People tour the construction site of Daybreak Field at America First Square, a new baseball stadium in South Jordan. The new home for the Salt
Lake Bees and the Downtown Daybreak development were the subjects of a tour and panel discussion organized by ULI (Urban Land Institute)
Utah and Larry H. Miller Real Estate. Photo by Brice Wallace, Business Journal.
DAYBREAK FIELD AT AMERICA FIRST SQUARE
Brice Wallace
They carefully toed the manicured warning track flanking each side of home plate, occasionally adjusting their protective helmets to better glimpse the vast, sunbathed sea of green grass beyond.
The roar surrounding them came not from a crowd but from a cacophony of construction machinery and activity. Utah’s latest “Field of Dreams,” the new home for the Salt Lake Bees, was being prepped for the home opener April 8 when the home-plate umpire commands, “Play ball!”
The small group was not a baseball team but instead people getting a tour of the diamond, set to become the first gem of Downtown Daybreak, a mixed-use development in South Jordan that many people believe will be a hit.
Before the baseballs fly, dirt is flying. The bones of the ballpark are in place, barely a year after the official groundbreaking in October 2023 for Daybreak Field at America First Square. The stadium is the proverbial “first pitch” of Utah’s first sports-anchored mixed-use development, visioned to eventually be a magnet for people seeking a walkable, bikeable and transit-connected regional hub with offices, retail, housing, dining and entertainment options.
“We’re trying to bring an activated place not just on game nights,” David Cannon, president of commercial real estate for Daybreak developer Larry H. Miller Real Estate, told a crowd during a panel discussion organized by ULI (Urban Land Institute) Utah and LHMRE before the construction-site tour. Baseball will occupy about 75 dates a year, but the goal is to have something to see and do 365 days, he said. “There are some great national examples of sports-anchored districts that aren’t just the stadium and a parking lot.”
The parking lot at Daybreak Field is little more than dirt and gravel as 500 workers from three contracting companies toil in and around the park, where the Bees will play after three decades at Smith’s Ballpark in Salt Lake City. In just a few months, 6,500 seats will be in place for fans, with total capacity to be 8,000 when adding fans at the outfield berm.
Just outside the park, beyond right field, will be a plaza that “can be a whole evening experience where there’s entertainment, food, a playground and really fun stuff,” Cannon said.
Long-term ideas for Downtown Daybreak, east of the Mountain View Corridor, are a Megaplex entertainment center featuring movies, bowling and arcade games; an open-air performance venue; an ice skating area; 100,000-plus square feet of offices, more than 75,000 square feet of retail, food and beverage establishments; 190 apartments; University of Utah Health’s South Jordan Health Center; and the Salt Lake County Library’s Daybreak branch.
Downtown Daybreak consists of about 200 acres of the 4,000-acre Daybreak development, which has evolved over 20 years and has had 10,000 houses sold. Downtown Daybreak will be “a very livable, walkable, compact, urban-scale environment,” Cannon said.
“This is among the fastest-growing spots in the entire country, and it doesn’t really have a natural downtown,” said Ted Knowlton, deputy director of the Wasatch Front Regional Council. “It doesn’t have a place where people come together and they think, ‘That’s the heart of the area.’”
The new development will serve as downtown beyond just Daybreak and South Jordan, he said. “It’s ‘downtown west side,’ really, so this is giving a real ‘there’ there, in an area that really, I think, will cherish it,” Knowlton said.
Tamara Zander, a member of the South Jordan City Council, said Daybreak has thrived and evolved, becoming home to families “of all different types and styles and income structures and dynamics.”
Two-thirds of the Salt Lake Valley’s population lives west of Interstate 15 but most of the valley’s amenities and jobs are east of the highway, but Downtown Daybreak can change that, she said. “This is the first big, huge splash on the west side,” Zander said, “providing jobs and shopping and dining and entertainment, and it’s right here in Daybreak, South Jordan.”
But panelists discussed ways that Downtown Daybreak’s impacts might expand beyond its borders. Stephen James, chief visioning officer at Larry H. Miller Real Estate, said it might be a model for growth that is different from the traditional suburban model, following Daybreak’s example of being “a bit of a laboratory for growth.” Downtown Daybreak can demonstrate how people can “live in a more compact way and the quality of life can actually be enhanced,” he said.
What once was just gravel fields owned by a mining company that did not want them, Downtown Daybreak is an opportunity to reintroduce the idea of “living local,” giving residents the freedom to not have to drive for jobs or entertainment, he said. It can serve as a way for cities “to rethink the way we regulate and zone communities,” he added.
“It’s exciting to see some of this land fill in and to begin to seed a new perception of this place, because I think it’s been primarily viewed as ‘suburban neighborhood done different,’ and that was never the intention of the plan. And now we can begin to model alternate futures for towns that will need to grow over time to accommodate the people who want to call Utah home,” James said.
Knowlton said conversations about density often focus on “losing something,” but that thinking can be shifted if a site becomes “a special place,” such as a downtown or town center, where people have pride and enjoy the space.
“It’s not just density … but it’s in the right place, in the right way,” he said.
Zander said success at Downtown Daybreak would be in the form of “a happy, thriving community.”
“Like, if I’m living in high-density somewhere and feel like I’m in barracks or a prison and there’s no place to walk my dog, there’s no place to breathe, that’s not success. We’ve got somebody in an affordable house but it’s miserable because they can’t really have a quality of life,” she said.
“We have this wonderful palette of land out here where we can make the design nice and well thought-out.”