Commercial Landscaping in Mesa's Fiesta District

Keeping up while the district changes

Also known as: Fiesta Mall

The old Fiesta Mall neighborhood is getting a makeover. Your landscape shouldn't be the part that missed the memo.

Select Mesa describes the Palo District as a planned $2.5 billion, 80-acre redevelopment of the former Fiesta Mall site, centered on a proposed 25,000-seat women's soccer stadium, with housing, retail, offices, medical space and two hotels. Projects like that take years. In the meantime, nearby centers will be competing for tenants with brand-new buildings and brand-new plantings. Clean beds, healthy trees and working irrigation are a practical way to keep an older property from looking like the before photo.

Banner Desert Medical Center and Banner Children's at Desert anchor the district, and Select Mesa points to room for more medical office and outpatient space around them. Medical sites see patients arriving early, some with walkers or wheelchairs, so walkways need to stay clear of debris, branches and trip hazards, and shade near entries really matters. Mesa Community College brings steady student traffic to nearby apartments, restaurants and shops too.

Many older shopping centers and office plazas here have aging irrigation, mature trees over parking lots and turf strips that drink more than they show. A walk-through sorts out what needs regular care, what needs repair and what is worth upgrading, such as converting thirsty grass to desert plantings. If the budget is tight, we can phase the work over a few seasons, starting with the frontage and entries people see first and leaving back lots and service areas for later.

Header photo: Richard N Horne, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)