A quiet explosion: growth in the 'burbs creates new business hubs.

• Author: Webb, Gaylen
• Position: Business BOOM

When Utah Business magazine made its debut a quarter century ago, Draper and Riverton were still classic Utah farming communities, while Eagle Mountain--that fast-growing city on the west side of Utah Lake--and Daybreak, Kennecott Land's mixed-use development in South Jordan City were nonexistent.

Like a lot of water under the bridge, as the idiom goes, times have changed among many of the Wasatch Front's suburban communities. Gone are the dinosaurs like Geneva Steel, whose demise made way for the Town of Vineyard to rise from slag. Businesses follow rooftops--and nowhere is that more true than in Draper City, which had little more than 5,000 residents when Utah Business was launched. Since then the city has exploded, growing from a small, rural bedroom community into a burgeoning metropolitan suburb with more than 36,500 residents.

As one of Utah's fastest-growing cities, Draper led employment growth in Salt Lake County for nearly a decade, according to a study by the University of Utah's Bureau of Business and Economic Research (BEBR).Today, Draper is more than a suburb of Salt Lake City. It's an employment center--home to global online auction company eBay, software giant Adobe, European retail giant IKEA, and more.

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Roads follow rooftops, too. The exploding suburban population along the west side of the Salt Lake Valley necessitated the construction of Bangerter Highway (SR 154), that expressway running north from Draper City to the Salt Lake International Airport. The highway's completion was a watershed event for Riverton City, says Jeff Hawker, who serves as economic development director, assistant city manager and public information officer there.

In 1986 it was as common to see a tractor in Riverton as it was a car. Now, with a population close to 40,000 residents and nearly all of the farmland developed, Riverton is a community struggling to maintain its rural heritage while making room for retailers like Wal-Mart, Lowes, Kohl's, Staples, Dollar Tree, Shoe Carnival, and a host of restaurants.

The community of West Jordan isn't so rural anymore, either. In 1991 the 500-acre master-planned development called Jordan Landing sprang from the farmland there. The development encompasses 250 single-family homes and 1,500 multi-family units...