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SALT LAKE CITY — City Creek Mall is getting some national attention. Business analysts call the recent development a good mix of business and religion.
Some are saying the mall is the best thing to happen to Salt Lake City in 50 years.
A recent New York Times article says the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints spent hundreds of millions of dollars on City Creek Mall. They analyzed whether or not the Church's investment paid off.
"(The) mall is the single most important thing to happen to Salt Lake City in 50 years, maybe more," Bruce Bingham, a partner with Hamilton Partners, a Chicago-based real estate developer, told The New York Times. "It revitalized downtown."
The mall opened a little more than a year ago and added 2,000 jobs, which brought more than 16 million visitors into downtown, according to a 2013 Economic Benchmark Report, paid for by the real estate firm CBRE.
The report also credits City Creek Mall with boosting downtown retail sales by 36 percent in 2012 — roughly $209 million.
Hamilton Partners also tells The New York Times that because of City Creek Mall's success and financial backing from the LDS Church, banks feel comfortable and safe doing commercial lending for new projects, at least with this development company.
(The) mall is the single most important thing to happen to Salt Lake City in 50 years, maybe more. It revitalized downtown.
–Bruce Bingham
"The Church put a whole bunch of people to work during a deep recession," said Church member Kevin Barney, 54, from Chicago. "For another thing, downtown Salt Lake City had become blighted, and that area is sort of like the Mormon Vatican. I think the Church had a responsibility to do something about it if it could."
Executive director of Salt Lake City's Downtown Alliance Jason Mathis said the mall has drawn positive and negative opinions.
"In this community," where amost 40 percent of the city's residents are Church members, "the LDS is such a powerful large entity, it will be more controversial and evoke strong feelings," he said. "But they're an interesting landlord. They're not worried about the next quarter. They have a much longer perspective than many other investors would have had. They want to know what the city will look like in the next 50 or 100 years."
Religious observance affects City Creek Mall. Unlike most shopping malls around the country, shops there, except restaurants, are closed on Sundays.
