Why 3.5 Million People Are Trapped in Utah

Utah is one of the fastest growing states in the country, but it has a weird geographic problem. It's actually running out of room. This isn't for lack of land. On the contrary, Utah is the 13th largest state in the US, but most of that land, nearly 70%, is owned by the federal government, leaving it unavailable for development. So why doesn't Utah own most of its land? And more importantly, why is the state fighting to get it back? I'm Jeff, and this is the weird geographic story of Utah's federal lands. Hey, I have a book coming out in 2027 called Badlands. Stick around to the end to learn more about it. Utah is rugged and geographically very diverse. And I get it, most people think of Utah as one big, dry desert, but it actually boasts everything from cool alpine forests to snow-capped mountains to parched, unforgiving salt flats and finally, yes, vast arid deserts. Because of this diversity, it's one of the most beautiful parts of the country, with a wealth of natural parks and protected lands that draw millions of tourists year after year. But though Utah is certainly pretty, it's also a place defined by extremes. It can get bone-chillingly cold in the winter and then become blisteringly hot in the summer, and the terrain can range from extremely mountainous to exceptionally flat. All of this means that there's enormous variety in climate across Utah. These extremes are the first part of Utah's development problem, since they make large swaths of Utah poorly suited to human settlement. Utah, as it turns out, is a complicated state, but let's start in the Far East. The eastern half of Utah doesn't really look like the Utah we commonly associate with. Instead, it's dominated by the forbidding Rocky Mountains, leaving many regions of this part of Utah inaccessible and difficult to traverse. In fact, in this way, Utah has much more in common with Colorado than it does with Nevada or Arizona. One of the western walls of the Rockies, A line of snow-capped peaks called the Wasatch Range cuts right down the middle of northern Utah, dividing the state in two. The line of the Wasatch Range is continued south by other arms of the Rockies, forming a sprawling network of high mountain ranges. Many of these mountains climb to over 10,000 feet, and their foothills are rugged and crowded with dense pine forests. Needless to say, traveling through this part of Utah is very hard. Building in it is basically impossible. Coming south is a portion of the state that's part of the Colorado Plateau, a similarly rugged high-elevation region where the plateau's reddish sandstone has been carved into dramatic canyons, cliffs, buttes, and other dramatic landforms by erosion and the Colorado River. These formerly included the enormous Glen Canyon, which was flooded and transformed into the winding Lake Powell Reservoir in the late 60s. Outside of a few scattered forests, the plateau is an arid desert region, barren and rocky. So in the east, Utah is a place of towering mountains and dramatic canyons. But in the west, oh boy does it change. The western half of Utah has what we call a basin and range topography, with lower, flatter basins divided by scattered mountain ranges. And it's even more arid than the Colorado Plateau. This stretch of Utah is part of the Great Basin, an enormous, arid, endorheic basin that takes up much of the American West. The Great Basin lies in the rain shadow of California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, which has left this whole region of the country, from Nevada and Arizona up to Idaho and of course into Utah, as a vast series of deserts. The largest of Utah's deserts is the vast Great Salt Lake Desert, which is dominated by rolling sand dunes and enormous salt flats, the latter of which were once the bed of an enormous Ice Age lake. But as those salt flats suggest, this part of Utah wasn't always so dry. In fact, tens of thousands of years ago, it was much wetter and it looked a whole lot different. Due to cooler global temperatures, the Great Basin enjoyed less evaporation and more rainfall during the Ice Age, which created an enormous lake called Lake Bonneville. Now, this lake was something else entirely to what we know from the region today. In fact, this once mighty lake covered the majority of western Utah, with a size similar to modern Lake Michigan. Before it drained at the end of the last Ice Age, Lake Bonneville left only a few remnants behind across the state. the largest of which is Utah's most famous body of water, the Great Salt Lake. As great as it is, though, the Great Salt Lake is only a shadow of the ancient Lake Bonneville. And unfortunately, the Great Salt Lake is continuing the pattern set by its ancient ancestor. It's shrinking thanks to a one-two combination of climate change and the water demands placed on the rivers that feed it. Since the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, around 11,700 years ago, Utah has become much drier, leaving a lot of the state unsuitable for human development. But between the mountains and deserts, there's a narrow corridor of Utah that's a lot more pleasant, the Wasatch Front. Sandwiched between the Wasatch Mountains to the east and the Great Salt Lake to the west, this network of valleys and basins is still on the warm and arid side, but it's a lot more livable than the other parts of Utah. As a result, the Wasatch Front is where most of the state's population is concentrated, and it's in one of the fastest growing urban regions in the United States. But this boom isn't just down to Utah's geography. It's the product of one of the most unique chapters of American history. Just like managing Utah's booming population required finding the perfect centralized corridor for development, managing a rapidly growing business requires a centralized system to actually handle the expansion. If your business is booming, but your operations are scattered across a dozen disconnected systems, you need today's sponsor, Odoo. Odoo is an all-in-one management software that offers entrepreneurs a massive range of integrated applications designed to completely streamline your day-to-day business operations. Instead of juggling a mess of external tools, Odoo completely centralizes your workflow into one single platform. What makes it so powerful is that it's natively integrated. All of Odoo's applications communicate seamlessly with each other. So, for example, your sales are directly linked your accounting and inventory management that prevents you from having to do double manual entry of your data and provides a cohesive real-time overview of your business plus it's incredibly scalable your business is going to grow and odoo is built to grow right alongside you at your own pace letting you add new applications as your specific needs evolve and odoo makes getting started incredibly affordable your first application is completely free including unlimited hosting and support, or you can get access to all available applications starting at just $24.90 per month. If you want to see how Odoo can streamline your business operations, you can book a free meeting with an Odoo expert or try the full platform for free for 15 days with no credit card required. You just got to click the link in the description below. Huge thanks to Odoo for supporting the channel. Now, let's get back to the history of Utah. The land that would become Utah has been inhabited by numerous indigenous nations for untold millennia. As Lake Bonneville receded, hunter-gatherer tribes spread across the land, with some of them later developing agriculture and building villages in Utah's more fertile regions. Centuries before the arrival of European settlers, the Four Corners region was one of North America's greatest centers of civilization, with the ancestral Puebloans building stone and earthwork villages all across the area. By the time European settlers arrived in Utah, Utah, the future state was mainly home to five indigenous cultural groups. The Utes, the Navajo, the Shoshone, the Paiutes, and the Goshutes. But unlike later settlers, these people were fairly spread out across the state. They didn't just cram themselves into the Wasatch Front, it was only with the arrival of European settlers that Utah's modern European geography began to take shape. But these people were different from most settlers. You see, the settlers were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which, at this point, had only been around for a few years. The Mormons had fled the Midwest over persecution due to their beliefs, and they deliberately sought out a remote, desolate place to settle in. They wanted to establish their own society, far from other American settlers, in a place that, hopefully, wouldn't be appealing to future settlement waves. But they still needed to find somewhere livable. Humans, after all, need a few core ingredients to survive, and chief among them are water and food. So the Salt Lake Valley in the Wasatch Front was their compromise. But this wasn't an attempt to establish a normal territory of the United States. As the Mormons began to build their first settlements, they established a theocratic society run by the leaders of their church. And this means that, despite the United States being a democracy, early Utah was actually a theocracy. And while they dreamed of expanding their society into a full-fledged state of the United States, which they named the State of Deseret, complete with a drafted state constitution in 1849, Congress simply wasn't having it. The Mormons' first moves toward statehood were soundly rejected by Congress. Instead, the settlements in the Salt Lake Valley became part of the Utah Territory, named for the indigenous Ute, which the fledgling Deseret state government effectively merged into. The later part of the 1860s saw Utah grow quickly, but it also saw constant tension between the territory's government and the federal government. At the time, many members of the Mormon church practiced polygamy, and Between that and the theocratic, separatist nature of their settlements, the Mormons were highly unpopular with other Americans, including virtually all of Congress. Utah was denied statehood until it budged on those issues. In the late 1850s, President Buchanan ordered church leader Brigham Young to be replaced as governor by a federal appointee, and he even sent federal troops to Utah to enforce the order. This sparked the Utah War, a tense standoff that ended with Utah being placed under nominal military occupation until the outbreak of the Civil War. Imagine that for a second. Utah was taken over by the U.S. military. All seemed lost for Utah statehood. Despite these tensions, Utah continued to grow. By 1869, 70,000 Mormon settlers had set up in Utah, and non-Mormon settlers started flocking to the state as well. Settlements began to spread all along the Wasatch Front, and settlers also began to expand to other parts of the state, albeit in much smaller numbers. The corridor of Mormon settlements between Brigham City and Nephi was still the heart of Utah, however. On top of just being the most habitable region, the territory's existing infrastructure was already concentrated there, and new settlers concentrated accordingly. But non-Mormon settlers still brought change with them, culminating in the steady secularization of the territory. In 1896, after the Mormon church finally, at long last, met the government's demands by formally renouncing polygamy and theocratic rule, Utah was granted statehood. But here's the weird thing, Utah's statehood came with very specific conditions. All land in Utah that hadn't yet been claimed by settlers immediately became federal property. In most other states, most land was federally owned before being parceled up and privatized, given to settler families through various homesteading acts. But in Utah, most of the state escaped this process. Huge swathes of land remained in the government's hands, and for a simple reason, settlers did not want it. A massive part of Utah is just too desolate to develop, leading most new arrivals to settle in the existing communities of the Wasatch Front instead. This pattern has continued even into the modern day. Utah's population has swelled over the past few decades, but it's remained concentrated in that relatively narrow corridor. After all, it's the communities in that corridor that have attracted all these new arrivals in the first place. The growth of Utah's population has also led to substantial economic growth, which is where Utah's modern boom runs head first into the limits imposed by federal lands. The vast majority of Utah's lands are owned by the federal government today. In fact, Utah is second only to Nevada in this way. In total, 64.4% of all land in Utah is federal property, along with another 10% that's owned by the state and 4.5% that's owned by the indigenous nations of the state. All told, that amounts to 78.9%, leaving just over a fifth of the entire state available for private ownership, which puts a hard limit on development. Of course, that hasn't stopped Utah from growing anyway. Between 2010 and 2020, Utah's population swelled by a whopping 16%, much higher than most other states. And since 2020, the state has continued its growth trajectory, adding an additional 300,000 people. And while this is partly due to the state's higher than average birth rate, that certainly doesn't account for all of it. Instead, most of the population gain is from immigration from abroad or people moving from other states. And as Utah's population has swelled, the state economy has grown with it. Today, there are a little more than 3.5 million people living in the state. And in recent decades, tech companies and other businesses have flocked to Utah, to the point that part of the Wasatch Front has earned the nickname Silicon Slopes. It's not hard to see why tech companies like Utah so much. The state's growing and disproportionately young population provides companies with a large workforce. And the state is just a short flight away from other centers of the tech industry the west coast. With the local tech industry continuing to grow, Utah's economy is thriving, and its growth shows no signs of stopping. But with economic growth comes increased demand for spaces and resources, which means increased demand for land. Which is an issue when so much land is government owned. Now just because something is federal land doesn't mean it's completely off limits. Most of Utah's federal lands are run by the Bureau of Land Management, or about 42% of the whole state. And the Bureau of Land Management is, at its core, a federal agency which is trying to make the most use of its land inventory, which means it regularly leases its lands for grazing or resource extraction like mining or oil drilling. And true to that mission, Utah has a thriving mining, logging, and ranching industry, all of which depend on access to federal lands. Even some of Utah's national monuments, such as the Grand Staircase and Bear's Ears, allow grazing on parts of their land. So the federal government isn't restricting any and all economic activity on these lands. They're just off limits for full development. And the activity that's allowed has to operate under strict restrictions so as not to destroy the land. But here's the real truth behind these areas. For the vast majority of federally owned lands, full development would be impractical at best. Every place's geography can only support so much human development before it suffers ecological collapse. And Utah's growth is testing the limits as it is. The Great Salt Lake, for example, is shrinking, and while climate change-induced droughts are a key factor there, the main driver of that shrinkage is water use. Meltwater from the Wasatch Mountains is the main water source for Utah's largest communities, and as more and more water is taken by the Wasatch Front communities, as well as by Silicon Slope's data centers, there's simply less that flows into the Great Salt Lake. All this is to say, federal ownership still comes with restrictions, which puts a limit on how Utah can grow. Public land owned by the Bureau of Land Management is managed closely to preserve the natural environment, protect environmentally or culturally significant areas, and ensure that all natural resource extraction is done sustainably. These regulations limit the growth of local industries, putting a cap on Utah's economic boom, much to the dismay of state leaders today. That's right, Utah wants its land back. The fact that Utah doesn't control most of its territory is a sticking point for the leaders of Utah. After all, this is a state that was founded by religious refugees looking to find a land of their own, whose early communities were in a constant state of conflict with the federal government. So, to many, federal control over so much of Utah conflicts with the spirit of independence and cultural freedom that's so central to the state's culture, which means they're trying to take it back. In 2012, the Utah state government signed a bill demanding that the federal government relinquish almost all of its land back to the state by 2014. The goal for Utah was to take control of the vast natural resource wealth and return it to the state, wealth that consistently flows to the federal government instead. It would also remove the perceived burdensome and bureaucratic red tape that stymies development in places that the federal government owns. And so, the state sued the federal government, arguing that the land is rightfully theirs. Unfortunately for Utah, the federal courts disagreed. Time after time, they ruled that the federal government does rightfully own the land. This has now made it to the point where the state of Utah is requesting the US Supreme Court overrule the lower courts and return the land to the state, a request which is likely to be ignored. But not every Utahn wants the state to own the land. Many residents of Utah value the sustainability and protection of Utah's unique environment, and on the whole, public lands in Utah and other Western states are wildly popular. In fact, Utah's national monuments and parks have even driven economic growth in some of the surrounding communities. Federal lands tend to attract tourism, and the tourism industry is a key pillar of Utah's economy. So the federal government may own most of Utah, but ownership isn't everything, and local communities and the state economy still benefit plenty from these lands and how they're managed. Land use and land ownership have always been a fraught issue in the US, and Utah is certainly no exception. But no matter how the land is divided and managed, there are always limits imposed by geography, and respecting that geography is a vital part of ensuring communities can grow sustainably. Plus, Utah is simply gorgeous in its mostly undeveloped state. This is my book, Badlands, the geography of cities that shouldn't exist and why they do. It's all about cities like Phoenix, Tokyo, and more, which are geographically in a tough spot. Whether it's water scarcity, seismic activity, sinking land, or huge volcanoes, this is the deep dive you've always wanted about the places that feel like they shouldn't exist at all. So let's go get a geography book on the New York Times bestseller list and pre-order it today. There's a link in the description below and of course, head over to my site, thebyte.co for even more details. I hope you enjoyed learning all about Utah's federal lands. If you did, be sure to check out this video all about Liechtenstein, the tiny country in Europe that outsources almost all of its government. Thanks for watching, see you next time.