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Gown Growth = Town Growth

Crow may be a bit ahead of the curve in his aggressive outreach to Arizona cities. (He’s helped kickstart four new research institutes and the Phoenix Urban Research Lab (PURL) since he took office in 2002.) But other university leaders around the country aren’t far behind. The Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, a $150 million public-private research institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s campus, is expected to begin construction in early 2008. California’s UC system is rolling out new research facilities in several cities, including the 141,000-square-foot Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) headquarters in Berkeley, which is under construction this spring.

What makes Arizona such an unusual case study is the incredible growth that the state is experiencing. According to the U.S. census, Arizona beat out Nevada last year as the fastest-growing state in the nation—a change that has filtered into Arizona’s university system. By 2020, a projected 92,000 students will enroll at ASU’s four campuses—50,000 at the main campus in Tempe and the rest split among the West campus in northwest Phoenix near Glendale, the Polytechnic campus in Mesa, and a new campus in downtown Phoenix. That figure doesn’t take into account ASU’s presence at SkySong. “We are a reflection of the growth in the region. There’s rapid urbanization going on here,” says Wellington Reiter, dean of ASU’s College of Design. “We can’t build fast enough to meet the demand.” Hundreds of millions of dollars are going into expanding the Tempe and Polytechnic campuses.

Arizona’s cities are turning the demand for education to their competitive advantage. With hopes of revitalizing the city center, Phoenix voters dedicated $232 million to ASU during the March 2006 bond election to help get a new downtown campus underway. Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon called the construction “the critical mass that will ignite downtown.” Five or six months later, what was mostly surface parking had been transformed into facilities for 4,000 students and 600 staff, who, it’s predicted, will spend $145 million in the area over the next ten years. And more than $1 billion in development is going up in the area, Reiter says—including CityScape, a mixed-use high-rise complex with restaurants, bookstores, housing, offices, and cultural amenities three blocks from campus but open to both students and the public.

“The fortunes of the university and the fortunes of the city are inextricably linked,” says Reiter, who was called in to help execute the university’s plan for downtown. So far, the new campus is home to several relocated programs: the College of Nursing and Healthcare Innovation; the College of Public Programs, which includes the schools of Public Affairs, Social Work, and Community Resources and Development; and University College, which caters to working adults. The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the city’s PBS affiliate are expected to move downtown in 2008.

“If you look at the core of downtown Phoenix, it’s vacant in terms of activities after the working day. Other than on ballgame nights, it’s very quiet,” he says, but with the recent bond issue, “the university was given some funds, and in return, the city has people on the streets.”

Scottsdale Sings for its Supper

SkySong promoters use much of the same reasoning—a build-it-and-they-will-come philosophy. But rather than a traditional campus, Skysong is touted as a hybrid research park, business park, and university laboratory. Planners drew on lessons from other commercial/research communities around the world, such as SRI International in California, the National Science and Industrial Parks in China, and the Genetics Knowledge Park in the United Kingdom. The beginnings of SkySong, still in its steel-girders-and-dirt phase as of spring 2007, sit on a high-profile but long-empty parcel that was the home of Los Arcos Mall during south Scottsdale’s better days.

“Los Arcos had been a real cornerstone of that part of Scottsdale; it had restaurants and retail that everyone went to,” says David Roderique, economic vitality general manager for the city of Scottsdale. “It became, ultimately, the most contentious redevelopment case in the entire city’s history.”

The close of Los Arcos in the late 1990s kicked off five years of political wrangling over what should happen at the former mall site—by that time, an area known for strip clubs and payday-loan stores, according to the Arizona Republic. Suggestions for rebuilding ranged from a hockey arena to a Wal-Mart-anchored center, plans that were muddled by failed zoning cases, referendums, and citizen initiatives. “The community was very split,” Roderique says. “A lot of the community just wanted their mall back.”

Then ASU approached Scottsdale with a concept for a research center at the site. The idea was to create a venue for the university to export its ideas, import global companies as partners, and identify entrepreneurial and tech programs. The ASU Foundation hurriedly negotiated a deal with the mall’s former owners, the Ellman Companies, to purchase the property for $41.5 million. On August 9, 2004, Scottsdale bought the 42 acres from the ASU Foundation and then leased 37 acres back to the foundation for development of the ASU-Scottsdale Center for New Technology and Innovation. The city also agreed to spend millions of dollars on the center’s infrastructure needs.

 

A Manufactured Dream?

“It’s obscene. It’s a bad use of taxpayer money,” says Robert Littlefield, a Scottsdale councilman who voted against the project. “It was promoted as a research center, and it’s not. It’s an office building. It’s not generated a single penny.” According to him, “great hype” created public enthusiasm for the project. “I could describe myself as a hot stud. That doesn’t make it true,” says Littlefield, a white-haired gentleman whose dimpled smile is covered by a bristly beard and mustache. He believes a private developer could have attracted the same tenants without a public subsidy. (Michele Irwin, a SkySong spokeswoman, takes exception to the word subsidy. “It’s not a subsidy; it’s an advancement,” she says.)

“I had no opposition to the city giving out subsidies; ASU was a good partner as far as being a research center,” says Mike Merrill, who has lived in south Scottsdale for 43 years and runs a political action committee in the city. “One thing: within the lease [with the ASU Foundation], they weren’t allowed to have housing. A year later, there’s a request from ASU to have housing—rental housing in the area [where] we were trying to build up and wipe out some of the blight.” Owner-occupied housing would have been okay with Merrill. But rentals, even those advertised as market-rate, luxury apartments, “you can’t really trust are going to stay at that level,” he says. “Also, the developers are touting words like classroom education. The last thing we wanted was dorms.”

Like Littlefield, Merrill is skeptical SkySong will generate economic benefits anytime soon. Tenants heralded as a boon for the project, like a Singapore company that builds equipment for computer-chip manufacturers, turn out to be just three or four people, he says. And nobody has said what retail is lined up for the bottom floor. “It’s still nothing but dirt. We don’t have a building yet. We have a skeleton of a building. I foresee that lot being a desolate wasteland for another seven years,” he says. The two are even less impressed with the design of the complex. “It looks like one of the Soviet-style complexes from the ’30s that Stalin would have built,” Littlefield says. Merrill called the peaked, white shade structure that is the hallmark of the project “our sky diaper.” “We’re waiting for a microburst to come along and take it down the road,” he says.

Others are willing to wait for the good times to roll in. Property owners in the area needed something to serve as a cornerstone for revitalization before they felt comfortable putting money into cleaning up their own places, Roderique says. Since 2003, about $1 billion in new investments has been announced for south Scottsdale, including a new Lowe’s home improvement store half a mile from SkySong, a senior center, retail, and 600 to 700 new residential units. Many older homes are being remodeled as well.

Littlefield counters that Lowe’s came in because there was demand for its products. “To credit it as due to Skysong is complete nonsense,” he says. But Roderique sees some interesting, positive trends, such as an increase in the number of families moving into the area and a rise in income levels.

According to SkySong’s PR team, by spring 2007, a sizeable list of companies had signed on to move into the building, including: Ensitech of Monterrey, Mexico; eFunds Corp. of Scottsdale; and Qwest Communications Inc. of Denver, among others. ASU plans to locate interdisciplinary research programs there, including Technopolis, the Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative, and the Partnership for Research in Spatial Modeling. Irwin, of SkySong, says construction will be a ten-year project.

“There obviously were some critics, but they were in a minority,” she says. “SkySong has done nothing but improve the neighborhood. Housing prices have risen, and people are investing because they know it’s a secure future.”

 

This article appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!