A Salt Lake City panel has cleared a major hurdle standing in the way of new housing on the surface parking lot just south of Trolley Square, voting 7-1 to approve relocating a 130-year-old home so a multifamily complex can finally move forward on the block. The vote by the Salt Lake City Historic Landmark Commission on Thursday, August 6, allows the home at 630 S. 700 East to be moved to 636 E. Sego Ave., within the same block, rather than demolished outright.
The approval is described as one of the final remaining elements in the pre-development process for the long-planned Trolley Square South complex, according to Building Salt Lake. Douglas White, an attorney representing developer Trolley Square Ventures, told commissioners that full plans for the multifamily site could be submitted to the city in the near future now that the relocation proposal has cleared the commission. Per the same report, Trolley Square Ventures intends to file a site plan application for the complex within the next couple of weeks if the relocation was approved, though the exact submission date remains unclear.
The home slated for relocation was built in 1896 and is recognized as a contributing structure within Salt Lake City's Central City Historic District, a status that requires Historic Landmark Commission sign-off before it can be moved or demolished, according to Preservation Utah. Under the approved plan, the relocated home will be rebuilt to modern building standards with modern interior features once it reaches its new address.
A Fight Over How the House Gets Moved
Commissioner Steven Cornell cast the lone vote against the relocation proposal, and his skepticism centered on the method rather than the move itself. Cornell said he doubted the home could be relocated in its entirety, and the article notes he expressed doubt that much of the building could survive intact and instead come apart during deconstruction and disassembly.
Commissioner Emoli Kearns took the opposite view, preferring that the building be moved in its entirety at once rather than piece by piece. The approved method would involve disassembling the home piece by piece and reassembling it at the new address, and applicants believe, according to a staff report cited in the same coverage, that the home would not survive an intact move because of its lack of structural stability. Cornell nonetheless said contractors from out of state might be able to move the building intact, though he acknowledged that option is potentially prohibitively costly.
What's Planned for the 3.75-Acre Site
The Trolley Square South site spans roughly 3.75 acres along 600 South and currently functions as an extra parking lot within the Central City Historic District. It is zoned largely MU-5 with an MU-3 parcel, a mixed-use classification that, per earlier Hoodline reporting, includes city incentives granting story and density bonuses to developments that add income-restricted affordable housing.
Plans for the site include a mix of building types: two-story townhome units, a two-story, 12-unit building with ground-floor retail on the northwest corner, a five-story multifamily building with a two-story podium, and a five-floor slab-on-grade condominium building. Together, the complex would include both apartments and condominiums, marking a significant densification of a block that has sat as a parking lot for years.
A Decade of Stalled Plans
Redevelopment plans for Trolley Square South first emerged in 2016, but the project fell by the wayside in recent years and remains undeveloped nearly a decade later. Trolley Square Ventures, headed by Utah industrialist and EnergySolutions founder Khosrow Semnani, has sought to activate the site since acquiring the broader Trolley Square property out of bank receivership in 2013 through his firm S.K. Hart Properties, according to reporting archived by the Salt Lake Tribune.
The developer previously secured certificates of appropriateness in 2017 to demolish contributing homes on the south parcel, but active pre-development work was shelved during the COVID-19 pandemic before being revived in late 2024, according to Building Salt Lake. The Historic Landmark Commission had also previously approved a similar home relocation for another nearby parcel, a pattern that stretches back to a June 2025 application to deconstruct and rebuild a separate circa-1915 Arts and Crafts home at 632 S. 700 East to clear street frontage along the same block.
Trademark Fights and a Neighborhood Building Boom
The renewed push at Trolley Square South comes as Trolley Square Ventures has also taken an aggressive legal stance elsewhere in the neighborhood. In July and August, the company filed federal trademark infringement lawsuits against neighboring commercial properties Trolley Corners Center and Trolley Place, alleging misuse of the “Trolley” brand name and seeking up to $25 million in damages, according to KSL.com. The lawsuits claim the neighboring developments created consumer confusion by using the “Trolley” moniker in signage and marketing.
The site's history stretches back further than its trolley-era roots. The original Trolley Square complex north of 600 South was built between 1908 and 1910 by railroad tycoon E.H. Harriman as streetcar barns for the Utah Light & Railway Co., later becoming one of the nation's earliest adaptive-reuse festival marketplaces in 1972, per Utah Historical Markers. Before that, the block served as Utah's territorial and state fairgrounds from 1888 to 1901, after Brigham Young originally designated the land for public use in 1847, according to the Daily Utah Chronicle.
The project also fits into a broader wave of high-density housing proposals reshaping the blocks around Trolley Square. Just northeast of the mall, developer 705 East 500 South LLC has proposed “Trolley House Residences,” a 15-story tower with 97 for-sale condominiums, requesting a rezone from MU-5 to MU-11 to accommodate the added height, as Hoodline previously reported. The Trolley Square area also sits two blocks from the UTA TRAX light-rail line at 900 East and 400 South, giving future residents car-free transit access to downtown and the University of Utah.
For now, the Historic Landmark Commission's 7-1 vote removes a major preservation bottleneck for Trolley Square South, but the precise timeline for a full site plan submission and construction remains fluid as structural disassembly details are finalized.
