The Arizona Republic - December 2006
A remote parkway in the far West Valley nicknamed the "Road to Nowhere" is poised to become Main Street for nearly 1 million people.
More than a dozen huge developments are sprouting up on both sides of the 30-mile-long Sun Valley Parkway, west of the White Tank Mountains. The area is expected to draw a quarter of all the Valley's new homes during the next few decades and transform the sleepy town of Buckeye into a giant suburb 40 miles west of downtown Phoenix.
Buckeye, with just 30,000 residents, has been annexing so much land it's about to rival Phoenix in sheer size. Its small downtown is still south of Interstate 10, but now its northern boundary stretches along the White Tanks so far that Buckeye is almost butting up to Wickenburg.
Deep-pocketed developers bought huge swaths of land west of the mountains and already have started building the first of more than 300,000 homes and 180 million square feet of retail, office and industrial space planned for the area.
"It's not if but when Sun Valley's growth takes off," said national housing analyst Tim Sullivan. "It's the logical place where metro Phoenix's growth will head in the next 10 to 20 years."
Buckeye and its suburb west of the White Tanks called Sun Valley have the land to house that future growth. In other parts of metropolitan Phoenix, growth is constrained because much of the vacant land is owned by the federal government or Native American communities and cannot be developed.
But water, transportation and jobs are issues for the area's growth just as they are for other new fringe suburbs. What's different is that developers from Sun Valley and other parts of Buckeye have taken the unusual step of working with the town and state agencies to address the issues before they become big problems.
Beyond only homes Buckeye needs jobs because new homes already are going up. And without jobs there, people have to commute on the already clogged I-10.
In 2000, fewer than 50 new homes were built in the town. Last year, 5,000 went up.
With its recent annexations, Buckeye already has more land than Tucson or Mesa.
The town stretches across 230 square miles but is planning for 600 square miles.
Buckeye's growth has been aggressive, and Sun Valley's developers are thinking big, too.
• Douglas Ranch, still in the planning stages, will span almost 34,000 acres and have as many as 83,240 homes.
• People already have moved into new homes in the 12,812-acre Tartesso at the southern gateway of Sun Valley Parkway. Nearly 49,000 homes and a town center are planned for the project. Many fringe areas draw buyers with low prices, but homes in Tartesso are now selling in the high $200,000s, close to the Valley's median new-home price.
• Farther north along the parkway is Trillium, a 3,000-acre project that could sprout 7,200 homes.
• Pulte Homes is building Sun City Festival with 7,200 homes in north Sun Valley.
"There must be a mix of homes in Sun Valley from acre lots to multifamily," said Keith Watkins, Buckeye's former economic development director, now with Trillium's developer. "A community that size must have diversity."
Marie Riviera was in the Valley recently looking for a retirement home and checked out Sun City Festival. The New Jersey resident liked how far away the community is from central Phoenix and its crowds.
Sun Valley draws many retirees, who like living far from the Valley's congestion. But they and other potential residents do not like being far from grocery stores and other retail.
All the big planned communities have chunks of land set aside for shopping centers and office space. One of Sun Valley's main commercial centers is near the middle of the parkway. Plans for the 708-acre Sun Valley Town Center call for office and light industrial space, which is needed to draw jobs, outside the retail and service industries, that pay high wages.
"It will be the urban center of Sun Valley," said Gil Gillenwater, who has owned the Sun Valley Town Center land since the parkway was developed in the mid-1980s.
Projections call for Buckeye to have almost 2 million people by 2030. That's bigger than the city of Phoenix is now.
Obstacles to growth Home building in Sun Valley has slowed this year like the rest of metro Phoenix's housing market. But building is expected to rebound to 50,000 new homes a year by 2008.
It's the other issues facing new fringe areas - transportation, water and jobs - that could put the brakes on the area's expansion. Many Sun Valley developers see how those issues have slowed growth in other parts of the Valley.
"We are all taking about transportation, economic development and the environment," said Tom Hennessy, an executive with El Dorado Holdings. El Dorado is developing Douglas Ranch. "Economic development is going to be the hardest. Jobs are competitive not only nationally but internationally now."
To bring in jobs, developers west of the White Tank area formed their own economic development group: Buckeye Valley Development.
Development requires water. Buckeye, seeing and often inviting the growth coming its way, recently completed its own water study.
Part of the town sits on the Hassayampa River aquifer. The aquifer holds enough for Buckeye's new developments to have water for the state-mandated 100 years as long as builders recharge as much water as they pull from the ground, according to the two-year survey by environmental engineering firm Brown and Caldwell.
Developers also must pay the Central Arizona Project to recharge water to meet those groundwater replenishment requirements. The plan must be approved by the Arizona Department of Water Resources.
Transportation already is an issue. I-10 is jammed with commuters as well as big-rig trucks making the drive between Phoenix and Los Angeles. Every day, more than 100,000 vehicles travel the portion of I-10 that bisects Goodyear.
Drew Brown, president of DMB, which is developing Verrado, has joked that with all the projects planned for Buckeye, I-10 would need more than 20 lanes. Verrado backs up to the east side of the White Tanks.
So many developers asked for interchanges along 1-10 in the West Valley that the Arizona Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration requested a regional transportation study. The goal is to create a plan in the next year for connecting I-10 and other regional roadways including Grand Avenue, Arizona 85, the I-10 reliever, Cotton Lane, McDowell Road, Buckeye Road, Bell Road, Jomax Road, Carefree Highway and Loop 303.
One plan is to build a road west of Sun Valley that would connect to the East Valley. But there is no money to build it.
"We want to show the nice lines on the map for new roads and work out a plan to pay for them," said Bob Hazelett, senior engineer with the Maricopa Association of Governments, which took on the study funded partly by Buckeye and Goodyear.
He said the roads could be funded by community facilities districts, regional impact fees or public/private partnerships.
Greg Vogel, principal of the Scottsdale-based real estate firm Land Advisors, said that for most of Phoenix's history, it has grown by small parcel by small parcel, which creates situations where little cohesive planning can be done, particularly for building freeways.
"In Sun Valley, you have landowners with big parcels who are very concerned how the first acre is developed and how the last acre will be developed years from now," he said. "It creates a much better situation for planning everything from transportation to economic development."
Sun Valley Parkway was built by private investors banking on the area's growth.
