A vacant, 80-acre site that was the longtime home of a shopping mall in Mesa, Arizona, is set to transform into a mixed-use redevelopment that could boost the state's soccer standing.
Scottsdale-based Sunny Day Sports is leading the direction and investment efforts for the planned Palo District — the project name for the reimagined Fiesta Mall site at 1445 W. Southern Ave. Sunny Day Sports plans to transform the site into a 25,000-seat soccer stadium, hotels, retail, entertainment and a women's health and performance campus.
For Vicki Mayo, co-founder and CEO of Sunny Day Sports, those commercial components speak to a vision that "goes much deeper" than bolstering the state's reputation as a professional soccer hub. Arizona has been the home of Phoenix Rising — a member of the USL Championship League — since 2014, but the state does not yet have a professional women's team.
"For me, this project is also personal," Mayo said in a statement to CoStar News. "As a former Olympic hopeful in horseback dressage, I experienced firsthand the lack of investment in female athlete care — particularly around prevention, recovery and long-term health."
The $100 million campus aims to fill those gaps by providing specialized services in sports medicine and comprehensive care, treating recovery and performance training to research and clinical care to support long-term health.
Construction could begin soon
Should plans come to fruition for Palo District, it will also build on a trend happening across the country: having sports as a driver for new development.
Examples can be found in Kansas City, home to the world's first soccer stadium built for a women's team. The Kansas City Current's newly opened stadium is spurring roughly $1 billion in planned development, including hundreds of apartments and an extension of the city’s public-transit system.
In Chicago, construction recently started for the Fire's new 22,000-seat stadium. The club is privately funding its stadium, but the larger neighborhood, The 78, is poised to add residential and hotels, restaurants and public spaces, with the stadium serving as a catalyst to spur growth.
Efforts to bring a professional women's soccer team to the Palo District are ongoing. Mayo added that Sunny Day Sports is actively engaged with professional soccer leagues to advance the infrastructure and ownership framework to support a franchise.
Still, construction is expected to start this summer for the stadium, initial retail, hospitality and the launch of the health and performance campus. Mayo expects that phase to be completed in 2028 and have a stadium ready for a club to take the pitch.
"We are building the stadium and broader district to meet league standards, ensuring that when a team is awarded, it has a best-in-class home from day one," Mayo said.
A second phase calls for the full build-out of the district, which would include residential, retail, hospitality and commercial elements, along with expanded community and experiential spaces, Mayo said.
Reactivating closed malls
Palo District is also an example of the effort to reimagine shuttered or obsolete shopping malls in Phoenix and nationwide.
The former Paradise Valley Mall, about 25 miles north of the Mesa property, has transformed into a 100-acre mixed-use development with luxury apartments, retail and office buildings. In Los Angeles, demolition started on a Sears building at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza for 92 apartments, the first part of an effort to remake the 42-acre mall property into a mixed-use neighborhood hub.
Fiesta Mall was built in the 1970s and played a big role in Mesa through the early 2000s while serving as a major gathering point for residents of Mesa and East Valley cities. The mall struggled over the years and eventually, every store closed by 2018.
"This site is a premier location for destination retail, entertainment, hospitality, and world-class amenities, plus there's room for employment and residential," said Jaye O'Donnell, Mesa's economic development director, in a statement to CoStar News. "We look forward to working with the developer to create an iconic place to live, work and play in Mesa."
Last November, the city of Mesa approved the formation of a theme park district for the site to facilitate its redevelopment.
Sunny Day Sports has a long-term lease on the land, which is owned by Verde Investments. Plaza Cos. serves as the master developer, overseeing execution across the site, while Gensler is leading the master planning and design.
Verde revealed plans to develop a project in 2023 that would have included thousands of housing units, up to 1.85 million square feet of retail and commercial space and over 500,000 square feet of open space. Mayo said Sunny Day Sports started to become involved in the Fiesta Mall redevelopment in 2024.