The year began with the decade’s best idea opening its doors and ended with the decade’s whole premise in ruins. SkySong, the ASU Scottsdale Innovation Center, opened on the former Los Arcos Mall site under its landmark tensile canopy — the payoff of the 2005 city–ASU Foundation deal, and the answer to a question south Scottsdale had been asking since the mall died. Startups, ASU programs, and global firms moved in beneath the shade structure that gave the campus its name.
Then the financial crisis arrived, and metro Phoenix turned out to be one of its national epicenters. Scottsdale had built a construction- and finance-heavy economy on top of tourism, and all three froze together: the condo pipeline stopped mid-pour, home values began a fall of roughly a third from peak to trough, and the payrolls that had quietly grown as important as resort jobs went idle. The 2005 special census had counted 226,395 residents; the 2010 count would not sustain it.
SkySong’s timing looked terrible and proved the opposite. The campus grew steadily through the downturn — the right idea at the worst possible moment, which made it all the more convincing — and it seeded the long revival of the McDowell Road corridor. The bust itself, and the two things that kept working through it, close out the 2000s chapter.