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August 18, 2008, 02:37 PM ET
Phoenix Merchants Look Forward to Influx of Arizona State U. Students
Students have begun moving into one of two towers of Arizona State University’s new Taylor Place housing complex in downtown Phoenix. (Rendering courtesy of Arizona State U.)
Arizona State University is opening two big new buildings on its downtown Phoenix campus this summer. One is a six-story, $71-million home for the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the other is a 13-story, 576-bed tower that is the first of two in a $150-million residence-hall complex.
According to The Arizona Republic, Phoenix restaurant and club owners are hoping that the new buildings will help enliven the neighborhood, in part because more undergraduates will be studying and living downtown. The university has had some downtown housing before, in a former motel whose amenities made it popular with students, but the biggest school on the downtown campus until now has been the College of Nursing and Healthcare Innovation.
Now a new university policy requires freshmen who want university housing to live on whichever campus is home to the program in which they plan to major. Translation: Freshmen in the journalism school have to live downtown, whether or not the nightlife matches that surrounding the university’s main campus in Tempe. A light-rail line scheduled to open December 27 will shuttle students between the main campus and downtown Phoenix.
Both of the new buildings have been constructed on expedited design-build contracts. Ron McCoy, who was Arizona State’s university architect before leaving this summer to take a similar job at Princeton University, said in an interview earlier this year that fast-tracking projects brings practical benefits: The more quickly a project goes forward, the less likely it is to get tripped up by things like rising steel prices or deterioration in the state’s budget outlook.
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