Cybear

MJLO: Could you set up a Salt Lake coffee house site for us? Perhaps the folks who want to contribute here wish only to discuss skylines and the like. As I recall, many are active primarily at other sites anyway. There's a place for intelligent and respectful discussion of other matters urban and maybe that's a coffee house spot like Charlotte's.

Say, NCB - These pictures really suggest a revitalized central business district. Can you give everyone an update on the rehabilitation of the greater NO area. The media lost interest when there were no more stories of abject suffering to exploit. How are average folks really getting along these days?

I meant that there are other cities in competition with Salt Lake to achieve business primacy of whatever sort in the West or indeed elsewhere in the nation. My perception is that Salt Lake is either oblvious to this or is prepared to concede losses in, for instance, head to head competiton for sizable business HQ reloactions or in mergers and acquisitions. For example, I cannot imagine Salt Lake's being involved in the kind of head to head struggle that occurred between Charlotte (NCNB) and Atlanta (C&S Sovran). As you know, that competition culminated in the formation of Nationsbank and allowed Charlotte to seize BofA from San Francisco and to stake its place as the Nation's second leading financial center. The attitude I preceive present here is that with its large internal population growth numbers, Salt Lake's economic growth and prosperity won't require much participation in competition of this sort. I just don't see that approach succeeding.

I am from Charlotte and moved here a couple of years ago for both business and personal reasons. The people are great and the climate is incomparable. I do not miss humidity. I am genuinely surprised by one thing however. For an urban area its size, SLC does seem to underachieve. I attribute that to two misperceptions. The first is local: People here seem to think that internally generated growth will allow SLC to compete with its urban competiton. I know of no other urban area that shares this perception, nor of any who have succeded upon that basis. It's a deadly misperception at that. The second misperception is foreign: Strangers have heard that outsiders are less than fully welcome here and that is shamefullly wrong. I think that as leadership changes hands and with the passage of time, both of these serious growth-inhibiting problems will solve themselves. I just hope that I'm still here when diversity and energy reach critical mass and this place takes off.

Hey Viperlord, let's not forget to tell MJLO about the threat of seismic activity as another limiting factor. As we speak, the State Capitol is being "earthquake proofed."

This is my first post as a new member, so I'll jump right in. I'm old enough to remember when I-40 was gerrymandered by the General Assembly to proceed from Wilmington to Raleigh to Asheville instead of from Wilmington to Charlotte to Asheville. In the years since, US 74 has become increasingly clogged with traffic on a substandard roadbed that meanders through Monroe, Wadesboro and other towns, while the hoped for growth that I-40 was theoretically going to generate in those economically depressed counties between Raleigh and Wilmington largely failed to materialize. Now, US 220, which runs through NC from roughly Greensboro to Rockingham, has been reflagged as I-73/74. At Rockingham, one of the proposed highways heads over the border into eastern South Carolina and the other heads eastward at a 90 degree angle along US 74, ending in Brunswick County. Is there any organized effort to authorize an Interstate spur, similar to I-385 in South Carolina, between Charlotte and Rockingham? I-385 provides an interstate-quality connection from I-26 in Columbia to I-85 in Greenville and would appear to level the playing field for Spartanburg and Greenville. I am aware of the US 74 connector proposals involving US 601 and I-485 through southern Mecklenburg and eastern Union counties. I'm talking about something much more comprehensive and arguably, something much more essential to the economic well-being of greater Charlotte. Where is our congressional delegation on this one?