Mega-suburb takes shape in Utah

Mining company builds community for half a million people

WEST JORDAN, Utah — It’s a development plan that will take more than 50 years from start to finish. A string of “walkable” communities, expected eventually to house half a million people, is starting to rise on the nation’s largest piece of privately owned land next to a metropolis.

This mega-suburb, twice the size of San Francisco, will be the work of a mining company, Kennecott Utah Copper Corp., which has no experience in real-estate development.

The Utah company is a subsidiary of London-based Rio Tinto, a mining multinational and avowed convert to environmentalism, which decided to make a showcase out of its surplus Utah lands instead of just selling them off for cookie-cutter subdivisions.

Home builders were skeptical when the Salt Lake valley’s biggest landowner laid out the plan for a 20-mile string of densely packed communities framing the rural west side of Salt Lake County. The communities would be laid out along a planned highway and light-rail lines connecting to Salt Lake City.

AP