Salt Lake City is one of the biggest winners of the past decade

“IT LIES PROTECTED behind its rampart mountains, insulated from the stormy physical and intellectual weather of both coasts,” Wallace Stegner wrote of Salt Lake City. The novelist associated his adopted hometown, where he spent much of the 1920s and 30s, with an “isolationism” and “provincialism” afforded by its Mormon heritage and its snug seat between the Wasatch Range and the Great Salt Lake. These features remain; but gaze upon the city’s bustling downtown today from a perch in the nearby foothills and Salt Lake looks far from provincial. There are few places in America that can crow louder about their successes in the past decade than the City of the Saints.

Utah’s population grew faster than that of any other state between 2010 and 2020. Salt Lake City has the lowest jobless rate among all big cities, at 2.8%, compared with a national rate of 5.2%. That the state has rebounded so well from the downturn caused by the covid-19 pandemic is thanks to the Wasatch Front, an urban corridor that includes Salt Lake and Provo, home to Brigham Young University. The four counties that make up the Wasatch Front account for at least 80% of Utah’s economic activity, reckons Juliette Tennert, an economist at the University of Utah.

In many ways Salt Lake’s success mirrors what is happening in other cities in the Mountain West,...