Post by Okwes on Aug 15, 2006 18:42:52 GMT -5
Home builders turn eye to Indian land in NE Valley
"Some of the priciest new homes in the Valley are going up in Scottsdale and Fountain Hills, and developers see the Indian reservations as their only opportunity to extend those pricey suburbs." These deveolpers will just not stop until they have everything.....who do they think they are! Why do they feel it is the tribes problem that these counties are running out of room to house all these rich white folk? None of this will benefit the tribal members, so who cares! This is not housing for the tribe.....Glad these tribes are keeping them off ndn land...........
Home builders turn eye to Indian land in NE Valley
Catherine Reagor
The Arizona Republic
Aug. 13, 2006 12:00 AM
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.
So far, neither the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community nor the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation has been interested in residential development for anyone but tribal members. Also, both communities have ordinances keeping non-tribal members from living on their land. And there are other hurdles to building housing developments on Indian land.
But that hasn't stopped the housing industry from coveting the prime land. Real estate analyst RL Brown sparked more interest in developing large residential projects on the Indian communities when he told a crowd of Valley business people this year that tribal land, particularly east of Scottsdale, could become a housing hub within the next few decades.
Some of the priciest new homes in the Valley are going up in Scottsdale and Fountain Hills, and developers see the Indian reservations as their only opportunity to extend those pricey suburbs. Otherwise, that growth is heading in another direction.
Metro Phoenix is one of 10 megapolitans or "super-sized" metropolitan areas that urban researchers have identified across the country. Dubbed the Arizona Sun Corridor, the area's growth is expected to span from Prescott in the north all the way south to Sierra Vista and the Mexican border with the Phoenix-Tucson stretch is the epicenter.
"The Indian Communities are Scottsdale's only chance for more growth," said Jay Butler, director of the Arizona Real Estate Center at Arizona State University Polytechnic. "But it's a slim chance."
Difficult to develop
Outside development on Indian communities isn't prohibited, but it can be difficult.
Three large commercial projects with prominent and deep-pocketed developers are under way on the Salt River Reservation along Loop 101. As with land for housing developments, Scottsdale has run out of big parcels for its growing office market so developers have looked to the reservations.
It took seven years of negotiations with almost 200 Salt River Pima-Maricopa landowners to pull together the land leases for Alter Group's 187 acre Riverwalk project. The developer is building as much as 1.5 million square feet of office and retail space on the site, near the 101 and Indian Bend Road.
About half of the reservation's 55,329 acres was given to tribal members to encourage farming. The Indians are barred from selling the land, which is held in trust for them by the federal government, but they can lease it out. The process of pulling land together is so time-consuming because many landholders died without making wills, leaving multiple heirs who have to agree on a deal.
Kurt Rosene, senior vice president of Alter, said he made multiple trips to Oklahoma to negotiate with one landowner whose parcel was smaller than a parking space.
Another project on the Salt River Reservation, Pima Center, is going up on 209 acres controlled by tribal member Joseph Ray's descendants and 34 other Salt River Pima-Maricopa families. Once completed, the 3 million-square-foot project will be one of the largest private business parks on Indian land.
Nearby on the southwest corner of Loop 101 and Via de Ventura, developer Opus West is building Opus Calendar Stick on 24 acres leased from tribal members. Office tenants aren't fearful of leasing on reservation space.
Cold Stone Creamery moved in to its new corporate headquarters at Opus Calendar Stick in late July.
"It's a quickly emerging commercial corridor," said Tom Roberts, chief executive of Opus West, which also developed three of the upscale office towers at Phoenix's Esplanade.
Fort McDowell has a commercial hub zoned along the Beeline Highway and a Radisson resort. Both Indian communities have casinos.
But the tribe's only plans for housing are for tribal members.
"Right now non-Indians can't live on the tribe's land," said Wendell Peacock, Arizona spokesman for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. "It would be a big deal and take a lot of work for that to change."
It has been done
Indian communities have sprouted homes for non-tribal members in Arizona and others parts of the West. But the partnerships haven't always worked out.
Hawley Lake, on the Fort Apache Reservation near Globe, was a second-home retreat for Phoenix and Tucson residents until the mid-1980s. More than 400 non-tribal families had cabins and upscale homes around the lake until their 25-year leases expired and the White Mountain Apache Tribe evicted them.
Some were able to move their homes while others walked way, took the real estate write-off and left houses that are boarded up and run down. Lawsuits over the homes dragged on for years. The tribe has since built a casino near the site.
"Housing has been a problem for decades for tribal members themselves," said John McIlwain, a senior fellow for housing at the Washington, D.C.-based real estate think tank Urban Land Institute. "Most Indian communities aren't going to let non-tribal members move into new homes on their land."
In Washington state, Tulalip Tribes is ending leases on almost 300 homes. Owners have less than 15 years to try to sell their property, figure out how to move it or find somewhere else to live.
Growth in Palm Springs, Calif., has led to housing development on Native American land, but the leases are pricey, making the homes more costly.
Residential development has worked on the land owned by the Cahuilla Indians near Palm Springs because they have patchwork parcels between privately owned sites, said George Bosworth, said Urban Land's Arizona executive director, who previously worked with Salt River Devco, the real estate division of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Community.
Instead of one big contiguous piece of land, part of the Agua Caliente Cahuilla Indian community is made up of individual parcels that are surrounded by private land.
The same patchwork land situation doesn't exist on the Indian communities to the east of Scottsdale, he said.
Could it happen here?
The many obstacles to building big housing developments on reservation land in the Valley haven't deterred all builders.
"There's nothing overtly going on with residential development on Native American land now, but there are a lot of developers interested," said housing analyst Brown.
The rising prices of homes in Scottsdale and Fountain Hills have driven up the value of Indian land to the east. So any housing developments that did go up on the reservations are bound to be pricey.
Housing for non-tribal members isn't a new issue for the Salt River Community.
Tribal leaders considered letting home builders on their land in 1970 before they had a casino. But a backlash from tribal members tabled the development plans and led to the ordinance that prohibits new housing for anyone not part of the community.
Bryan Meyers, community manager for the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Community, said there's an existing lease for a mobile-home park on the reservation, but that was established before the council's ordinance.
He said the tribal council wouldn't consider any new housing for outsiders.
The community prohibits non-tribal members from living on the reservation for more than 30 days.
It would be even more difficult to develop housing on the Fort McDowell Reservation.
Debra Krol, a spokeswoman for the Indian community, said that unlike on the Salt River Reservation, all of the Fort McDowell land is owned by the tribe and can't be leased out to developers by individual members.
One of the last pieces of private land east of Fountain Hills recently sold to former Phoenix Coyotes owner Steve Ellman. He is planning an upscale housing community. That development is bound to affect Fort McDowell. It could also be one of the last new Valley housing projects to go up east of Scottsdale and Fountain Hills.
"The only way the Valley can grow to the east is to access Indian community land, but developers have to be extremely patient," said Pete Bolton, managing director of the Phoenix real estate brokers CB Richard Ellis. "The Indian communities there have always maintained that non-tribal members can shop on their land or office and manufacture goods there, but they can't live there. Period."
"Some of the priciest new homes in the Valley are going up in Scottsdale and Fountain Hills, and developers see the Indian reservations as their only opportunity to extend those pricey suburbs." These deveolpers will just not stop until they have everything.....who do they think they are! Why do they feel it is the tribes problem that these counties are running out of room to house all these rich white folk? None of this will benefit the tribal members, so who cares! This is not housing for the tribe.....Glad these tribes are keeping them off ndn land...........
Home builders turn eye to Indian land in NE Valley
Catherine Reagor
The Arizona Republic
Aug. 13, 2006 12:00 AM
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.
So far, neither the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community nor the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation has been interested in residential development for anyone but tribal members. Also, both communities have ordinances keeping non-tribal members from living on their land. And there are other hurdles to building housing developments on Indian land.
But that hasn't stopped the housing industry from coveting the prime land. Real estate analyst RL Brown sparked more interest in developing large residential projects on the Indian communities when he told a crowd of Valley business people this year that tribal land, particularly east of Scottsdale, could become a housing hub within the next few decades.
Some of the priciest new homes in the Valley are going up in Scottsdale and Fountain Hills, and developers see the Indian reservations as their only opportunity to extend those pricey suburbs. Otherwise, that growth is heading in another direction.
Metro Phoenix is one of 10 megapolitans or "super-sized" metropolitan areas that urban researchers have identified across the country. Dubbed the Arizona Sun Corridor, the area's growth is expected to span from Prescott in the north all the way south to Sierra Vista and the Mexican border with the Phoenix-Tucson stretch is the epicenter.
"The Indian Communities are Scottsdale's only chance for more growth," said Jay Butler, director of the Arizona Real Estate Center at Arizona State University Polytechnic. "But it's a slim chance."
Difficult to develop
Outside development on Indian communities isn't prohibited, but it can be difficult.
Three large commercial projects with prominent and deep-pocketed developers are under way on the Salt River Reservation along Loop 101. As with land for housing developments, Scottsdale has run out of big parcels for its growing office market so developers have looked to the reservations.
It took seven years of negotiations with almost 200 Salt River Pima-Maricopa landowners to pull together the land leases for Alter Group's 187 acre Riverwalk project. The developer is building as much as 1.5 million square feet of office and retail space on the site, near the 101 and Indian Bend Road.
About half of the reservation's 55,329 acres was given to tribal members to encourage farming. The Indians are barred from selling the land, which is held in trust for them by the federal government, but they can lease it out. The process of pulling land together is so time-consuming because many landholders died without making wills, leaving multiple heirs who have to agree on a deal.
Kurt Rosene, senior vice president of Alter, said he made multiple trips to Oklahoma to negotiate with one landowner whose parcel was smaller than a parking space.
Another project on the Salt River Reservation, Pima Center, is going up on 209 acres controlled by tribal member Joseph Ray's descendants and 34 other Salt River Pima-Maricopa families. Once completed, the 3 million-square-foot project will be one of the largest private business parks on Indian land.
Nearby on the southwest corner of Loop 101 and Via de Ventura, developer Opus West is building Opus Calendar Stick on 24 acres leased from tribal members. Office tenants aren't fearful of leasing on reservation space.
Cold Stone Creamery moved in to its new corporate headquarters at Opus Calendar Stick in late July.
"It's a quickly emerging commercial corridor," said Tom Roberts, chief executive of Opus West, which also developed three of the upscale office towers at Phoenix's Esplanade.
Fort McDowell has a commercial hub zoned along the Beeline Highway and a Radisson resort. Both Indian communities have casinos.
But the tribe's only plans for housing are for tribal members.
"Right now non-Indians can't live on the tribe's land," said Wendell Peacock, Arizona spokesman for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. "It would be a big deal and take a lot of work for that to change."
It has been done
Indian communities have sprouted homes for non-tribal members in Arizona and others parts of the West. But the partnerships haven't always worked out.
Hawley Lake, on the Fort Apache Reservation near Globe, was a second-home retreat for Phoenix and Tucson residents until the mid-1980s. More than 400 non-tribal families had cabins and upscale homes around the lake until their 25-year leases expired and the White Mountain Apache Tribe evicted them.
Some were able to move their homes while others walked way, took the real estate write-off and left houses that are boarded up and run down. Lawsuits over the homes dragged on for years. The tribe has since built a casino near the site.
"Housing has been a problem for decades for tribal members themselves," said John McIlwain, a senior fellow for housing at the Washington, D.C.-based real estate think tank Urban Land Institute. "Most Indian communities aren't going to let non-tribal members move into new homes on their land."
In Washington state, Tulalip Tribes is ending leases on almost 300 homes. Owners have less than 15 years to try to sell their property, figure out how to move it or find somewhere else to live.
Growth in Palm Springs, Calif., has led to housing development on Native American land, but the leases are pricey, making the homes more costly.
Residential development has worked on the land owned by the Cahuilla Indians near Palm Springs because they have patchwork parcels between privately owned sites, said George Bosworth, said Urban Land's Arizona executive director, who previously worked with Salt River Devco, the real estate division of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Community.
Instead of one big contiguous piece of land, part of the Agua Caliente Cahuilla Indian community is made up of individual parcels that are surrounded by private land.
The same patchwork land situation doesn't exist on the Indian communities to the east of Scottsdale, he said.
Could it happen here?
The many obstacles to building big housing developments on reservation land in the Valley haven't deterred all builders.
"There's nothing overtly going on with residential development on Native American land now, but there are a lot of developers interested," said housing analyst Brown.
The rising prices of homes in Scottsdale and Fountain Hills have driven up the value of Indian land to the east. So any housing developments that did go up on the reservations are bound to be pricey.
Housing for non-tribal members isn't a new issue for the Salt River Community.
Tribal leaders considered letting home builders on their land in 1970 before they had a casino. But a backlash from tribal members tabled the development plans and led to the ordinance that prohibits new housing for anyone not part of the community.
Bryan Meyers, community manager for the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Community, said there's an existing lease for a mobile-home park on the reservation, but that was established before the council's ordinance.
He said the tribal council wouldn't consider any new housing for outsiders.
The community prohibits non-tribal members from living on the reservation for more than 30 days.
It would be even more difficult to develop housing on the Fort McDowell Reservation.
Debra Krol, a spokeswoman for the Indian community, said that unlike on the Salt River Reservation, all of the Fort McDowell land is owned by the tribe and can't be leased out to developers by individual members.
One of the last pieces of private land east of Fountain Hills recently sold to former Phoenix Coyotes owner Steve Ellman. He is planning an upscale housing community. That development is bound to affect Fort McDowell. It could also be one of the last new Valley housing projects to go up east of Scottsdale and Fountain Hills.
"The only way the Valley can grow to the east is to access Indian community land, but developers have to be extremely patient," said Pete Bolton, managing director of the Phoenix real estate brokers CB Richard Ellis. "The Indian communities there have always maintained that non-tribal members can shop on their land or office and manufacture goods there, but they can't live there. Period."