Quote:
Originally Posted by Cirrus
The Phoenix metropolitan area has about 103 million square feet of office space in it. Divided by the 4.7 million people in its MSA, that's 22 sq ft per person. That's pretty low.
Compare that to the Denver metropolitan area, which has about 117 million square feet of office space total. Divided by the 2.9 million people in its MSA, that's 40 sq ft per person.
Or compare to Boston, which has an almost identical metro area population to Phoenix (4.8 million), but has 184 million square feet of office. That's 38 sq ft per person.
Or let's compare to another new city: Charlotte. Charlotte has 107 million square feet of office space and an MSA population of 2.5 million, for 43 sq ft per person.
Conclusion: It's not just that Phoenix is a new suburban city. Part of the answer here is that Phoenix has less office space than you'd expect for a metro area of its size. If Phoenix matched the office space per person rate of more office-oriented cities, it would have almost twice as much office space as it has.
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There are a couple of strange oddities to the density calculation.
1. Phoenix has MASSIVE empty city parks in its mountain preserves that take up a huge amount of square milage and are counted as city land.
2. the northern 1/3 of the city limits is uninhabited desert (for now)
This makes the straight size/population calculation inaccurate, our density is actually quite on par with like LA or Dallas fofor the most part.
Furthermore Because downtown was so undesirable for so long, most of the offices located in Tempe, Scottsdale and Chandler.
Desirable close suburbs that have most of our upscale and high calss offices that would traditionally locate downtown.
Once again this is starting to change but you guys must understand that downtown was practially worse than non-existent for 5 decades.