Downtown Daybreak opening a mixed-use urban center
Daybreak in South Jordan, Utah, is the largest new urban development with 30,000 residents and is opening what may be the biggest new urban downtown to date. As of 2025, Downtown Daybreak features a new Triple-A ballpark for the Salt Lake Bees, an amphitheater, a performing arts center, a large cinema, a health center, a Salt Lake County Library, a mix of residential units, and office space.
The 200-plus-acre downtown will eventually have 5,000 residents and is connected to Salt Lake City and the region by the TRAX light rail system. Downtown Daybreak is the latest outcome of a vision that began a quarter century ago with Envision Utah, the plan that looked at scenarios for the growing Wasatch Front.
Envision Utah was sponsored by a coalition of civic, business, and political leaders. Participants preferred the future of mixed-use, compact development connected by light rail over the business-as-usual scenario of unmitigated sprawl and more highways (126 square miles versus 409 square miles of new development). Although Envision Utah had no direct power, it had influence. The region has since built 45 miles of light rail with 51 stations, and jurisdictions have planned and implemented walkable mixed-use like Daybreak along the transit.
Daybreak was master-planned by Peter Calthorpe, the CNU cofounder who also led the Envision Utah process. Other new urbanist designers have provided detailed planning in Daybreak, notably Urban Design Associates (UDA) of Pittsburgh. Daybreak is the largest land use project on the system, although there are other significant developments in planning and construction, including Utah City near Provo, a 300-acre TOD that broke ground in 2023. Daybreak began in 2004, and could eventually have 40,000 or 50,000 people on six square miles.
Because of its design, Daybreak is a model for a healthy community. The development is walkable and bikeable, and it also includes more than 50 miles of multiuse trails. Walkable development and greenways are both associated with healthier outcomes for residents.
The town has a dozen residential neighborhoods with mixed-use destinations, but the downtown brings it all together.
The first phase includes 100,000 square feet of office space and 75,000 square feet of retail, food, and beverage businesses, 900 residential units, along with the other attractions. Phase one, which is billed as Utah’s first sports and entertainment district, amounts to a tenth of the total downtown. “This will be a new center of gravity for the Salt Lake Valley,” says Stephen James, chief visioning officer for Larry H. Miller Real Estate, Daybreak developer. “Daybreak is considered a model for this kind of development, and we are taking this to a whole new level in Downtown Daybreak.”
In addition to the street grid, there will be a system for pedestrians to get around downtown that involves mid-block pathways on a very tight urban scale, Eric Osth of UDA told Public Square. The light rail system connects the new downtown and the historic one in Salt Lake City in a way that will be “wired to one another,” he says.
In addition to office space, the health campus, and the retail/entertainment uses, Daybreak features employment in light industry like warehouses and data centers. The community is being developed on a large former mine where copper, gold, silver, and other materials were extracted. In that sense, it is a brownfield site.
Daybreak is a small city sprung from a vision that compact transit-oriented mixed-use is better than sprawl. For the residents of Daybreak, their health is the better for it.
