Few observations from cruising around Tempe:
The Greek Village at Terrace/Rural, even though it's pretty generic looking, actually seems to work pretty well and I think is an improvement over the old tower-in-the-park dorms. The community center comes out and meets the corner at Terrace/Rural well.
ASU's website says that the community center will have a retail component as well, which is great. Doubt it will ever happen given the backlash from reducing auto travel lanes on the less busy McClintock, but it would be awesome if they reduced Rural to two lanes in each direction, widened the sidewalks and added bike lanes. The new developments along Rural are all at least someone pedestrian oriented and it would be nice to start to change the complexion of Rural to match that.
Also noticed that there is some signage up around the Union showing that they already have some retail tenants lined up--I noticed Starbucks, Insomnia Cookies (who already have the new location up on their
website) and Nekter Juice. I have no idea how there is a market for another Starbucks in the area--off the top of my head I can think of the one at Mill/5th, the one in Marina Heights, the one in the Chase offices, the one in the engineering dorms, and 2-3 on the main campus within walking distance. But they would know better than I. Hope there are more diverse retail tenants filling up the other spots.
ASU Surplus at Rio Salado/101 is having a moving sale, so it looks like Broadstone project there is moving forward. That once always seemed to me like a relatively easy one to build, so I suspect that will go relatively quickly.