City of Tucson Picks $203M Hotel Development Plan

Garfield Traub was recommended by the city selection committee to develop a new 707-room Sheraton. Now that the city selection committee has chosen Garfield Traub’s plan, it will go to the city council for final approval before Thanksgiving. Initially, the plan calls for the 250-room Hotel Arizona located on Broadway just past Granada Avenue to be completely renovated. Then, if market conditions allow, a 28-story 450-room expansion would be built.

This is a great addition to Tucson’s downtown in conjunction with the $130M being spent on the renovations to the Tucson Convention Center. The renovation and redevelopment of the Hotel Arizona will be the start of revitalization of Tucson’s downtown area, which is badly needed. Tucson is a long way from having an “In Demand” downtown. Other cities, such as Phoenix, San Diego, and Denver, have transformed their downtown districts into the live-work-play areas that are in extremely high demand. Tucson, unfortunately, is way behind and Rio Nuevo has made very little progress to transform the area. Hopefully this revitalization of the Hotel Arizona will be the major redevelopment that pushes Tucson towards its own “In Demand” downtown.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.