Maricopa looks to future, cultivates prosperous image
Once a dusty stop for stagecoach and train, the city harbors big ambitions and has almost tripled in size in the last decade
Bedroom community. Poster child of the housing crash. Open for business at any cost. One way in, one way out. A place you leave to go to work, never a destination.
Such portrayals of Maricopa are dated or off-base, say its leaders, and the city is poised to correct them.
Before Maricopa incorporated as a Pinal County city about 35 miles south of downtown Phoenix, 1,040 people lived there, and City Hall was a tem- porary trailer borrowed after Loop 101 was built.
That was in 2000. Three years later, the population shot up to 15,934, and the city decided to incorporate.
Last week, the community of now 44,956 people celebrated its 10th birthday in a new City Hall complex. It’s just one of the ambitious public works that its leaders think will usher in a lasting prosperity and an image makeover for the city, located about 15 miles southwest of Chandler and nestled between
two reservations — those of the Gila River and AkChin Indian communities.
But a decade after its incorporation in 2003, Maricopa’s image is shaped by its rapid growth and the consequences.
The city issued close to 600 building permits a month for new houses in the go-go years just after incorporation. It was the fastest-growing city in Arizona and among the fastest-growing in the U.S. But by the depths of the Great Recession and the sluggishness that lingered, one house in four was in foreclosure. New construction stopped.
Next great thing
The seeds of the boom were planted in1987 when heavyweight developer Mike Ingram first saw the small agricultural community as the next great thing.
His firm, El Dorado Holdings LLC, assembled some land and started building Rancho El Dorado in 2002.
From then on, Maricopa harvested houses where it used to harvest cotton and pistachios. It became the best bet for young families with East Valley jobs or first-time buyers who could now qualify for a loan. And for investors who could trade pricey out-of-state homes for a portfolio, confident that values would keep climbing.
People were lured by home prices that were lower than in metro Phoenix. Their appetite was fueled by adjustable-rate mortgages, predatory loans and easy credit. That created a city of transients.
“If you found anybody who’s been here five years, I’d call them a pioneer,” former Mayor Anthony Smith said. Then came the crash. Current Mayor Christian Price remembers it vividly. He was president of his homeowners association.
“You’d go down the street of 100 homes and easily see 25 with weeds up to the windows. You’d see people move out in the middle of the night, pulling out every light fixture and every door stop to sell,” he said.
He had a neighbor who boarded up the house, ran every faucet inside and flooded the home. If he was going to be underwater, so would the bank. A contractor later saw mold on the walls, and bought the home for $35,000.
Those days are gone. Maricopa was one of the first cities in the country to emerge from the foreclosure crisis. The city, whose population never dipped, is issuing building permits again — more than 30 a month last summer — and some leading forecasts conservatively estimate returning to peak levels in 2016.
Facing challenges
On the east side, Jennifer Garduno moved into a stucco home in the Rancho Mirage subdivision a month ago. All around her, workers were adding tile roofs and stucco wiring on half-built homes. It is her third home in Maricopa. She works in Chandler.
She first moved there in 2007 to be close to her parents and because “we thought we got a good deal.” But then her husband died in an accident, she entered foreclosure on her $195,000 home and she moved into her second home in the city. After values rose, she traded up for her current $180,000 home.
She likes Maricopa, it has “friendly, genuine people” and has rolled with its bumpy decade. “There’s not a lot of traffic, not a lot of noise, not a lot of crime,” she said. In fact, Maricopa boasts the second-lowest crime rate of any Arizona city.
The city faces other challenges. It never had the chance to attract many of the things its bulging population needs.
Like jobs. For every local job in Maricopa, there are five rooftops. Many people commute to tech jobs such as those at Chandler’s Intel plant.
A recent economic retail report for the city shows there are no homefurnishing stores, no liquor stores and no florists. People drive “into town” for most purchases, meaning north across the Gila River Reservation into Phoenix’s Ahwatukee Foothills neighborhood.
Of the industries, only three — auto-parts stores, grocery stores and vending-machine operators — meet local sales demands. Last year, of the $152 million that Maricopa residents spent on retail purchases, $107 million was spent out of the city.
Price was elected mayor last year. He’s a glasshalf-full kind of guy.
“There are a lot of challenges, but I see it as a land of opportunity,” the 38-year-old said.
He points to the local Fry’s Food Stores supermarket. For a long time, it was the closest thing Maricopa had to a city square. Two soft, worn leather couches and three small tables squeezed between the coffee bar, flower stand and lottery-ticket desk mark the meeting place. A flat-screen TV blares out news.
But Price sees something else: It’s the chain’s most successful store in Arizona — and a metaphor for other successful local retailers, such as Ace Hardware and the Subway sandwich shop.
“You don’t have the competition. You get people loyal to shop here. It’s an absolute gold mine if you want to take the risk,” Price said, adding that numerous retailers and businesses want to locate to Maricopa, but for them it’s a matter of timing.
Pro business
The city promotes itself as pro-business, fasttracking permits. It offers an online service called “Maricopa Prospector,” with which developers can locate any available piece of land and find out its zoning, ownership, size and other key characteristics.
It works. Allen Rice has been building homes in Arizona since 1967. Three years ago, he began building single-family homes in Maricopa for first-time owners because there were so many assembled properties, primed for development.
Rice says Maricopa is “plain vanilla,” a place with not much excitement, where “if you opened up a gourmet restaurant, you’d starve, because nobody wants one.”
City leaders accept the bedroom-community tag but want to move beyond the sea-of-houses mindset.
“We want to flop that trend and create a job magnet for the outside. It is ambitious, but look at what we did in the last 10 years,” said former Mayor Smith, now a Pinal County supervisor.
Next year is shaping up to be pivotal.
So, a new City Hall is open on the east side, surrounded by empty fields. A new 140-acre regional sports park is being built on the south side next to rows of cotton. Central Arizona College has opened a campus. Ahospital is planned, and two health-care facilities opened in the last year. The Ak-Chin Casino got a major overhaul and opened a glitzy cinema complex a year ago. The casino is the biggest local employer.
In March, the city expects the Arizona State Transportation Board to earmark a critical project — an overpass of Arizona 347 to span the increasingly busy Union Pacific Corp. main-line transcontinental railroad, which cuts the city in half. When trains rumble through, cars can line up for more than 20 minutes waiting to get through.
Maricopa’s crossroads are Pinal County’s. Both are expected to grow rapidly in the next quartercentury as urban Phoenix and Tucson fuse together along Interstate 10, demographers predict.
Like the city of Maricopa, Pinal County is struggling to attract and diversify the labor pool. Both face transportation problems. Both pin hopes for progress on an ambitious plan to link Phoenix and Las Vegas with a proposed new Interstate 11.
Most of the preliminary routes that made the first cut in early planning take a route south of Maricopa to tie the new freeway into I-10.
If built, I-11 would open up development on the cut-off south end of the city. It’s part of a planning area that extends to Casa Grande to the east, Interstate 8 to the south, near Gila Bend on the west and the Gila River Reservation to the north.
Price said his city could potentially grow to 750,000, but most people cite a 350,000 projection.
But unlike West Valley towns like Buckeye, which started approving far-flung subdivisions in the middle of the desert, Maricopa wants to grow more thoughtfully, Price and others say.
“We had a textbook of how not to do things with the growth in the Valley,” said Brent Murphree, president of the Maricopa Historical Society and founding member of the committee that pushed for incorporation.
So when calls came to double the size of the city, early councils rejected them because they didn’t want to overrun the existing residents, he recalled. And they learned, too, from other fast-growing Pinal communities, like the San Tan area. Some 80,000 people live there, and many clamor for better services, which have never come because it was never incorporated.
“We wanted to control our destiny,” Murphree said. “It happened so fast. It’s not that we did anything wrong. We weren’t going to slow growth, but we had to do it in a way to help residents.”
An opportunity
Back at the lounge at Fry’s, most seemed happy with the results.
Ken Walker, 71, and his wife, Clair Shishan, 59, moved from Southern California in 2006 because they got a house for half the price of the one they left. They paid cash, so when the value dropped from $220,000 to $80,000, they could wait it out. On their block, six of the seven homes were empty at one time. Now, their home value is back to $150,000, they said.
For fun, they go dancing at the casino or go to the health club in their subdivision. For shopping and dinner, or a night out, they drive to Chandler and don’t mind.
“I always say it’s like living in an island. To go anywhere, you have to leave the island,” Shishan said.
Homebuilder Rice doesn’t think that will change anytime soon.
“Nobody wants to be what they are. This is a bedroom community of Phoenix,” he said. “All the small bedroom communities want to be the next Scottsdale, but they can’t.” The city is “misguided” to think that will change. He cites a lack of manufacturing or big-box retailers.
But the leaders are undeterred. They see an opportunity to create a sense of place in a city that has none and shape a new image. For a city whose motto is “Proud History, Prosperous Future,” that’s nothing new.
The first town of Maricopa Wells sprang up in 1857 to serve the stagecoach. In 1879, Maricopaville replaced it to serve the then-Southern Pacific Railroad. That town relocated again in 1886, to its current spot as Maricopa Junction. It was always a crossroads and a town of transients. With each fire, flood or advance in transportation, it recast itself.
For Price, the defining characteristic of his city, just like for resident Jennifer Garduno, is resilience. “Maricopa is the comeback kid.”
What it comes back as remains to be seen.
“It’s a blank slate. That’s what’s so exciting,” Price said. “We are inventing what we are going to be known for.”