Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Mesa needs to attract more business

Mesa has the office space, but it doesn't have the tenants. A glut of office space is available now with another 2.5 million in square feet that are currently under construction. This type of problem is expected, especially when businesses are shutting their doors leaving even more existing space. So, the real question is, should we lament their emptiness or should we be looking for ways to fill the space?

For now, the first step is to curtail the approval of additional office space. In the past, Mesa has had the tendency to continue to allow more and more of a good (or bad) thing until the entire city is saturated. It sounds like we have a pretty good base of office space lined up, so it might be time to cut down on the approvals.

With the HEAT plan, (healthcare, education, aerospace, and tourism) the next step would be divide up the spaces into the respective categories where they would be best suited, and start pushing them as a block of available space instead of marketing each center individually. In fact, if, for example, there was a large block of medical office space available in a particular area, work to find something that would attract business (ie a hospital, atheletic rehab, a med school, senior treatment, hospice care, etc).

2 comments:

Heath Reed said...

First is, why would a office want to relocate here? What is attracting them to Mesa in the first place? When you have major corporations, other businesses feed off of that corporation and it spurs the economy and work force. I like the HEAT plan, but think we need to bring more office jobs to the area. So, like what Brady did in attracting Gaylord and pursuing them should be done for a major corporation that is looking to relocate. You have to recruit these type of businesses here and can’t wait for someone just to fill them.

Next thing is, flexible zoning codes. That is one of the major reasons why our city is laid out in such a bad way. We allowed for crap to come in and that is what these big box and strip centers do. They go away and fall apart in 20 years.

Mesa needs to be creative and bring in office jobs in and around the Fiesta area, Riverview, DOWNTOWN and the Gateway area.

We just have too much small space I think and that is the problem for now.

Tenacious Me said...

Im with you on flexible code. it was the largest pain i have ever experienced opening a small theatre space in 2005....Ang Guess what Everything else in my complex is totally empty. Hmmmm sometimes people will go where the path of least resistance is.