INSIDE TUCSON BUSINESS: Mon., Feb. 13, 2005
Developers plan for growth, but find space elsewhere
By Philip S. Moore, Inside Tucson Business
With more than 70,000 acres of land being master-planned for 31 residential development over the next several years, providing room for more than 120,000 homes, there's a lot of capacity around Tucson to build the homes of the future.
What isn't here is a lot of room to grow in the area traditionally identified as metropolitan Tucson. Land use restrictions, development fees and other obstacles to growth are pushing the city's boundaries ever farther, said Tim Prouty, managing director of CB Richard Ellis in Tucson.
If these developments are a sign of what's coming, he said the Tucson of 2025 will be widely spaced collection of nearly independent communities, scattered across an area extending from the far side of the Tucson and Tortolita Mountains to the foothills of the Dragoon Mountains and the Mexican border.
“There are a lot of reasons for this, but the result is the same,” he said.
As Tucson spreads east into Cochise County, the housing market for that area will be transformed, said Robert Carreira, director of the Cochise Center for Economic Research in Sierra Vista.
Growth has been concentrated in the southwest corner for more than a century, and again in 2005, 80% of single family home construction was in the southwest quadrant of the county, Carriera said. However, while the community recorded a 21.2% increase in the volume of homes sold, and the median price rose to $189,000, the number of new homes built went down, slipping from 898 in 2004 to 871 in 2005.
Meanwhile, as many as 30,000 home sites are becoming available around Benson, which will mean even more competition for buyers. “Builders have said they expect 70% of home buyers to come from the Tucson area, but what's planned for the northwest quadrant could mean a population more evenly disbursed over the whole west side.”
Carriera doesn't foresee see people moving away from Sierra Vista, “but I would presume that new people who might have bought a house in southwest Cochise County will now be looking at the northwest.”
If that happens, “It won't be long before commercial developers see the value of providing support services. Already you have a Super Wal-Mart being built in Benson. So, it's likely we could see more of that in the future.”
Carriera said, “A lot of this based on how successful the marketing efforts are for the Benson area. It's one thing to get permits and it's another to get people to say they want to live there. Right now, it's a wait-and-see kind of thing.”