Sandy City’s Cairns is making progress
It has been over nine months since the city of Sandy unveiled The Cairns, a 20-year master plan for the City’s downtown. The 1100 acre city center plan area is the City’s second attempt and creating a urban center.
The Cairns plan area is bounded by 9000 South to 11400 South between Interstate 15 and UTA light rail to the east. The plan calls for high density housing, retail and office space surrounding City Hall, a reconfiguration of the suburban style, South Towne Center mall and transit enhancements that connect the area to the nearby TRAX and FrontRunner stations.
Unlike the City’s previous plans for downtown, The Cairns is moving forward as several large projects in the plan area are either under construction, or will soon start construction.
The debut of The Cairns coincided with the groundbreaking of its signature project, the Prestige, a large mixed-use project across the street from City Hall on the southwest corner of Centennial Parkway and Sego Lily Drive.
Construction of the first of four phases of the Prestige should commence shortly. The project’s developers went before the Sandy City Planning Commission in July to get approval to build a 12-story mixed-use residential tower. The first phase building will consist of 93 for sale condominiums with a rooftop common area and four ground-floor units that will be reserved for future commercial space.
When built out, the Prestige will consist of around 650 residential units spread out in four mixed-use residential towers between six and 25-stories tall. The phase one tower will be 153 feet tall, 13 feet more than the 140 foot limit in the Central Business District. The master plan allows for the 25-story heights if the project meets the plan’s guidelines. The original renderings for the Prestige showed two six-story buildings sandwiched between two towers over 20-stories.
Construction has started on the Park @ City Center, a proposed 330-unit apartment building directly north of Sandy City Hall. The project will include a mix of one and two-bedroom market-rate apartments, a parking structure with 616 parking stalls and common areas including a swimming pool.
According to planning documents, the minimum parking requirements for the project is 648 (nearly two parking spaces for every one residential unit). The developers sought a five percent reduction in parking citing the project’s proximity to transit.
Sandy city planners cited recent studies that show that Sandy’s parking requirements for multi-family housing exceeds actual demand as more renters are becoming one-car and no-car homes,
Construction continues on the East Village, a mixed-use transit orientated development near the Sandy Civic Center TRAX station at 10000 South. The first phase consists of 271 residential units and 55,000 square feet of office space. The East Village includes the area south of Jordan High School to just south of Sego Lily Drive and between State Street and TRAX. When the project is built out, it will potentially include an additional 954 residential units, 33,000 square of retail and 365,000 square feet of office space.
Sandy plans to partner with the Utah Transit Authority to launch a circular bus that would connect new residents to nearby TRAX and Frontrunner stations.
Like Salt Lake, there are no real large areas of undeveloped land left in Sandy. City leaders are focusing on building up instead of out in order to grow as a city and increase the local tax base.
