Park City is about to make a decision it cannot take back. The case against it isn’t that we’re moving too fast. It’s that we’ve been moving slowly for years and are now mistaking motion for progress. Nearly everything else in this debate is reversible. Budgets get amended. Developers ge t replaced. Traffic studies get redone. But a ground lease of 60 to 99 years on the last sizable parcel of developable land the public owns at the center of town is, for all practical purposes, permanent. No one now living will see that decision revisited. That should set the standard high. The question isn’t whether this proposal is acceptable. It’s whether this is the most ambitious thing Park City can do with a piece of ground it will never get back. First, what I am and am not. The people who make this town work need housing, and the shortage is real and worsening. I’m not a developer, a local business owner, or a neighbor protecting a view. My wife and I fell in love with Park City and bought a home here. We’re here part of the year, which is a qualified kind of standing. It’s also the point: We came for a reason, and that reason is what’s being decided. The city bought 5 acres for an arts and culture district anchored by Sundance and the Kimball Art Center. Sundance stepped back. Kimball stayed in the plan until a better offer near Kimball Junction pulled it away in 2024. Then, over nearly two years of open meetings and public testimony, residents weighed what an arts district would cost against a housing shortage they can see every day, and the direction shifted. Nobody did this in the dark, and nobody did it in bad faith. But underneath those years sat a single assumption nobody examined: that arts and culture was simply no longer available to us. The anchors were gone, so the category was closed, and the only question was what to put there instead. That assumption deserves a second look — because of why Sundance left. Not because we failed them. Not because Boulder is cheaper, not because Boulder is a better town, and not because more people will show up there. Sundance left because the thing it existed to do largely got solved. Independent film no longer needs a festival to reach an audience, distribution changed, and a festival is one path among many rather than the only door. That was going to happen to Sundance in Park City, in Boulder, in Big Sky, or in Boston. But notice what that means. The audience didn’t disappear. It moved — to streaming, to YouTube, to podcasts, to a creator economy larger, better funded, and more culturally central than the indie film world ever was. And here is the paradox at the heart of it: Because that world is entirely distributed, the one thing it cannot manufacture is a reason to be in the same room. Scarcity has flipped. Gathering is now the premium good. Park City has spent 40 years becoming very good at gathering. We should be selling that, aggressively, to the people who need it now. A Netflix, a Spotify, a Substack — someone building an annual event for the creators who actually command attention today. In sales you don’t wait for the customer to arrive knowing what they want. You go to them with what you have. I’ve seen no evidence we’ve tried. And the question underneath that one is worth asking out loud because I have not heard anyone ask it: What conversations do we want happening in this town? Who do we want here, and what should they be arguing about over dinner at the Eating Establishment, or in a coffee shop the next morning? Sundance answered that question for 40 years, and we got used to someone else answering it for us. Now we have to answer it ourselves. That is not a burden. It is the most interesting opportunity this town has had in a generation, and we are about to hand it to a ground lease. Which brings me to what I’d ask the City Council to sit with. Look at what we are asking these 5 acres to hold: 106 apartments, 32,581 square feet of commercial space, structured parking, childcare, arts uses, and a park. That is a program for 50 acres being pressed onto 5. It is why the plan needs a height exception. And it guarantees that every single element arrives in a diminished form — a park that is really a lawn between buildings, arts space that is really a lobby, commercial that is really whoever will sign a lease. This is the oldest failure in development: cram enough public goods onto a parcel that no one can object without seeming to object to all of them. Five acres does one thing well. It does five things badly. So the question is which one thing. Housing can be built on many parcels in this valley, by many mechanisms, over many years. A cultural anchor of real scale can only happen on a large, contiguous, city-controlled parcel at the center of town. Use the scarce asset for the thing only the scarce asset can do. We have spent months on traffic, height exceptions, and view corridors. Those are real questions. They are also small ball. A town that hosted the most important film festival in America for 40 years and will host the 2034 Olympics is now conducting itself like a subdivision review board. The argument we should be having is not how many feet tall, or how many parking spaces, or whose sightline gets clipped. It is what this place is going to be known for in 2050. We are told planning is too far along to change course. Projects are always too far along, right up until the moment they aren’t. And the honest history here is not that this has been rushed. It is that the question sat while the world this land was bought to serve rearranged itself completely. The boldest idea produced is to lease it out for a century. We should be moving faster than that, not slower. Not toward the nearest available proposal, but toward the biggest question. And let’s not be cynical about each other while we get there. Nobody here is trying to ruin anyone’s life. The council isn’t in someone’s pocket. The people who signed that petition aren’t trying to keep working families out of town. We are neighbors who disagree about 5 acres. We’re better than that. This place is better than that. Park City, think bigger! What you have here is rare. People fly across the country and the world for a few days of it. Go sell it. Tracy Kaiser Park City and Houston The post Our big chance appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less