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May 15, 2007 - 6:05AM
Experts: Growth will keep Scottsdale housing prices high
Ari Cohn, Tribune
More than 50,000 additional people are expected to be living in Scottsdale by 2020, while vacant land that can sustain residential development in the city continues to disappear.
The result will be high housing prices in the long term because of a high demand to live here, according to economic and business officials.
Population projections recently released by Scottsdale indicate that by 2020, almost 290,000 people will call the city home. At the beginning of the year, the city had about 239,000 residents. That’s about a 21 percent increase in population in a little more than a decade.
Over the last 17 years, however, Scottsdale’s population increased by about 86 percent, from about 128,000 at the beginning of 1990.
Rick Kidder, president of the Scottsdale Area Chamber of Commerce, attrib- uted the slowdown in growth to the decreasing amount of vacant land suitable for residential development. Scottsdale only has about 3,000 acres left, and most of it is zoned for acre lots or larger, he said.
“We’re running out of space. We’re running out of open land,” Kidder said. “That would account for the relatively dramatic slowdown (in population).”
Dave Roderique, the city’s economic vitality director, said the type of housing being built in Scottsdale has changed as well.
“Back in the 1990s, we still had a lot of tract development occurring. You had a lot of available land. We’re pretty much done with that,” he said. “It’s been consistently getting slower, and it’s going to continue to slow down until we reach buildout. We don’t have the land.”
Now, new residential construction consists mostly of custom homes in the city’s north and condominium development downtown, he said.
However, the demand for housing here is expected to remain high because of Scottsdale’s healthy commercial sector.
“Demand will continue to stay very strong despite market fluctuations,” Kidder said. “As long as demand remains strong and the supply is weak, the prices are going to remain high.”
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