City South Jordan, Salt Lake County
The southwest-valley city known for Daybreak, its lake and its new ballpark
South Jordan, and the lake it had to dig itself
If you are trying to place South Jordan, it is the wide city on the southwest side of the Salt Lake Valley, best known for Daybreak, the community built around a 67-acre lake the developer excavated and filled from a canal. The Salt Lake Bees ballpark opened inside Daybreak in 2025, the light rail station beside it a couple of weeks earlier, and The District has been the corner's open-air shopping default since 2007. The river that named the city runs quietly along the far eastern edge, with three stocked ponds and hardly anyone there. This hub is the map to all of it.
By Scott Buehler, Moving Utah
Updated October 2026
The short answer
South Jordan is the wide city in the southwest quarter of the Salt Lake Valley, and it is known above all for Daybreak, the community laid out in 2004 on old Bingham Canyon copper-mine ground and built around a lake dug from scratch. The two ends of the city were built about a century apart. The western end is new and holds the lake, the villages, the Salt Lake Bees ballpark and a light rail line, while the older eastern end runs along the Jordan River and keeps the quiet things: a free museum, three stocked ponds and the county fairground. In the middle, at 11400 South and Bangerter Highway, sits The District, the corner's open-air shopping default since 2007. This hub is the map to six deeper pages, and it hands the canyons, the mine and the valley's winter to the county-wide pages that all the valley cities share.
Buying or selling in South Jordan?
The shape of it
A new western end, an old eastern one, and a real drive between them
The city reads new to old, west to east. The western edge, up against the Oquirrh foothills, is almost entirely this century: Daybreak's villages, the lake at the center of them, the ballpark, the light rail stops and a cinema and bowling block, all within a few hundred yards of each other. The eastern edge, along the Jordan River, is the older half and holds the quiet things. Getting from one to the other is a genuine cross-town drive, roughly fifteen minutes rather than a walk, and that single fact shapes most visits and most house hunts here.
What surprises people is how little of what draws them the city itself runs. The ballpark is a professional venue with its own April to September schedule. Oquirrh Lake and the villages around it belong to the Daybreak community, which is why the ring path is open to anyone on foot or a bike while the water is limited to residents and their accompanied guests. Bingham Creek Regional Park, 160 acres on a reclaimed gravel pit, is a Salt Lake County park, free and open. The District is private open-air retail, with every tenant keeping its own hours. The parts the city itself runs are the smaller, older ones: the free Gale Museum near the river and the stocked ponds beside it. Knowing which is which tells you what to expect before you arrive.
Most of the best of it is recent. Bingham Creek Regional Park opened in 2023, the Gale Museum reopened in 2024, and the ballpark, its train platform and the cinema block all opened within a few months of each other in 2025. The ranked list sorts the nine that carry a trip on their own, and four of them did not exist five years ago.
A city that dug its own lake, then put a baseball team's worth of summer evenings beside it.
The year
A season built around a fixture list and a farmers market
Nothing here depends on snow, which is unusual on this side of the valley and makes the year read differently from the bench towns. What South Jordan has instead is a summer with a real schedule and a winter that moves indoors without much complaint, and the pivot point in both directions is the western end of the city.
April to September is baseball. The Salt Lake Bees moved here for the 2025 season after three decades at Smith's Ballpark, and a Triple-A schedule means a lot of home dates rather than a handful, which changes what a Tuesday evening in this city can be. The ballpark sits a short walk from a light rail platform that opened two weeks before it did. The Daybreak page covers the district that has grown around both.
Summer into fall is the market. It runs Saturday mornings from June into October on SoDa Row, in the middle of Daybreak, and August adds the county fair at the Bastian Agricultural Center on 11400 South, the one week of the year the older eastern half of the city is the loud one. Check the current dates before you plan around either.
The water has its own calendar and it is longer than people expect. The 3.4 mile ring around Oquirrh Lake is walkable in every month, and it is at its best in the two shoulder seasons rather than in July, when the western end of this valley gets no shade to speak of. The lake page takes it season by season, including what freezes and what does not.
The wider valley
The canyons and the mine are written once, for the whole valley
South Jordan has a mountain range close on each side and owns neither. The Oquirrhs on its western horizon and the mine cut into them, the Cottonwood canyons across the valley, the long river trail and the valley's winter are covered once on the county-wide pages rather than retold on every city page. Here is where each one is.
The long line
The Jordan River Parkway
The valley's long green line, read in segments, plus the honest state of a working urban river.
Read the guide
The west range
The Oquirrh side
The range on this city's western horizon, the largest human made excavation on earth, and the towns the copper built.
Read the guide
Days out
Weekends in the valley
Eight outings across the county ordered by price, from the aquarium down to a farm whose grounds cost nothing.
Read the guide
The canyons
The Cottonwood canyons
Four resorts on two roads that both end in snow, and the watershed rules that come with them.
Read the guideAll four sit under the Salt Lake County hub, the front door to every town in the valley. What South Jordan itself owns, and what the six pages below cover, is the lake it built, the community around it, the retail center in the middle, the county park on a reclaimed pit and its own short reach of the Jordan River.
The South Jordan companion
Six pages, and three of them stand on the same 4,000 acres
Everything The Local has written about South Jordan: the ranked list of what is genuinely here, the community that reshaped the western half of the city, the lake at the middle of it and how it was built, the retail center at 11400 South, the city's own reach of the Jordan River, and the practical homework a master-planned community asks of a buyer.
Things to do
The top 9, ranked
The nine that carry a trip on their own, each with a cost and a walk or drive time.
Read
The community
Daybreak, village by village
The master-planned community that reshaped the western half of the city, read village by village and phase by phase.
Read
The lake
Oquirrh Lake, made and filled
How a 67-acre lake was dug on old mine gravel, the liner that keeps it there, and what the ring path and the water each allow.
Read
The District
The District at 11400 South
The open-air retail center at Bangerter Highway, its 20-screen cinema, and how the road finally caught up with it.
Read
The river
The Jordan River through South Jordan
The city's own quiet reach of the river and its three stocked ponds, pond by pond.
Read
Moving here
Buying in a planned community
What to read and ask before buying into a master-planned community, in plain buyer terms.
ReadQuick answers
South Jordan, answered
In the south west quarter of the Salt Lake Valley, about 18 miles south of downtown Salt Lake City. Its eastern boundary is the Jordan River, its western edge runs up toward the foot of the Oquirrh Mountains, and Bangerter Highway crosses the middle of it. Riverton lies directly south, Herriman to the south west, West Jordan to the north and Draper across Interstate 15 to the south east. The city is wide enough that crossing it end to end is a genuine drive rather than a hop.
Daybreak, and increasingly the ballpark inside it. Daybreak is a community of roughly 4,000 acres launched in 2004 on former Bingham Canyon mine land, built around a 67 acre man made lake and served by three Red Line light rail stations. The Ballpark at America First Square opened there on 8 April 2025 for the Salt Lake Bees. Beyond that the city is known for The District, an open-air retail center of about 120 acres at 11400 South and Bangerter Highway.
No. It was excavated from 2005 on former mine ground, and the bed had to be lined with polyethylene between layers of soil, silt and clay because the material underneath is gravel from the ancient Lake Bonneville bed and the water would simply have drained away. It was then filled with canal water pumped north from Utah Lake more than five miles off, under water rights long held for the mining operation. It is published today at 67 acres with a 3.4 mile perimeter.
The path around it and the parks on its edge are open to anybody who walks or cycles there. The water is not: floating on it is limited to residents and their accompanied guests, non-motorized craft only, under the community's rules, and permits are involved. Fishing is from designated shore areas rather than from boats or bridges, and a Utah fishing license is required from age twelve. Treat the ring as public and the surface as not.
For the 2025 season. The Ballpark at America First Square opened on 8 April 2025 in Downtown Daybreak after a groundbreaking on 19 October 2023, with a capacity of about 8,000 made up of roughly 6,500 fixed seats and a berm holding about 1,500. The Triple-A club, affiliated with the Los Angeles Angels, had played at Smith's Ballpark in Salt Lake City since 1994. The season runs April to September.
The Red Line's South Jordan Downtown station sits at 11080 South Grandville Avenue, a short walk from the ground. It opened on 26 March 2025, two weeks before the first pitch, as an infill station with two side platforms in the median of Grandville Avenue; before the ballpark was announced, a station there had been planned for the 2030s. The Red Line also stops at Daybreak Parkway and South Jordan Parkway, so three of its platforms are inside this city.
An open-air retail, dining, office and residential center at 11400 to 11800 South Bangerter Highway, developed by The Boyer Company across about 120 acres and roughly 852,000 square feet, with something like 90 businesses in it. It opened in 2007, although its anchor cinema, the Megaplex 20 at The District, had already opened in May 2006 with 20 auditoriums seating 5,544 and an IMAX screen. It is not an enclosed mall and behaves nothing like one.
Bingham Creek Regional Park, a Salt Lake County park on 160 acres at 10200 South 4800 West. Phase I, about 50 acres, opened on 22 June 2023 with multipurpose fields, a playground, trails, a disc golf course, pavilions, restrooms and 401 parking stalls across three lots, and Phase II added a further 90 acres. The ground was previously the Welby Pit, used for gravel extraction and equipment storage, and it needed environmental remediation before any of this went in.
For a visitor, yes, provided you accept one long crossing. The city is wide, and its two best things sit at opposite ends: the lake, the ballpark and the new district at the western edge, and the river with its three stocked ponds at the eastern one. A morning on the ring path, a midday crossing to the river, an afternoon at The District in the middle and an evening at a fixture fills the day. What a single day cannot do is the market or the county fair, since both are fixed dates.
Thinking about South Jordan? Start with which half of the city you mean
This is a wide city whose two ends were built about a century apart, and the difference between an address at the western edge and one near the river is not a matter of taste, it is a different week. Tell me what you are weighing and I will put you with a Salt Lake County partner agent who works this corridor, and stay on the file for the homework and the financing side.
Or call Scott: (435) 357-4345or send Scott a message
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Eight more doors into South Jordan, chosen for what this page covers.
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