City North Salt Lake, Davis County
The southernmost city in Davis County, and the youngest of its fifteen
North Salt Lake, and the bench it was built on.
21,907 people at the 2020 decennial census on about 8.5 square miles, from Jordan River flats up onto a Wasatch bench, with the whole southern boundary shared with Salt Lake City. The town incorporated on 3 September 1946 because a developer bought the spring water out from under the valley floor. Seven pages on the city itself, including two documented landslides, a park built on top of one of them, and the one refinery that is genuinely inside the city line.
Southern Utah is my home turf. North Salt Lake is not, so these pages are researched rather than lived: the facts come from the city, the Utah Geological Survey, the state air quality record and the operators themselves, and each one carries the date it was checked. A Davis County partner agent does the on the ground work here.
The live question
How many people live in North Salt Lake, and why does every source say something different?
Three figures are in circulation and all three are defensible, which is why averaging them is the one thing nobody should do. The 2020 decennial census counted 21,907 people. The Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute put the city at 23,925 as of 1 July 2024, working from a 2020 base of 23,065 rather than from the census count. The city's own Demographics page carries 24,811 for 2026 and says plainly that the figure includes the Val Verda neighbourhood annexation. All three checked 15 August 2026. They measure different territory on different dates by different methods, so the only correct practice is to name the source every single time.
The genuinely counterintuitive part sits inside the Gardner series. North Salt Lake lost 132 residents in 2024, a decline of about half a percent and the largest absolute drop of any city in Davis County that year, and it was one of ten of the county's fifteen cities to lose population in the same twelve months. That is not in conflict with the city's rising estimate: the city figure added annexed ground, and the Gardner figure measured the same ground year over year. Both are true and they point in opposite directions.
One more piece of civic geography that trips people up. North Salt Lake shares its entire southern boundary with Salt Lake City, and it is still counted in the Ogden and Clearfield metropolitan statistical area rather than the Salt Lake City one. It is the southernmost city in Davis County, the youngest of the fifteen, and it is the county's south door in every sense that matters to a commuter.
Start here
A town that incorporated because a developer bought the spring water.
Every city has a founding story and most of them are ceremonial. This one is a water fight with a date on it. By 1930 there were about 65 homes on the hillside above the highway and most of the area's houses and businesses sat below it, drawing water from the privately owned McDuff and McNeil springs on the hills to the south, right on the Salt Lake and Davis county border. In 1946 a developer bought hillside ground to build houses and made a purchase agreement with the owners of those springs. The landowners below the highway were then allowed no additional water. Some of them formed a committee, drew up a petition to form a town so that control of the water system could be instigated, and on 3 September 1946 the Davis County Commission granted town status to roughly 456 acres.
Hold that, because the whole city runs on it. This bench is a spring bench. The springs are why the town exists, they are why one of its parks is called Tunnel Springs, they are why a hillside two miles north crept downhill for fifteen years, and they are why the cure for that hillside was a drainage system built to catch spring water and take it away. A place founded on an argument about groundwater ended up with two landslides caused in part by groundwater, which is either a coincidence or a geology lesson depending on how much you enjoy irony.
The second thing to hold is the shape. This is about 8.5 square miles running from the Jordan River flats up onto the Wasatch foothills, with the valley floor a little over 4,200 feet and the bench streets climbing several hundred feet above it. Four parallel roads run the length of it and the whole south line is another county. The city's own figure for the drive to downtown Salt Lake City is 7.6 miles and ten minutes, which is closer than most of Salt Lake County's own suburbs manage.
North Salt Lake at a glance
21,907
counted at the 2020 decennial census
8.52 sq mi
of flats and bench, the city's own figure
3 Sep 1946
town status granted, on about 456 acres
1
refinery inside the city line, of five on this seam
The layout
Four kinds of ground stacked between a river and a mountain.
You can cross this city in about ten minutes and pass through four completely different propositions on the way. Sorting them first is the most useful thing a visitor or a buyer can do here, because the rules, the weather and the paperwork all change as you climb.
| The east bench | The original townsite | The west flats | The corridor | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where it is | Above Orchard Drive, climbing to the upper Eaglepointe streets and the shoreline bench | Along US-89, Main Street and Center Street, the 1946 footprint and its postwar rings | West of the freeway on old lake bed, from Redwood Road out toward the Jordan River | The seam either side of I-15 and Beck Street, running south into Salt Lake County |
| What is on it | The city owned golf course, Deer Hollow Park, Eagleridge Pond, and three trail doors onto the foothills | City Hall at 10 East Center, Hatch Park across the road, the community garden at Center and Orchard | Eleven named city parks, the Wetlands Trails, and two doors onto the paved trail that runs the county | One refinery, three gravel pits, rail loading, truck yards and the alarm test schedule that goes with them |
| What the ground is | Lake Bonneville sand and gravel over clay rich volcanic ash, which is the recipe behind both slides | The toe of the bench, where the springs came out and the first houses went up | Old lake bed, flat as a table, and wet enough in places that the city keeps some of it as wetland | The same flats, zoned for work since before the town was a town |
| What the rules are | Geologic hazard studies under city code title 10 chapter 12; no fireworks east of Orchard Drive | Ordinary city rules, plus the winter no parking rule during a snow event until plowing is done | No fireworks south of Eagleridge Drive either; watering banned 10am to 6pm and switched off 15 October to 15 April | A Title V major source in two nonattainment areas, with every permit public and dated at the state |
| Where it is written | Eaglewood, and both landslide pages | The refinery corridor page carries Center Street's history | Foxboro | The refinery corridor |
Ground, rules and provision as published by the City of North Salt Lake in its Parks and Trails Map and Guide, its New Resident information, its codified ordinances and its Demographics page, and by the Utah Geological Survey and the Utah Division of Air Quality, all checked 15 August 2026. Municipal fees and seasonal rules reset annually and the watering rule moves with drought conditions, so read the city's own pages for the year you are in.
There are two documented landslides in this city, not one, and the older one destroyed six times as many homes than the famous one did. Search the city and you will find 5 August 2014 on Parkway Drive, which destroyed one house and made the evening news. The Utah Geological Survey also publishes the Springhill landslide two miles north, which crept downhill from the late 1990s and, in its own words, ultimately destroyed 18 homes over 15 years. The city bought and demolished the affected houses with a federal mitigation grant awarded on 28 June 2012, and the failure surface is now a public park with a loop trail and interpretive plaques. One let go in a morning and one took a decade and a half, and they sit on the same stack of lake gravel over clay. Both are on this companion, and Springhill goes first because it explains the geology the 2014 page then narrows.
The long view
The street the city meets on was named for a meat packing plant.
Cattle got here before anyone else did. Brigham Young sent settlers north in 1847 to find pastureland, and the ground they found was swamp grass by the Jordan River, tall grass on the lower mountainsides, small springs running out of the hills, and hillsides too rocky and sandy for crops or cattle which, in the city's own dry phrasing, did produce several sand and gravel excavations. That last clause is the entire history of this place written by the place itself, and both landslides are downstream of it.
In 1895 Leary and Warren established the Salt Lake Union Stockyards near the railroad tracks, which made cattle matter here in a commercial way. In 1916 the Cudahy Meat Packing Company bought the Intermountain Ice Packing building on Center Street just below those tracks, and the plant did well enough that the street which is now Center Street was called Cudahy Lane. Cattle came in by rail and processed meat went out to destinations all over the world. The plant closed in 1972.
The city keeps the receipt. Its own Cudahy Crossing page publishes a panoramic photograph taken on 12 December 1931 by Harry Shipler at Center Street and the Denver and Rio Grande tracks, and in it you can pick out the post office mail drop, the packing plant, a roadhouse at Center and Main and a Bamberger Railroad yard. The recollection printed with it is that the train would go by at nine in the morning and throw the mail bag out. That post office is where the name North Salt Lake came from, on ground that had until then been called South Bountiful. The name has not entirely gone either: the US Geological Survey still gauges the Jordan River at a point it calls Cudahy Lane. The refinery corridor page carries the rest of that street.
Two more dates finish the frame. The trail that ran along the edge of the hills above the hot springs, where William Luker kept a store and restaurant he called the Halfway House for travellers, became US Highway 89 and 91, which is a better description of Main Street than any highway sign. And the refinery on Center Street was commissioned in 1948, two years after the town incorporated, which means the plant and the municipality are almost exactly the same age. The refinery did not arrive next to a town. They grew up together.
Rocky, sandy hillsides not well suited for crops or cattle, however, they did produce several sand and gravel excavations. The city, describing its own ground.
The county's own subjects
Four things this city touches that belong to the whole county rather than to it.
Davis County carries seven region pages written once for all fifteen cities. North Salt Lake genuinely touches four of them, at a trailhead, at a ridge line, at a pond and at a recreation district card. Those four are handed over intact below rather than repeated from a doorstep that is not theirs.
The paved one
The Legacy Parkway Trail
Thirteen flat miles through five cities, and the southernmost signed trailhead on it is on Center Street here.
Read the guideThe mountain
The Davis canyons
The bench canyons as a set, the Skyline Drive spine above them, and the shoreline trail that links their mouths.
Read the guideThe water
The lakeside parks
The county's pond map, which is where the city's own urban fishing water at Eagleridge belongs in context.
Read the guideDays out
Family weekends in Davis County
What a paid day out costs county wide, including the recreation centre this city buys resident pricing at.
Read the guideThree more Davis subjects sit north of here, and the nearest of them starts at a causeway about half an hour away. The island in the lake, the managed wetlands and their brand new access permit rule, and the air force base and its museum are all real reasons to drive north out of this city, and none of them is a doorstep amenity from a street in North Salt Lake. They are written once at county level for all fifteen towns, and this companion points at them rather than describing them from twenty five miles away. All seven sit on the Davis County hub, alongside a companion for each town.
If you only have one day
A day here climbs, because everything worth seeing is uphill of the freeway.
First thing
Walk a landslide
A loop trail with interpretive plaques laid across the surface of a slide that took fifteen years and eighteen houses.
Read the guideMid morning
Take the bench trail door
Restrooms, parking and the city's own listed access onto the shoreline trail, at the top of the Eaglepointe streets.
Read the guideAfternoon
Play the city's own eighteen
Par 71 over about 6,200 yards on the hill, run as a municipal department with its own citizen oversight committee.
Read the guideBefore you leave
Drive down to the flats
Eleven named parks, 8,208 linear feet of wetland trail and the trail door at the far west end of Center Street.
Read the guideLiving with it
A year in a city that had to schedule its own town square.
There is no historic main street to walk here, and the city has answered that the way small cities do now, with a calendar. Its own events page listed seventeen named annual events when it was checked on 15 August 2026, including an Easter Egg Dash run by the Youth City Council, a Kite Festival, a Juneteenth celebration, Liberty Fest, the Eaglewood Auto Fest, Monday food trucks and a vendor fair at Legacy Park, a Night Out Against Crime that doubles as a health fair and a back to school night, NSL Reads, a photo contest, a Halloween event, a Winter Lights Fest, a 9 September day of service and a Summer Trail Series. Almost none of them carries a fixed date on the city's own overview page, so the calendar is the document to read rather than a listing site.
The most distinctive one is on the water. Get to the River is a paddle down a three mile stretch of the Jordan River each September, 2026 being the thirteenth annual, and the city makes canoes, kayaks and life vests available in limited numbers at no cost. Registration is required, it is no longer first come first served, boats must be reserved in advance, and registration opens on 1 August. The paddle runs downstream into North Salt Lake and finishes at the city's own boat takeout on Jordan River Drive, which is a genuinely unusual municipal amenity for a town of this size.
The seasonal rules are where a bench address and a flats address stop being the same city. Fireworks are permitted only on 2 to 5 July, 22 to 25 July and on 31 December between 11pm and 1am, and they are not allowed east of Orchard Drive or south of Eagleridge Drive at all. That is a wildfire line drawn straight through the middle of a city, and it is the cleanest single sentence anyone has written about what living on this bench means. Outside watering is banned between 10am and 6pm and sprinkler systems are switched off from 15 October to 15 April, subject to drought conditions. During a snow event it is unlawful to leave a vehicle or trailer on the paved roadway until plowing is finished from pavement edge to pavement edge.
And then there is the corridor, which never stops. The refinery inside the city line runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and says so in its own state air permit. Odour days happen, they are episodic and wind dependent, and the honest homework is to drive the street you are considering on a grey winter weekday rather than a blue Saturday and to look at the state's own monitoring record for the months you care about. That is the whole of the advice this companion will give on the subject, because characterising health risk is not something a real estate page has any business doing.
No fireworks east of Orchard Drive, and none south of Eagleridge Drive. One municipal rule, and it draws the bench in a single line.
The North Salt Lake companion
Seven pages, and two of them are about the same hillside failing in different ways.
Everything The Local has written about North Salt Lake itself: the slow landslide the city turned into a public park, the sudden one that produced an ordinance, the bench park that is the city's trail door, the municipal golf course and the rules that come with a hillside address, the west side and its eleven parks, and what living on a working industrial corridor actually asks of a household.
Quick answers
North Salt Lake, answered.
Three things, and only one of them is the one people expect. It is known for the refineries visible from Interstate 15, although exactly one of the five plants on that seam is actually inside the city line. It is known for a bench that has failed twice, once slowly enough to destroy 18 homes over 15 years and once suddenly on the morning of 5 August 2014. And it is known locally for being the closest Davis County address to downtown Salt Lake City, with the city's own published figure at 7.6 miles and ten minutes.
At the southern end of Davis County, sharing its entire southern boundary with Salt Lake City, with Woods Cross to the north and Bountiful to the northeast. It covers about 8.5 square miles that run from old Jordan River lake bed on the west up onto the Wasatch foothills on the east, so the valley floor sits a little over 4,200 feet and the bench streets climb several hundred feet above that. Despite bordering the capital, it is counted in the Ogden and Clearfield metropolitan statistical area rather than the Salt Lake City one.
Over water, and the city tells the story itself. Most homes and businesses sat below Highway 89 and 91 and drew from the privately owned McDuff and McNeil springs on the hills to the south, at the county border. In 1946 a developer bought hillside land to build houses and made a purchase agreement with the owners of those springs, which left the landowners below the highway with no additional water. Some of them formed a committee and drew up a petition to form a town so that control of the water system could be instigated. The Davis County Commission granted town status to about 456 acres on 3 September 1946.
Name the source, because three figures are all defensible and they do not reconcile. The 2020 decennial census counted 21,907. The Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute estimated 23,925 as of 1 July 2024. The city's own 2026 estimate is 24,811 and it says plainly that the figure includes the Val Verda neighbourhood annexation. In the same period the Gardner series recorded the city losing 132 residents during 2024, the largest absolute decline of any Davis County city that year, which is not a contradiction because the two figures measure different territory.
There were two, and only one of them is famous. The Parkway Drive landslide let go at about six in the morning on 5 August 2014, a mass roughly 500 feet by 500 feet with a 60 foot main scarp, and it destroyed the home at 739 Parkway Drive. The Springhill landslide two miles north is the older and larger story: the Utah Geological Survey says it ultimately destroyed 18 homes over 15 years, the city bought and demolished the affected properties using a federal mitigation grant awarded on 28 June 2012, and the failure surface is now a public geologic park.
One. Big West Oil operates at 333 West Center Street, and the Utah Division of Air Quality confirmed that physical address in the intent to approve it issued on 4 December 2025. Four other refineries sit nearby in three different cities: HF Sinclair's plant, which is named for Woods Cross, is physically in West Bountiful; Silver Eagle Refining is in Woods Cross; and the Marathon and Chevron plants are across the south line in Salt Lake City. The count of five is right and the geography gets printed wrong constantly.
The city publishes 28 numbered park and trail sites of its own, and the ones worth a drive are on the bench. Springhill Geologic Park carries a loop trail and interpretive plaques across the surface of a landslide. Tunnel Springs Park and Wild Rose Trailhead Park are the city's doors onto the foothill trail network, and Wild Rose has a small amphitheatre. Eaglewood Golf Course is a city owned 18 hole course on the hill. On the flats, Foxboro carries eleven named parks and the Wetlands Trails, and the county's paved trail has two doors inside the city.
No. The nearest is the Woods Cross station at 750 South 800 West in Woods Cross, which is a few minutes from most of the city, and the four stations serving Davis County are Woods Cross, Farmington, Layton and Clearfield. On the bus side, UTA introduced route 417 on its change day of Sunday 13 April 2025, running through Woods Cross, North Salt Lake and Rose Park and linking FrontRunner with the TRAX Green Line. A bus rapid transit line from Farmington to Research Park is in design and stops in this city, with no published opening year.
That is a housing question and this companion deliberately hands it over. What these pages can tell you is what the place asks. A bench address comes with a document set, because city code title 10 chapter 12 requires geologic hazard studies in mapped hazard areas, and with a fireworks ban east of Orchard Drive. A west side address sits closer to a working corridor where odour days happen and where the nearest train is in the next city. The practical city guide carries prices, taxes, schools and utilities, and a Davis County partner agent carries the street level judgement.
Seven pages on a city that has been checking its own ground since 1998.
Visiting here is easy and buying here is specific. A bench purchase brings a reading list that a flats purchase does not: the geologic hazard study, the seller disclosures, the hazard mapping for that exact parcel and how a policy treats earth movement. A west side purchase brings different homework, about the corridor, the wind and how far the station really is. Tell me which streets you are circling and I will put you with a Davis County partner agent who works this end of the county, and stay on the file for the financing side.
Referral disclosure. Outside Southern Utah, I connect home sellers and buyers with partner agents I trust in their area. If you choose to work with an agent I refer, that agent's brokerage pays my brokerage (Real Broker, LLC) a referral fee. The fee comes out of the agent's compensation; it is not an added cost to you. You are always free to choose any agent you wish, and using a referred agent is never required.