The 2026 Zions Bank Wasatch Back Economic Summit began May 11 on an optimistic note.
Natalie Gochnour, who teaches business at the University of Utah and directs its Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, addressed the crowd in the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley.
“There's actually good news ahead, in the sense that you are in the state of Utah. You are in urban Utah. You are in the back of urban Utah,” Gochnour said. “There's almost no better place to be in the entire country.”
Gochnour acknowledged dropping consumer confidence, higher prices — especially at the pump — and “tepid” job growth in Utah and across America.
But rather than dwell on the slowing economy, she portrayed Utah as still prosperous compared to the rest of the country.
“Our challenge is: how do we grow and change and still maintain everything that makes us special?” she said. “What is the ‘New Utah’? Well, we've gone from a small state to a midsize state.”
In 2020, Utah ranked 30th in population, whereas it ranked 34th in the three censuses prior.
The Gardner Institute estimates transplants now account for 61% of Utah’s growth. That’s double what they did between 2000 and 2020.
Consequently, Utah is now older and more ethnically and racially diverse than before.
The main risk Gochnour sees in those trends is high housing costs, since wages haven’t kept pace with rising land values.
“I'll just say that Summit [County] and Park City are known for really high quality growth that isn't off the charts. It's a more managed growth, and it just shows up in the numbers,” she said. “It's in part, I think, deliberate decision making.”
Summit County is sandwiched in between the places with the most job growth — Morgan County — and population growth — Wasatch.
But Gochnour praised conservation, like Park City’s purchase of McPolin Farm from the Osguthorpe family. It preserved the iconic white barn and surrounding land as a green entry corridor.
“You have a lot of, what I'll call, critical lands,” Gochnour said. “These are lands that have value in the way they currently are.”
The Gardner institute has a list of the “magnificent seven” indicators it thinks prove Utah’s unique prosperity.
Those include a growing population and youthfulness, coupled with high household income and low poverty rates.
Gochnour implored the crowd of a few hundred government, tourism, real estate and business leaders to help Utah capitalize on those qualities. Despite a dingy national economic outlook, she said Utah can show other states the path to success.
