Is it possible to create a Great Salt Lake friendly neighborhood?
Seniors in Utah State University’s Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning Department capstone class have created a waterwise landscaping guide that does just that.
They applied it to the fast-growing, lake-adjacent city of West Haven, in Weber County. Their "Guide for Residential Waterwise Planning in the Great Salt Lake Watershed” envisions curbing sprawl with a mixture of single-family homes, townhomes and higher density along with agriculture and buffered wetlands. There would be much less grass and smaller lot sizes but more shared open spaces. Water would be metered so that the saved water would be guaranteed to go to the lake and not used by other industries.
Check out their model residential design toolkit.
Discover another of their proposals to protect the eastern shoreline of the lake by buffering the wetlands from development, integrating them in the community through trails and incentivizing their protection by branding the community residents as Stewards of the Shore.
And in another proposal, students seek to restore the wetlands and riverbanks of the Jordan River to create a major park and housing development where the Jordan River and Mill Creek converge to connect Salt Lake County to the lake.
