Salt Lake City is on the list?
Unbelievable! It is a BEAUTIFUL city filled with really, really, really **nice** people.
Salt Lake City proper is actually quite small with some congested barrio type neighborhoods. The immediate downtown area is very nice as you describe, but five blocks away or so, not so much. The city proper is only about 12 x 12 blocks, a small part of a large metro area. Yeah, these are big blocks.
I saw that too.
Only downside to Salt Lake City is you need to be Mormon to fit in to the community.
Other than that, Salt Lake is far, far from being on a top 50 worst cities list