WAIT! Who bought 1000’s of acres near Buckeye?
A well known billionaire bought up 24,000 acres of desert land between Buckeye and Tonopah about 5 years ago! He also bought 2,800 acres right in Buckeye.
If you are like me you might be curious how much 24,000 acres of desert would cost. The answer is a whopping 80 million.
Mt. Lemmon Holdings was the official purchaser. The plan is to build a new planned “smart city” called Belmont.
What is a smart city you may wonder. www.globest.com says: “According to the Arizona real estate investment company involved in the deal, Belmont Partners it will be ‘a forward-thinking community with a communication and infrastructure spine that embraces cutting-edge technology, designed around high-speed digital networks, data centers, new manufacturing technologies and distribution models, autonomous vehicles and autonomous logistics hubs.’”
Anyone who has ever traveled west on I 10 from Phoenix has noticed that it is solid urban jungle until you reach exit 112 which is the last Buckeye exit aka State Route 85. From Buckeye on west to Tonopah it is open desert—the first non urban area in over 60 miles from the East Valley to the West Valley.
When the project gets underway we can expect to see housing, schools, offices, and retail stores. How cool would that be to have some stores, and hopefully some restaurants and stuff without having to go back east into the urban jungle!
So who or what is Mt. Lemmons Holdings? While there is very little information available we do know that Bill Gates is the man behind the project and it is his vision to build a smart city.
“Real estate developers are scrambling to keep up with Buckeye’s growth, with approximately 21,000 single-family homes in various stages of entitlement and construction across 30-plus planned communities, including Blue Horizons, Arroyo Seco, Verrado, Westpark, Tartesso and Festival Ranch…” www.globest.com
Besides the 24,000 acres of open desert Gates’ holding company also bought another 2,800 acres in Buckeye proper. With the phenomenal growth of Phoenix and especially Buckeye (as the fastest growing city over 50,000 in the US) is it any wonder a developer would want to own this purchase for further development?
The plan says it hopes that Belmont will become the size of Tempe!
“An exhaustive February 2021 in The New York Post identifies Gates as the nation’s single largest owner of farmland through a tangle of subsidiaries ultimately owned or retained by Cascade Investment LLC, noting that ‘with the Washington state acreage and other recent additions to his portfolio’ … Gates now owns at least 242,000 acres of American farmland.”
“As for what Gates imagines sitting on his Arizona land parcel, Digital Trends reported then that the smart city’s cutting-edge manufacturing technologies and modes of distribution could involve large-scale 3D printing, a technology Gates has supported in the past. With plans for autonomous vehicles, the city could be one of the cities Gates says will experiment with the technology before it is offered to the broader public.”
“As of today, a smattering of builders is erecting new homes in the vicinity of the proposed site of the smart city of Belmont, Arizona, but there’s been no large-scale development as yet.”
“Belmont and Tonopah are off Interstate 10 about 50 miles west of Phoenix. They both lay along the potential route of the proposed Interstate 11 freeway between Phoenix and Las Vegas, a route that could serve as a big trucking and distribution reliever for Southern California.”
“Interstate 11 could bring plenty of growth to what is now remote county land. And, like with other freeways, there are landowners and developers counting on it and banking land.”
“Despite suggestive posts from the Verge, CNN Money, Fortune, Business Insider, Architectural Digest, and dozens of other publications, this is not Gates’ attempt to do in Phoenix what Google is trying to do in Toronto. This is not a story about techies building the city of the future from scratch. It’s actually a little more illuminating than that.”
“Mt. Lemmon Holdings paid roughly $7,500 an acre, according to Business Real Estate Weekly of Arizona, which would be an insanely low price for residential land in a major American city. But then Belmont is barely even a metropolitan area.”
Also according to www.slate.com:
“A California company spent $80 million on 10,000 acres in Buckeye, hoping to built 40,000 new homes. Adjacent to Belmont is Douglas Ranch, whose 34,000-acre master plan allows for an astounding 104,000 housing units and 290,000 residents.”
As long as the new Interstate 11 doesn’t take a bunch of our homes by imminent domain it is pretty exciting to see what is going on in and near Buckeye. Even Bill Gates thinks we are a good investment! But then again Gates is the biggest owner of open desert and farmland in America.
If nothing ever happens at least Belmont, AZ, has its own Wikipedia entry.
