Washington City-"The Best Place to Live"

Recently the nationwide real estate company Movoto released its annual ranking of the best places to live [link], in each of the states, around the country.  Not surprising to us, Washington City ranked as the second best place to live in the state of Utah.  We were slightly eclipsed by the city of Holladay, in northern Utah, but we are proud of the ranking nonetheless.

The selections were based upon a point system that measured: total amenities available, quality of life (cost of living, median home price, median rent, median household income, and student-to-teacher ratio), total crimes, tax rates, unemployment, commute time, and weather.  Once this criteria was established, Movoto looked at all cities over 100,000 with populations over 10,000.

Washington City scored the highest of all cities with regards to amenities.  This included not only the great outdoor opportunities available in our beautiful area but also our local parks, recreation programs and community center.  We also scored high in our weather and quality of life.  And even in spite of the fact that, on occasions, the Green Spring/Telegraph intersection can be crowded, we scored strong points for having a commute time of only 16 minutes.

Our neighboring cities of St. George and Hurricane scored respectively 17th and 39th.

We are very proud of this recognition and note that the best asset of our community was not even measured; and that is the quality of our citizens and the spirit of community that exists here.  In that end, it is the citizens that we want to be and the community spirit that we want to create and maintain that will make us the one of the best places to live and raise our families.

Growth

We recently did a calculation in our city of the number of new single-family residential homes that have been built in the last year, the total came to approximately 630.  That represents an increase in population of approximately 1,764 new residents to our community, just last year.  We are not anticipating this growth to curtail at all and should remain constant like this for the very near future.

Growth is always a challenging thing and sometimes not liked by our existing residents.  Too often we have the sentiment "now that I have built my house, please don't let anyone else build."  This "last in" feeling is understandable but not realistic.  As we continue to build this community into a "city of choice," we will continue to attract residents.  They will become our neighbors and friends.  They will become friends of our children and many of those relationships will last a lifetime.  There is much more good that comes from growth than negative, in my opinion.

People often ask why we can't slow down the growth.  That is also challenging when you consider that growth comes because of individual property owners desire to benefit from the land that they own, by subdividing it and selling it for homes.  For local government to intervene in a property owner's desire to do this, challenges the very premise of property rights and ownership-a beautiful component of the society and country we live in.  Of course we will attempt to assist in making sure this new growth has as minimal an impact as possible on the existing residents but growth is driven by supply of land and demand for residency, with local government in the middle helping to make sure this comes together in the best way possible.
In my view, I think that growth is going to continue; at least for some time.  But I like to think of the wonderful people that are now calling this place home, for the children and the relationships that will begin because of these new neighbors, and for the wonderful richness we will experience as our borders expand.  For all of our residents, old and new, it is and will be a wonderful place to call home.