At age 10, Eastmark's progress is stunning

Apr. 10—Ten years ago, crowds came out to tour seven model homes and celebrate the grand opening of a massive master-planned community with a utopian vision for a community southeast Mesa on 3,200 acres formerly owned by General Motors to test vehicles.

Ten years later, crowds of Eastmark residents gathered at the park to celebrate the community's anniversary.

From seven model homes, Eastmark has grown to 7,000 houses, 20,000 people and 26 million square feet of non-residential buildings, including 10-12 million square feet of industrial space for the likes of Apple and Meta.

Many of those involved in planning the community say they are astonished by the speed the community has developed and the degree to which the lofty ambitions for the master-planned community have been realized.

"I'm really impressed it all worked," said Trevor Barger, CEO of Espiritu Loci, the design firm that created Eastmark's master plan.

According to Eric Tune, senior vice president of Eastmark managing partner Brookfield Residential, the community is about 90% built out.

The last 600 available residential lots have been sold to guest builders for retail home buyers, he said.

Many of Eastmark's planners thought it would be years before the community reached this point. They attribute its meteoric rise in part to a surging housing market and an innovative approach to zoning tried by Mesa that developers say made it easier to adapt the final plan to changing market conditions.

Barger is pleased to see the community has a life of its own, which was on display at a 10-year anniversary celebration held in the Eastmark's Great Park last month.

Families and residents of various ages filled the central Great Park, taking in the music, food and activities. A trio of teenagers plugged an electric guitar into the amphitheater while the band took a break.

Three schools serve Eastmark, and the local high school, part of Queen Creek Unified School District, won the state championship in football last year. A Mesa Public Library is in the works.

Residents happy with it

District 6 Councilman Scott Somers, an Eastmark resident, said he believes people who live there are happy with the community.

"I think there's a lot of pride," Somers said.

Tune, an early Eastmark homeowner, said residents are more likely to know their neighbors than in other communities he's lived in.

"Before I even actually moved into my home, I knew eight people that were moving into the street that I was going to be living on," he said. "That was a testament to the efforts that our Community Life team put forth in getting residents connected to each other through things like new resident patio parties."

"It's such a well-connected group of people, considering we have nearly 20,000 residents today," Tune added.

Barger said the Eastmark's layout is designed to promote connections.

"We wanted to make a 'living room' for each of the neighborhoods," Barger said. "If you notice, when you drive in ... you always get to the park first and then off to the houses, and the reason for that was, you would see everybody gathering, and you're reminded each day of the community you live in."

Barger said his team traveled the country, looking at turn-of-century neighborhoods for inspiration, and also took Irvine, California, and its relationship with John Wayne Airport as a model since Eastmark is near Phoenix Mesa Gateway Airport.

Barger feels the plan has succeeded when he sees how many people bike in the neighborhoods and use the Great Park.

The Great Park, like the neighborhood pocket parks, was intended to serve as a gathering space for the community with an amphitheater as a focal point.

Tune agrees that Espiritu Loci's vision has become reality.

"You get that Old World, hometown feel when you're in Eastmark because there's moms with their kids at toddler time at the community center, and there's teenagers that are running back and forth," he said.

"When someone gets ill or someone has a baby or someone's having some kind of issues, there's meal trains that get created throughout the community," he added.

Somers said that other communities in the Valley look to Eastmark as a model.

He spoke recently to a West Valley mayor who toured Eastmark because a developer wants to replicate the community on a smaller scale on that side of the Valley.

"It shows you that (Eastmark) has already served as templates for others to follow in community building," he said. "It's really a different community than has been developed in the Valley up to this point."

Wheeling and dealing

Grady Gammage Jr. served as attorney for GM when it was divesting its real estate holdings in Mesa, and he traces the high quality of Eastmark's development standards and innovative zoning to the tension between automaker and the city when the company was looking to sell.

"The General Plan of the City of Mesa at that point had the entire Proving Grounds shown as industrial with no residential," he said. "There was a concern that allowing residential too near the airport would constrain the ability of the airport to grow."

The industrial plan meant that a high-end residential development was a "hard sell" for leadership.

Gammage said Mesa's plan at the time was "wildly out of proportion to the natural ratio between residential uses and industrial and commercial use."

For GM, the site was far less valuable as pure industrial land, which he estimated it would have taken 100 years to build out.

GM mounted a campaign to convince the city that Eastmark could coexist with the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, and moreover, mixing in residential rather than having pure industrial would lead to higher-quality development.

"I think this turned out to be true," Gammage said. "The reason so many terrific employers have been attracted (to southeast Mesa) is because there are places for people to live nearby."

Once the city opened up to the idea of a mixed-use development, City Manager Chris Brady said Mesa was determined to avoid a "cookie-cutter kind of development."

"We wanted to have a very much higher-quality development that would be something unique as far as the amenities, the streetscape, the green spaces, the lighting, just everything that you see as your public space," he said.

As a result of this back and forth, Gammage said the city struck a bargain with the developer in which they would build Eastmark to high design standards. In exchange, the city would give the developer flexibility to alter land uses and densities as Eastmark developed.

One challenge for Eastmark

Gammage said quality-for-flexibility has become a common trade between municipalities and developers in Arizona, but at the time it was relatively novel.

In its redevelopment of Fiesta Mall in West Mesa, Verde Investments is seeking this kind of flexibility, and in a pre-application meeting, city planners suggested they look at the Eastmark development agreement.

Brady says that from the city's perspective, Eastmark's buildout has been a great success.

"It has changed the market out there," Brady said.

One disappointment for the city has been that commercial and retail development has lagged behind Eastmark's residential and employment buildout.

"We hear that from the residents all the time," he said. "They want more sit-down restaurants. They want more quality retail closer to where they live."

High-quality, destination retail and entertainment has been envisioned for a project dubbed EastMarket at Ray and Ellsworth Roads, but Tune said this could be three to five years away.

Brady's not sure if there's anything the city could have done at the outset to speed up retail development, saying it comes down to attracting developers to invest in those places.

But on balance, Eastmark has been a boon to the city.

"The families and the people that have moved into Mesa because of Eastmark have really helped make the city a better place," he said.

Strength and weakness

Tune said the flexibility allowed by Eastmark's development agreement with the city of Mesa allowed Eastmark to thrive amid fortune's twists and turns over the past 10 years, and there have been many: the Great Recession, a massive Gaylord Resort being canceled, Apple moving in and helping spark a tech boom, and the pandemic.

Instead of having to map out exactly how each acre would be used at the outset, Eastmark's various development units had a "land use budget," so to some extent Eastmark could roll with the punches.

But the flexibility built into the plan and the city's willingness to accommodate changes when Brookfield has needed to amend the agreement has also been a source of frustration for some residents.

After the $800 million Gaylord hotel and conference center along the northern edge of Eastmark went kaput after 2012, this area became the Elliot Road Tech Corridor, and industrial land once planned for the south was shifted to the north.

With a hot industrial real estate market in the East Valley, the land went predominantly to warehouses and data centers right to the border of the northern neighborhoods, with the community's narrow disc golf course as a buffer.

At public hearings last year, many residents complained about the changes and questioned the process. They wanted, if nothing else, more of a transition between the residential and industrial sections.

Those who helped design Eastmark weren't sure how to avoid situations like this other than to make the master plans more rigid from the outset.

Barger views changes to neighboring property uses as inherent to a live, work, play community.

"This is urban. We have this mix of uses — they're all right here together," he said.

Tune said of Eastmark's entitlement scheme "while it's flexible, it still makes it a little bit difficult to relay information to the public as to what will be coming in your community. Because you just really don't know."

Somers, who was on the council when Eastmark was planned, said if he could do it over, he'd have the city take a closer look at alternative traffic-calming measures, "rather than adding more and more traffic lights."

Still, everyone largely agree that in 10 years, Eastmark has made a mark.

"I honestly thought it would take 30-plus years to get to where it is now," Gammage said. "I think that is a testament ... that if you build a product that is distinctive and different, you will attract people to an area more quickly."

Somers said that Eastmark has been "incredibly important."

"It's provided a variety of housing," he said. "We're in need of entry-level housing and upper-level housing, and this community provided much of that in a fantastic environment."