A Development Boom Aims To Transform Downtown Phoenix Into An Urban Mecca

Downtown Phoenix is in the midst of a historic revitalization effort that is reshaping the skyline and generating a buzz about the area as an increasingly attractive place to live, work and play. 

Through strategic growth and development, the once-sleepy downtown is going from dull to dynamic, waking up to a development boom.

“Downtown Phoenix is in the middle of an incredible resurgence,” said Christine Mackay, director for the City of Phoenix’s Community and Economic Development Department. “‘When you go into the 1800s to the early 1900s, even the 1950s and 1960s, downtown Phoenix was a vibrant, thriving urban shopping corridor,” she said. “It’s where everybody came to do business. It’s where they came for their recreation. It was truly the city center up until about 1970. In the 1970s, it really started to flip.” 

In the 1970s, the freeway system in the sprawling city began to develop as suburbs ringed the urban core. “Those suburbs were hungry, and they got a freeway, and they started drawing the businesses,” said Mackay. “They created those first master-planned communities. People moved out to the suburbs because now they had cars. Now there was a freeway and the city was laid out on a one-mile grid system, so it made it really easy to commute. And people really fled the urban downtown.”

Fast-forward to 2008 when the first leg of the city’s light rail system began operating and Arizona State University opened its downtown campus. “That was the beginning of the recession, and so not a lot happened,” said Mackay. “We did a remodel of our convention center. We built two more convention centers. All this great stuff happened, but still, to be quite frank with you, still crickets — no noise, nothing happening. But the last five years, and particularly over the last 24 months, have seen downtown Phoenix just absolutely surge forward.” 

As a lifelong resident of Phoenix, Mackay has had an opportunity to see the good, bad and ugly of the downtown, which she says was moving forward pretty quickly until the 1970s. “In the 1970s we really saw a downturn,” said Mackay. “There was significant slum and blight. There were significant environmental issues. There were significant infrastructure issues, and so the city created a redevelopment area in downtown in the late 1970s and has been working that redevelopment plan ever since. But it’s kind of the right time, right place as we’re seeing across the country with the resurgence of people wanting to live and work in a more urban connected environment.”

In addition to the government sector, downtown Phoenix has attracted a number of businesses in the technology, hospitality, insurance and financial sectors. Arizona State University’s Phoenix campus downtown has added vibrancy to the city center. 

“There are a strong number of companies that have greater than 2,000 employees in downtown Phoenix,” said Mackay. “Pre-2014, downtown Phoenix was about government. It was about courts and large financial institutions. In 2012, there were 67 technology-related companies in downtown Phoenix. There are more than 350 today. Those small businesses, under 250 in their employment, have really grown in downtown Phoenix. It’s a true mix of government, financial services, education, technology companies, small business, creatives. It’s a really robust, vibrant, diverse economy in downtown now.”

Sara Scoville-Weaver, business development manager for the Downtown Phoenix Partnership, said 115 restaurants and bars have opened in Phoenix since 2008. “As people started creating really cool bars and restaurants, people started coming into downtown to visit those places and then they also wanted to start living near them,” she said.

The non-profit has played a key role in strengthening development downtown, working closely with the private sector as well as city and county government.

“We’ve seen a huge growth in restaurants over the last 10 years, more than doubling to well over 200 restaurants and bars,” said Dan Klocke, executive director of the Downtown Phoenix Partnership, adding that along with the housing units coming up “we’ve created a neighborhood again that sort of had disappeared for a few decades as Phoenix spread out and sprawled. And now we’re seeing between these incoming businesses that the huge growth in education, the influx of live music and restaurants as well as residential buildings has really recreated a downtown neighborhood and changed it pretty dramatically over the last five years.” 

Fry’s Food Stores opened the doors of its 67,000-square-foot supermarket to waiting crowds on October 23. The grocery store, which has long been sought after by residents and city leaders, is part of the Block 23 development, a 230,000-square-foot multi-use development, and within walking distance of CityScape, which is the central hub of downtown Phoenix; Talking Stick Resort Arena; Chase Field baseball park and several downtown apartments and neighborhoods.

Rick Naimark, senior vice president and university planner at Arizona State University, said that since the launch of the downtown Phoenix campus, ASU’s student body has increased to about 12,000 students. The city’s light rail system has been instrumental in connecting students at ASU’s campus in Tempe with the downtown campus.

“Some of the growth has been in programs we brought initially, and some of the growth has been in programs we’ve continued to bring to the downtown Phoenix campus,” said Naimark. “Generally, when we’ve located something on the downtown campus, it grows on the campus.”

Phoenix is making every effort to keep pace with the housing needs of the downtown area, according to Mackay. “Downtown Phoenix has not been lacking in affordable housing,” she said. “We call it affordable and workforce housing.” The city is striving to ensure the downtown market does not become too costly in a market where the average salary is $64,000.

“We went more than a decade with only two high-rise residential projects in downtown Phoenix, and those were built in 2010 and 2012 and were immediately occupied.” Mackay said. “When you look at what’s been built most recently, the high-rises are trying to catch up with the market. Only 4% of the workforce in downtown Phoenix lives in downtown Phoenix. We’ve seen the lion’s share of the workforce commuting into downtown Phoenix because we’re catching up to the types of units that they want to live in.”

Mackay said redeveloping an urban downtown is not for the faint of heart. “I’ve been an economic developer for 25 years, and I’ve been working on the revitalization of downtown for the last five years,” she explained. “It’s the hardest economic development I have ever done in my life. And what I mean by that is it’s incredibly complicated. Every project you go to work on has challenges you’ve never seen before and things you’ve never thought of before. And if you try to redevelop an urban downtown following a textbook, it will never, ever happen. You have to get smart people in a room, and you have to all be willing to work toward a solution that makes sense for sustainability, that makes sense for long-term development, but also makes sense for private development and for people to live and operate. We can build a pretty downtown or we can build a downtown where people can thrive. And we opt for the latter.” 

Many Baby Boomers are selling their suburban homes and moving to downtown Phoenix. “Those are people who are getting ready to retire and retirees,” said Mackay. “We’ve seen a real mix of who wants to live downtown, from students to Millennials to the more senior workforce to people who are retiring, all wanting to converge over downtown Phoenix. And as we are bringing these projects forward with private developers, the City Council is asking them to provide for a certain period of time 10% of the units they build into a workforce situation so we aren’t out-pricing downtown Phoenix for the workforce.”

Phoenix has a long-term vision to be a zero-waste and carbon-neutral city with all new buildings being carbon neutral in energy and materials by 2050. “In the near term, the city has developed a very innovative walkable urban code that improves walkability in all high-growth infill areas by requiring 75 percent shade around the new developments,” said Mark Hartman, the city’s chief sustainability officer. “The Planning and Development Department also provides open-source building plans and pre-approved construction drawings for a sustainable home where building permit fees are waived if you build it in Phoenix.” 

The department offers an optional green construction building code. Hartman said, “The city has also made a shift within downtown to emphasize a more balanced transportation system with the current and expanding light rail line, adoption of the bicycle master plan and a form-based zoning code to emphasize street-front designs that encourage walking.”

Alan Stephenson, planning and development director for the City of Phoenix, said his department’s workload is up about 20 to 30 percent over last year. “We’ve been hiring and looking for additional efficiencies in how we respond to hiring third-party contract reviewers for landscape plans and more minor inspections that allow us to more quickly address some of the fluctuations in the market.”

He said city officials have taken “great pains” to make sure downtown Phoenix is growing in a more sustainable and balanced manner. 

“We’re the fifth largest city in the country, and a lot of the elected officials over the last few decades have really wanted to make sure that as we continue to grow, we were fantastic at growing out. But we needed to really learn how to grow up and grow in,” said Stephenson. “And we are now benefiting from a lot of that foundation that was laid and are really focused on creating a more balanced transportation city in downtown where we obviously have cars, and we have to have parking to accommodate that.”

He added, “One of the critical things that we transition to in downtown Phoenix is a form-based zoning code that looks at how you have an interesting walk and a good streetscape to entice people to walk, which isn’t something that people across country traditionally think of when they think of Phoenix.”

Stephenson believes Phoenix is keeping pace with the boom. “Development is much more balanced, and we don’t have the numbers that we had back before the Great Recession, so I think we are on a good track to continue on in a nice, steady upward fashion but no big huge acceleration in terms of permits and activity that were unsustainable the last time,” he said, explaining that “all the things that you see in other big cities that have an urban nightlife and suburban vitality, we’re very much creating that here in Phoenix today, and it’s exciting. It’s going to be great to see it going forward.”

This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.