EAST VALLEY FOCUS
GATEWAY TO PROSPERITY
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n 2020, a study by J.D. Power ranked Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport as the best major airport in the U.S. While many travelers coming to or departing from the Valley pass through Sky Harbor, it isn’t the only runway in town. About 30 miles to the southeast is Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, which originally was an Air Force base where more than 26,500 pilots trained over a 52-year period. Gateway Airport now offers non-stop flights to 60 cities and hosts more than 40 companies, with an annual economic impact of $1.3 billion to Arizona’s economy. The land surrounding the airport, known as Mesa Gateway, has become a magnet for industry, with developments including the 1 million-square-foot speculative industrial building Elliot 202 and an $800 million data center by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, in the works.
FACEBOOK DATA CENTER 30 | January-February 2022
According to Mesa Councilmember Kevin Thompson, who represents Mesa Gateway as part of District 6, the accessibility of the area is attracting more industrial users. “Just the fact that SR 24 is coming has accelerated projects that have been looming in the background for years. Developers are seeing the nexus of everything coming together and they want to be part of that,” he says. Between the availability of land and growing connectedness of the region, development in Mesa Gateway is thriving.
A LIMITED RESOURCE The esteemed American author Mark Twain once quipped, “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” Indeed, even in a sprawling city such as Greater Phoenix, space is at a premium. The Southwest Valley is uniquely constrained due to surrounding state and tribal land. Despite the
Industrial users are fueling growth in Southeast Mesa By KYLE BACKER
restrictions, industrial users are still scouting out the area. “When I first got elected in 2015, I had developers telling me they wanted to build residential near Gateway saying, ‘You’ve got 200 years’ worth of land that you’ll never use,’” Thompson recalls. “Here we are seven years later, and even though there’s still land, it’s hard sometimes to parcel together enough of it when you have a big user that comes in and wants a millionsquare-foot facility.” The appetite for larger space is something of a novelty for the Southeast Valley. Steve Larsen, managing director at JLL, notes that, historically, the Mesa Gateway area attracted smaller to mid-bay clients looking for 15,000 square feet to 50,000 square feet. “Now, it’s closer to 150,000 square feet on average. There are some very large users — a million square feet or more — which we’ve never seen before
