The conglomerate that brought you the largest open pit mine in the world is planning a dense "mega-suburb" nearby that will become home to 500,000 people in 50 years' time. The city of Daybreak will be centered around sustainability principles evidenced in planned transit lines that will connect the currently rural area to the rest of the Wasatch Front: (via)

This mega-suburb, twice the size of San Francisco, will be the work of a mining company, Kennecott Utah Copper Corp., which has no experience in real-estate development.

The Utah company is a subsidiary of London-based Rio Tinto, a mining multinational and avowed convert to environmentalism, which decided to make a showcase out of its surplus Utah lands instead of just selling them off for cookie-cutter subdivisions.

Home builders were skeptical when the Salt Lake valley's biggest landowner laid out the plan for a 20-mile string of densely packed communities framing the rural west side of Salt Lake County. The communities would be laid out along a planned highway and light-rail lines connecting to Salt Lake City.

Land is increasingly at a premium around Salt Lake City, as the Wasatch Front's demographics point to an perpetual population boom compounded by difficult geography. Kennecott's 144 square miles of contiguous real estate is the largest piece of land controlled by a single owner that is next to a major city anywhere in the US:

Single ownership of the land "gives incredible control over development and the execution of the plan," said Gary Hunt, a retired executive for Irvine Co., which developed one of the country's first master-planned communities, in California's Orange County, starting in the 1960s. "In other parts of the country you don't have that kind of opportunity."

None of the eventual 162,800 homes of Daybreak will have aluminum siding:

At Daybreak, every house will be within a five minute's walk of a park on 37 miles of interconnecting trails, some lined with channel streams. It will be easy to walk or bicycle to grocery and other shops and restaurants in the village core. Kennecott banned the use of aluminum siding and fake cobblestone facades in favor of natural materials and insisted on rambling front porches for most houses.

"My wife always wanted a front porch," said Craig Douglass, a 56-year-old software quality analyst for 3M Co., who moved from a nearby subdivision, where he found his half-acre yard too large to maintain. At Daybreak, the couple bought a $273,000, 1,650-square-foot house with "a nice small yard, and we're looking forward to all the amenities" that will include a sailing lake, he said.

"The idea is these homes will appreciate in value because of their quality and the amenities of the neighborhood," said Wilson, the builder who has taken 200 orders so far and can't finish the houses fast enough for his buyers.