Indian givers? Great White Father makes plans to take back reservations . . .
Catherine Reagor has a feature in today’s Arizona Republic on the idea of building new residential housing in North Scottsdale using leased land from Native American reservations:
New homes will keep going up on metropolitan Phoenix’s fringes, stretching its boundaries as more people move to the area.
The Valley will grow south toward Tucson, west past the White Tank Mountains and north toward Prescott. But its growth to the east is likely to come to a halt.
Metro Phoenix is already bumping into Native American land on its eastern fringes. And developers can’t just hop over the Salt River or Fort McDowell reservations bordering Scottsdale and Fountain Hills the way they have leaped over other obstacles, including giant chunks of state land, as the Valley grows to the south, west and north. If they tried, they would run into the vast, undevelopable Tonto National Forest on the other side of the reservations.
Despite the recent slowing in home building, the Valley’s population is still projected to double in the next four decades. That has real estate industry leaders looking for the next housing hubs, and the reservations to the east have caught their eye.
The idea was first floated earlier this year by housing analyst R. L. Brown. At the time it seemed unlikely to me because a land lease is an extended game of musical chairs. If you’re on the land when the music stops, you lose.
Even so, I’m sure that land is a sore temptation to developers. Witness:
The busy stuff along the left and top of the image is Scottsdale. That land is worth $1 – $2 million an acre — as dirt, no structures. The vast tract of emptiness in the lower-right of the photo is a small piece of the Salt River Pima Community. A freeway runs through it.
To drive up Pima Road, the north-south yellow line that divides these two radically different uses of the land, is an experience like East and West Berlin before the wall came down.
There are relatively few living Salt River Pima. The reservation operates two casinos, so they’re already raking in serious money. But each one of the members of the tribe would be a multi-multi-millionaire if they could sell that land — the land they only got in the first place because no one else wanted it…
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Sue says:
Its been over 2 years now on this post. I am wondering what ever happened here if the land is still intact or if there is new construction sitting there now or in process.
August 27, 2008 — 12:25 pm
Greg Swann says:
No change since then. The bottom fell out of the housing market. As me again in five years.
August 27, 2008 — 1:10 pm