All partially funded by sweetheart lease deals between land ASU owns and billions of dollars in corporate office buildings and hotels thanks to the tax exempt status of the University. Status that is supposed to be used for educational purposes but instead is turning the ASU campus into a commercial property tax haven.
As someone who attended at the turn of the millenium, the entire area is unrecognizable now, with all the towers that have gone up where it used to be low-rise shops and restaurants servicing the student audience. Traffic's a mess and you can't park at the Chuckbox during the school year. OTOH, some of the new buildings did seem nice (the astronomy programme had an open day earlier this year)
And yet, there's still no proper grocery store in orbit of the campus; there was a sketchy IGA back in the early 1990s, but they gradually drove all the tenants out of the strip mall, claiming it would eventually be built into a wildly-needed parking structure; instead they built a 25-story retirement home on campus.
I feel like the weirdest angle on it is the entire Shady Park scuffle: they built the retirement tower largely during the pandemic, and people kvetched to the point of a legal dispute when the club across the street started having noisy concerts again. How do you have a large mainstream college WITHOUT things loud college bars nearby? What exactly did they expect?
I graduated from ASU in 1995. Tempe was a local’s community until the Chase development and SuperBowl XXX signaled what was to come. Sun Devil stadium is dwarfed by those giant glass buildings and the whole place feels mega- and apocalyptic.
