That would have been the better way to go, and I feel like things like the 435 podcast and things like what mccray is doing, just sharing, like here's what's coming, it really helps yeah to be proactive in that way yeah, the, the uh, landon and mccray, thanks for being here.
Speaker 1:Buddy, we'll see you guys um, it's interesting because there's a lot happening there and I want to have celeste on to talk more about, uh, what they're doing with the land and urban development, releasing county federal state land for development. Right, I know they're trying to release a lot of the restrictions in the red tape and being able to develop land, but we still have to be thoughtful just because the city gets it, we still have to be thoughtful with how we develop it, especially with the water concerns. I'm going to go back to transportation really quickly because I think we're thinking about transportation like we thought about transportation 50 years ago.
Speaker 4:I agree.
Speaker 1:When, 10 years from now, self-driving cars are going to be the predominant way that people get around, and I think of all the people that can't drive. But my son, he learned about self-driving cars. He's nine years old and it blew his mind. He's like, why would I ever have to drive a car? And I think as a kid I was like so excited to drive a car because it's self-driving car wasn't an option.
Speaker 1:And you think of the freedom that you get out of a self-driving car, right, and I was excited about the go-ped where it was. Instead of having a pedal, I could get on a little. You know, two stroke engine and drive down. Right, I'm excited about that. He's like, wait, so I could just get in the car and I could just read a book or play video game. I was like, yeah, he's like that's awesome. I was like, yeah, and then, and then the car could take you where you want to go, and then the car would just go back to the house. It wouldn't even wouldn't even need to park. Horses were thinking about cars when this is like the future, like we're right here. It's not like this is 20-30 years down the road and so we're going to make infrastructure plans with this idea that for sure is going to just overwhelm and change transportation at a massive degree to where individual cars can manage thousands of people with relative ease. And I think about-.
Speaker 4:Driving right next to each other. Driving right next to each other.
Speaker 1:In a tiny space. We don't need large cars, we don't need the safety is going to go up. Musk said that they did a study. This was with all the different self-driving cars and it was half the number of accidents occur in self-driving cars versus, uh, human-powered cars like even today, with what, what, what technology they have it's like one in ten thousand or something like that. It was like one in ten thousand accidents were happening on on full self-driving versus like the 2.5 that happen in non-self driving cars.
Speaker 1:Right, and so thinking about safety is going to go up, but the fear of the change is what drives from the generations that were looking at a window back before, and so I think of those local governments as saying, hey, we need to accept that this is a reality.
Speaker 1:This isn't like. Well, what if this happens? Because I don't think there's any stopping it. The biggest tech companies in the world are doing it, all the auto manufacturers are all on board with doing that, and it's going to change the way cities move and the way we flow throughout the county, and so I wonder about a young city like this that typically doesn't look at this advanced technology as being something that, oh, we're going to be behind Salt Lake, and we're going to be behind, but we don't really need to be. We choose to be if we want to. But can we look at these different technological advances that are happening because we have? The world is at our fingertips and the ability to know that? Can we rethink that? Is there even a conversation about how self-driving is going to change city development in any way?
Speaker 4:No, that conversation really isn't happening like at the city level right now. The thing that I noticed, though, robert, like speaking to what you're talking about, is the only way people aren't afraid, the only way that we that I've learned that we're able to get them to change their minds or to think into the future, is storytelling. It really is. It's emotion and it's storytelling. It's like asking them, you know, did you know that 45,000 people die every year in the United States in car accidents? Like this is a huge number of people. Like we've just grown to accept that.
Speaker 4:Did you know that we could decrease that by you know and here's what that looks like for you and bringing it down to the human level every time, when it comes to transportation especially, did you know you could get to work faster and safer? Did you know that the air quality won't be so negatively affected? Did you know that your kids could walk to school and you're not going to be worried that they're going to get run over at that crosswalk, you know, because the stopping ability will be so much better? Like, bringing it back down to human scale and telling stories about how that will affect our lives helps people, and I don't think that the conversation will at least be an open conversation in government until people start to feel a little more comfortable with it right Because there's a risk factor.
Speaker 1:Right, there's this risk percentage involved to where? Well, what if we're wrong? And I don't want to be the one who made this decision when we were wrong? Versus being iterative right, having an entrepreneurial mind and being like, okay, hey, let's try this thing out and see how it goes. Let's just try this out and see how it goes and but it's all or nothing. It's like. It's almost like the mindset of the stick shift versus automatic.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, it was like everyone was kind of fearful from going from a stick shift to automatic. Yeah, you know. And now, yeah, you're. You're right, I think we're with the tech, the robo taxis and things like that. I think it's.
Speaker 1:We're less than 10, less than 10 years, yeah absolutely, you know, and and the generation of kids that will get their license right in that 10 years they're 100 on board with being like, oh, I don't have to, I don't have to buy a car, I could have a. Uh, I could get on uber and it's like significantly cheaper to where we could call a self-driving uber it's almost just like a membership it's like it'd be a membership right and uber is built on that.
Speaker 1:It was built off a columbia university study saying how could we replace every taxi cab if? If we were to do this, if we were to replace every cab in new york city with a self-driving car, what would that look like? And they got down to 500 cabs with less than five minute wait for everybody who wanted a cab. If it was just full self-driving, they'd cut thousands of thousands. I think there was like 10,000 cabs in New York when they did the study and they got it down to 500 cabs throughout New York city. They could have a five minute wait because of the way they were called up Right and the way that they could service certain areas within the city, because when it's all systematic, you can see patterns, human patterns and this was a big thing when I lived in Las Vegas Uber coming out because the taxi cab unions were huge, and so when that came out and the taxi medallions like all of a sudden lost all their value.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then you know, I mean, it just came down to when. When that was implemented, it was just easier for everyone. Taxis are still there, yeah, you know, and and, but when we're, when we're building more of these roads and and things like that to accommodate more and more cars, one thing that we have to take into account is all that concrete too, that concrete everything around that. I'm from Las Vegas, like I said, yeah, everything in that downtown area where there's more concrete, it's gotten a lot hotter, it's hotter.
Speaker 4:It's seven degrees hotter. Is it seven degrees? Yes, the Arboretum Index for Vegas is seven degrees hotter.
Speaker 2:And one of the reasons I love downtown is because there's so many awesome beautiful mature trees and landscapes and all that kind of stuff Like that's what I absolutely love, and my wife is like crazy about trees and her garden and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:You know, as, as Danielle's mom probably knows, danielle's mom comes over every once in a while and helps Stacy with the garden. But you know, it's one of those things I still can't wrap my head around $10 million for the parking garage. But then you go to the parking garage and you're like man, that's a lot of concrete and that's going to kind of pop up that temp a little bit around there.
Speaker 4:Not only the temp, chris, but like, actually anything that's impermeable in a desert creates issues, because deserts actually need for any water that comes to be able to like recharge the aquifers and to like keep the moisture in the soil. So that's something that saint george and the water district is already seeing, especially in drought conditions, the more non-permeable surfaces that you have, the bigger challenge that you have when you do get those rains, because the rain doesn't seep into the ground like it's supposed to.
Speaker 2:It causes a lot of problems, which is probably why Las Vegas floods so bad.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, it's really interesting to see how all these factors have these second and third, fourth, unintended consequences. When you look at it. And so, making decisions based off this one neighbor feeling this one particular way, I feel like it's the job of the government to take a step back and my ultimate point goes to they have a fear of well, I don't want to lose in the next election. I want to stay doing my job, and this is where Hurricane tried to pass a referendum vote to have term limits on their city council members and the mayor, and the mayor, who's a beloved layer mayor right now, right, nanette? Everybody loves Nanette and Hurricane. They're like why would you do this? She's like because I don't think that you know politicians should stay here forever, right very smart that way, yeah, but they didn't even get it on the ballot they didn't
Speaker 1:get enough signatures to get it on the ballot right, and part of it, she said, was timing was was off. She didn't get a big enough coalition to to get the because they. She didn't want it just to be legislation, because if it was just legislation it can be changed right, and so she wanted it as a referendum. So then it was stuck there, which is is really smart, but I I think about that for the city of saint george's, would this, would would the city council mayors, uh, city council members, be more apt to take something that's seemingly a little bit more risky?
Speaker 1:yes if, if they didn't have to worry. He's like well, I, I got. I got two or three cycles and I'm not going to worry about an election cycle, I'm going to just do what I think is right and then it offers. Is that always a good thing, though?
Speaker 4:Well.
Speaker 2:I mean to me.
Speaker 4:Well, at the end of the day, you're right. Like you should always vote. Like you're never going to be reelected. Like that's just across the board. Like you should but.
Speaker 1:But they don't vote that way but we're talking about humans. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And people's egos. I mean when you were so, yes, I mean. But back to the car thing, you know, I think it'll be really interesting as autonomous cars, like these new options, come that are safer and better for our society overall. What we're going to see, what we always see, is the collective good versus the individual good and really it's almost always about ego. I brought this book because I love this book so much I even brought it to city council last night. It's the history of Washington County from isolation to desolation.
Speaker 4:This is one of the coolest books. It was written by Doug Alder, who was the university president, and Carl Brooks, who was the mayor of St George for a while.
Speaker 1:Oh cool.
Speaker 4:It's such a good book, but it literally tells the story of the collaboration to build this space in the desert. I mean, we built a city in a desert and we've always had to collaborate. Water has always been an issue, the heat has always been an issue, it always will be, and so how do we collaborate when it comes to things like transportation, autonomous cars Well, but I drive a G wagon and that makes me look better than my neighbor, like all of a sudden, if we're all in the same autonomous cars like, how's my ego going to be fed there's?
Speaker 2:no flex.
Speaker 1:You will see that kind of thing.
Speaker 4:I promise you, because we are human and we do, we have these. You know, we have this attachment.
Speaker 1:That's why there's Uber Black you can do Uber Black. Like those people have.
Speaker 2:You're just going to post that on Instagram. Yeah, exactly, guys.
Speaker 4:By the way, I called up an Uber Black, that's right, and you just put a picture of you in front of your.
Speaker 1:Yeah, autonomous G-Wagon.
Speaker 4:Your more fancy Uber.
Speaker 1:I don't even need to drive my G-Wagon it drives itself.
Speaker 4:That's right. Well, I just bring that up because I do think it all goes back to why did we build the city in the first place? The only way can be a good city, a good community, is collaboration.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah and I think one of the reasons I chose to live downtown. I love living downtown and I love St George. People in St George are absolutely incredible.
Speaker 2:I just absolutely love living here, but we can walk to things. There's a little bit of funkiness with it. Like, right next to us is a, an apartment complex that you know, you just kind of have different people in different walks of life. And me raising uh, two boys, eight and six, right now, I want them to see that, because they're going to see it regardless. Right, we can't necessarily protect them. I think my goal as a parent is to explain things to them that are somewhat different, that they haven't experienced yet. Right, but when we walk to the park, when we walk to town square park, you know there's so many different plants and people that we come across that we all say hi to and we always get in these conversations. But that builds so such a strong community, because then we see those people again. When we walk on Sunday mornings, we, we see all the people walking to church and we, I mean it's like it's, it's amazing, it's fantastic. You're waving hi to everyone. Like my hand gets tired, you know. And those are the things that I think make this community so special. Yeah, it's small enough to, but it's also in that like happy spot to where it still has that small town feel.
Speaker 2:You know, I was watching a YouTube video last night and it was a guy who was visiting St George and he's like this place is kind of stuck in the times a little bit and I was like, you know, I kind of got like mad. Yeah, but he was going on Tabernacle and he was going on Main Street and by the end of the video he kind of changed his tune a little bit. He's like, wow, look at this, look at this restaurant, look, he went into Judd's and all this kind of stuff. He went into FS coffee and he's like, wow, a coffee shop in St George. And it's like that mentality is, you know, we don't hear that much, yeah, or at least at least I don't. But you know, it's interesting to see that perspective.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know and, and I think that's just kind of like what makes my neighborhood amazing. Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 4:it it's diverse and there has been a change of perception, I even think by the majority lds culture of. I mean, I sat in a meeting six years ago where a man said if you allow a bar downtown, there will just be drunk people stumbling all over the streets. Right, and he really did. That was a very legitimate fear that he had and he was actually one of the same people who also really protested jewel Plaza and he's a very sweet man and his intentions were good, like he just wanted to keep a good community. And I've heard him say since about jewel I was totally wrong, you know, he was like it'll just be a disaster for everything and he said I actually love it. And I haven't had a conversation with him about the bars, but I would imagine that he would say the same thing like oh okay, I realized that. You know these are well-managed.
Speaker 4:Utah has great liquor laws that keep these things you know, under control and this is just, like you know, kind of part of the ecosystem of a downtown and it's okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, it's easy to slippery slope it right when you're like, well, you let this in, and then it opens the door for this thing, and then it opens the door, which we do, which is which is a fair argument, and at the same time, it's there's nuance to it. There has to be some progression, mixed with some control and staying conservative, right. And so, okay, what does the bars look like? Is it going to look like? You know, I went to Cal State, fullerton, and then downtown Fullerton is massively known as just the party street, right?
Speaker 4:So there are other people stumbling.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there is that right, but they're open until 2 am and you know, it's like they don't open until 10 o'clock. It's like, yeah, you think we're going to go from, you know a to Z instantly where that's not, that's not really what the the that's not the goal for anybody in town. And what is the? What is the goal? Okay, we, we, we want to provide a more vibrant downtown that includes a mix of a lot of different people Like what are these things that we can create? And if, if the community doesn't want it, they'll reject those businesses and then they won't patronize them, they'll go elsewhere, they'll go out of business.
Speaker 4:And we do want it to stay family friendly. We always want people to feel safe, you know bringing their families downtown. So it is. It's a. It's a very good balance and mix that we have to strike. But to your point, I love that. I mean, yeah, you let a bar come in.
Speaker 2:If, if the community doesn't want wanted, it will go out of business, and that's good. I mean the competition breeds success, right, I mean the competition having, let's say, another bar open in downtown, I mean I think that just raises the standard for the rest of the bars that are already operating. Yeah, same same thing goes for restaurants or any other business. You have to get better. Yeah, and that's the beauty of business is, if you don't get better, you're going to get swallowed up, right? So, like you're, you're always striving to get better, and I think that's what our mindset should be in downtown or in St George in general, is just always thinking of ways that we could improve. Yeah, it.
Speaker 1:Rather than progress, I think evolve is the best way to describe it, because it doesn't always have to look like this never-ending.
Speaker 4:Progress is definitely a trigger word.
Speaker 1:It's trigger of saying, okay, we're changing from the past. It's like, no, maybe we just need to adapt to this different environment, right? And that's where housing comes into play. And I balance this. How does the government force affordable housing? Truthfully, I've looked at all the different ways. They can't force it. They can't force it. But they can let the shackles off of developers and allow them to explore that diversity and that ability to say, okay, can I do more with this small space, the space on River Road and Fort Pierce Drive.
Speaker 1:Right, it was nine acres, it was low density. It went from 10,000 square foot lots to. They wanted to have a mix of single family and multifamily homes on this space, right, and you're getting public comments saying it's going to destroy that area and it's already too busy and all these problems. When they wanted to put 30 units on this three acres, it's just over three houses per acre, which is still low density. Right, it's low density still, but because the zone was one house per 10,000 square feet, it's a funky lot. Because there's a hill in the middle of it. Right, it's. Nine acres is a lot, but not all of it can be developed, for you know, it would go from oh, maybe two houses could have been built there to what is 30 look like, and maybe they don't even use the whole thing and make 30 full units. But how? How do we just let the builders and developers come up with something unique to allow that price point to come down? And they've really done a good job.
Speaker 1:This is the other misconception, too is that the developers just want to keep building bigger and bigger, where the vast majority of new construction throughout the county has been under $500,000. The vast majority of it. Right, we've built more affordable homes in the last three years than we've ever built in Southern Utah. Multifamily has come down because of factors outside of our control. Right, we can't. It's financially expensive to build, because of parking, because of all these other restrictions. It's expensive to build apartments and condos, and even long-term values. That's not the best thing for that resident, right? I, 99% of the time. If somebody wants to buy a condo, I'm like are you sure you want to buy a condo? I mean, it's not really like a. If you really want to live there and you just want that kind of environment, okay, you could buy a condo, but they don't appreciate and value. The same way they don't resell the same way.
Speaker 2:I wish you would have told me that when I when I bought a condo in Mesquite.
Speaker 1:I know I would have. I would have talked you out of that.
Speaker 2:The HOA has gone up $200 in the past three years because of insurance claims. Yeah, and I that's my mother-in-law who lives there, so we're trying to get her to with McCray. I was like McCray, do you have anything? You know, like in in those townhomes, yeah, and he's like man, I'm like nothing, there's nothing. And you, we try to look everywhere downtown to town to bring her here. Yeah, there's nothing for for that price point.
Speaker 1:And that's the problem that I think we're we're tugging on Right and it's not always we don't have to do the full spectrums, it's the middle right, it's the it's the middle margin is actually where we can make the biggest impact is that medium density type setup and allow single flat townhomes. You know single level flat townhomes in, you know already developed. It's the redevelopment space that I think we can make the biggest impact on and the only way we can do that is through zoning and through the city allowing us to say okay, this, this is a should be. It looks like a manufactured house. It's halfway falling down. There's a block on 700. That's right outside. It's in the net.
Speaker 1:The neighbor traditional neighborhood zone. It's a. It's literally on the border of that and interconnected, so it doesn't allow for multifamily. But there's six houses there with a bunch of empty lots in the middle, because the lots are weirdly shaped and you can only build houses there. So it's either I build a 35,000, you know a 3,500 square foot McMansion in the middle of downtown but I can't build two or three smaller cottage type homes there because of that zoning and because of that.
Speaker 1:Well, that would require a 40 foot road to have to go to the middle of this neighborhood and all of a sudden the asphalt costs and all these things make it undeveloped. So they just put lipstick lipstick on a pig and resell the houses that were built in the seventies that nobody really wants to live in anyway. It doesn't allow for redevelopment and that's where the city can come in. Is that redevelopment zone and we want tighter density. But I want somebody to own the land. I don't want them to build a bunch of condos. We could make a big impact with just medium density, medium to low density housing in zones that are older.
Speaker 4:And this is where I feel like the development community needs to get loud. Now that the general plan and the downtown plan are out, the development community needs to start saying okay, this is a great framework, but it needs to be loose. It needs to be like the reality is to your point about all the zones. It like blows my mind and we've talked. You talked with Stacy and Stacy told you that there's 16 zones in Japan.
Speaker 1:Yeah, remember that, like over the entire country, there's 16 zones.
Speaker 4:I mean, we have 16 residential, just residential zones, yeah, sub zones. Yeah, sub zones. We have to loosen that up.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like we have to make it so that if you as an individual want to come in to city hall and say, like I want to do this creative thing, as long as it's safe housing, like you're not going to build something that's unsafe or that would cause problems, you should be able to walk out with a building permit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, currently on my lot. Right, we didn't build a huge home and we purposely have land. We left it there because we wanted to do an ADU and we want to buy something from Box House. So we're saving up to buy something from Box House, a St George company, but I would love to put two back there. I'm not building 25. I want to put two. I want to have something for my mother in law and I want to have something possibly for an employee, because there's always an employee that needs housing. You know they're. They're either like hey, they my landlord told me I have to be out in a month. Is there something? Yeah, you could stay here for a month until you go, or a couple of months before you. You know, find something. And I, I, every time I go there and I'm not the smartest, right, but I get so confused when I see the, the different zones and all that kind of stuff and I'm like so, so can you just answer me this question Can I do it? Yeah, they're like well, no, not really.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you know, but then you got to just like take it. We're confused, Like even the city is confused right. Like they have to break it down and pull your lot up and then and it's not just, it's not just like you go into city hall and you ask this person.
Speaker 1:No, it's like you got to schedule the sit down and you have all sit there and there's 10 people around and they all give their opinion as to what they can and can't do. It's like, yeah, you could do this, but you can't do this. And then you're like, okay, I'm gonna take a shot, I'm gonna go to the, the planning commission, and then the planning commission. You do the same thing all over again and they're like just say to heck with it.
Speaker 2:I'm just gonna try it yeah exactly if I get caught, you know and that's what happened like which we have plenty of. There's plenty of that and I understand why, and that's what it's going to lead to is, some people are just going to get frustrated and they're just going to be like, ah, screw it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, and that's not good, we don't want that On that block, on 700, I probably put 40 hours into reading all of the different zones and being like, okay, with this one, can this one work? And then you go and not being an architect cause you don't want to go spend a bunch of money on an architecture time, right? Or a draftsman I'm like, okay, here's the rule. I have, like you know, my just rudimentary tools, right? You're like, oh, this is a measuring tool. I take the satellite view and I'm like, okay, if I, if I put this here, this is about this many feet, Can I put this house here, in this house here. And then you know you're 20 hours in and you're like, nope, can't do that.
Speaker 4:Well, you know, I called our city manager the other day just and who I love. He's great and I really believe.
Speaker 1:He won't come on the podcast by the way.
Speaker 4:Okay, I'll talk to him.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't think he's still going to go.
Speaker 4:I just told I talked to him about this exactly. You know, and he agrees. You know they have met the demand of what the community has said. Like we, you guys, nobody comes in and demands more than people who are NIMBYs. Like they want more zoning, they want more restrictions. They've got their houses.
Speaker 1:And now.
Speaker 4:They don't want other people to be able to build anything next to them. We have to hear louder from people who are like, yes, we want creativity. Yes we want our city to be able to do things like infill. Because you know, I said, I'm looking at this zoning code and I've been looking at it for 10 years since I joined planning commission and I'm still confused by it yeah like it still just blows my mind like that I have to sit here and study to your point, robert, who's a professional in this space?
Speaker 4:you had to study this out for 40 hours yeah that should not be so yeah and I mean, and john and John did commit, he said I, we're going to work, we're going to work on this Like we really are, and we do meet with the builders a lot, um, and with the realtors, and it just needs to be more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we're moving in the right direction. There's, there's been a lot of things. It's just slow movement, right, and I'm okay with the slow movement, you know, know, to your point where it's like it feels like there's always, you know, progression taking place, like, uh, evolution taking place. It's just slower and with affordable housing it should be slow.
Speaker 2:I want it to be slow and careful one.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I'm I'm in uh, disagreement with the governor on is specifically this idea that he can, he can shove it down the city's throat to be like nope, you're, you're building 48,000 houses, like tomorrow.
Speaker 4:And it's like we're just going to give you a bunch of federal land and you're just going to build a bunch of houses.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 4:That's the same pattern that Vegas did, and it's a disaster.
Speaker 1:Exactly, it's a disaster and, because of our unique geographical issues, the compounding effects of just jumping into it is a problem, so we have to be thoughtful with it. Uh, but uh that, and that's why I'm so pro redevelopment, because I don't want to keep sprawling out into the desert. I like the open spaces. I want to rethink the space that we have and can we, can we change this and that and financially make it work? And ultimately we're in a tight financial market to where we weren't and when, when it was loose, it was so fast and it was us trying to keep up with it. Now that it's slowed down, it allows us this opportunity to okay, let's really start to test some things out. And I'm encouraging, you know, city council members and planning commission members to be okay with testing some things out and saying, hey, that wasn't a great decision, we tried this. It didn't quite work, but allow time to play out and not have to force this idea of affordable housing, because ultimately you could end up with Dixie Downs and things like that, where we end up that has a 50 year impact on that community Right, and so being a little bit more, you know, a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer, I think is is important for the city and the development, but keep looking forward.
Speaker 1:We have to keep thinking forward, especially transportation too. I'm really encouraging people to be like the world is going to look different in 10 years with traffic. Do we really have to have this many cars, spaces and requirements and do we have to have parking structures Because you know China has a billion unliving? You know homes that nobody's living in because they thought, oh, this is what it was going to look like and waste a bunch of time and money and resources? Uh, I think we could be more thoughtful with transportation. But anyway, we can talk forever. Let's get. Let's get out of here. Thanks for coming on, guys this is fun.
Speaker 2:Thank you for always fun.
Speaker 1:You guys are the best. Um, thanks for tuning in everybody. Bon Rue Bakery, downtown St George they're going to be all over the world. Just very shortly Check it out. I'm going to dive into one of these. Danielle Larkin with the City Council. Thank you for being here and, mccray, we miss you. We'll see you out there. Bye guys, see you out there. Thanks for listening in. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe. Make sure you're following us on all the social media websites. We love your support. We love the dialogue. We want to continue that going. Find us at realestate435.com.
Speaker 3:We'd love to help you find a house here in town or help you get wherever you're going.