Hi-rise condos are selling — kindasorta. If you put your ear to the ground, you’ll hear all kinds of doom and gloom about luxury condos, but in the long run all of these new units will sell. The problem is that construction costs push sales prices to $300 per square foot and above, so there probably will never be hi-rise living in Phoenix, Scottsdale or Tempe for the less-than-affluent.
But: Hope springs eternal in North Phoenix. CityNorth is lo-rise residential with a paired retail district. This is one worth watching, if only because it will tell us if people are willing to pursue a facsimile of urban living in what is, for now at least, a fairly remote location. The dirt on that branch of the SR-101 Freeway is hugely underdeveloped, so it will also be interesting to see if CityNorth can induce a more-vertical Phoenix up north. The big question might be: Why open a sales office now, with the real estate market in the doldrums? The answer is that the developer is betting that the market will have turned by the time it gets up to speed.
Don’t snicker, but Avondale also has vertical ambitions. This is not as silly as it might seem at first glance. The confluence of the I-10 and the SR-101 Freeways is rich with people, and neither Phoenix nor Tolleson seems to be taking advantage of that opportunity. Avondale is close to being built out in its current footprint, and Goodyear has sucked all the oxygen out of the annexation possibilities. As with Tempe, that leaves Avondale with one direction for growth: Up.
The Phoenix Metropolitan area has zoning — which disperses development — but it lacks any sort of regional vision to concentrate big-budget building all in one or two places. Downtown Phoenix may eventually suck up enough tax-money and government takings and giveaways to come to life, a costly proof of the Frankenstein principle. Uptown Scottsdale has the money to do whatever it wants. The only real, organic urban vertical development is in Tempe, and Tempe is still my bet for the most-downtownlike undowntown in the Phoenix area. But scattering our vertical development in the same way that we scattered our suburban development may not be the best strategy for getting the Phoenix Thunderbird back to the sky.
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