by Kerry Fehr-Snyder

The Arizona Republic

Jun. 5, 2008 07:17 PM-Planning for Superstition Vistas, a massive housing and development project that could bring 1 million residents to Pinal County, will require equally massive cooperation between business and government leaders, a consultant said Thursday in Tempe. The 275-square-mile area, which touches the southeastern tip of Mesa, will develop as either a self-sustaining community or another far-flung bedroom community, said Robert Grow, founding chairman of Envision Utah. Grow’s urban planning group considers how regions can be built as sustainable centers that reduce the need to drive to jobs, shopping and entertainment venues. Speaking Thursday at the annual meeting of the East Valley Partnership, a business and political consortium, Grow called Superstition Vistas an “unprecedented opportunity” because the area is one of the few parcels of its size owned by a single entity. The State Land Department owns all 275 square miles but has postponed auctioning the land until the real estate market rebounds.

“Planners would think they’d died and gone to heaven with the opportunity to plan something like this, and I’m one of them,” he said. Grow, who founded the group in 1997, said developers have a chance to create a “worldwide example of what growth could be” while improving the Phoenix-Tucson metropolitan region and elevating it to a “super region.”

He predicted that 75 percent of the growth in the next 50 to 100 years will go into these booming super regions. They include the Las Vegas area, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City and parts of Florida. Grow said the growth needs to be managed to occur in transportation corridors rather than spill out concentrically in typical urban sprawl fashion. “If you look out 50 years, only about 40 percent of what you’ll see is what’s here now,” he predicted. “You really are a region at crossroads.”

Grow predicted the following trends are coming:

• Population growth.
• Aging baby boomers and smaller household sizes.
• Skyrocketing energy prices.
• Soaring food costs, which is leading to food shortages.
• Global warming.

“You may believe it or not but there’s incontrovertible evidence,” he said, flashing slides of a snow-capped Mount Hood in 1984 and a dry Mount Hood in 2002. “This debate around sustainability is going to rage around us.” Grow said the national debate needs to focus on what is sustainability in economical and social terms.

The goal: creating “polycentric” employment, housing, shopping and entertainment centers. “Right now, every household in Phoenix has to make 10 trips a day,” he said. “Even working from home hasn’t changed that because people start the day working from home and then leave to go to Starbucks and work from there. “Bringing destinations to you will be one of the most important things needed to reduce energy consumption.”

Grow said the math is relatively simple: 5,000 rooftops are needed to sustain a grocery store, and 150,000 residences are needed to support a regional shopping mall. “Centers are the puzzle piece in the center of development,” he said. Transportation corridors will play a key role in the growth of the region, which spans from Maricopa County to the east in Pinal County and to the south in Pima County. Superstition Vistas is a triangular chunk of land that runs from nearly to Superior on the east and Florence on the south. The center of the new urban hub is roughly Florence Junction.

Grow called Superstition Vistas the State Land Department’s “crown jewel.” “If the United States succeeds in the next 50 to 100 years, it will be because it succeeded in developing growth around interstate highways, airports” and railways, including the 20-mile light rail starter line that will begin running through Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa in late December. “Transit helps everyone whether you ever ride it or not,” he said.

He added that the region’s growth is “serious business because it’s the legacy we leave for our children” and “your region is on the forefront of taking hold.”