Big Surf Is Becoming a Warehouse. Is That Really Progress?

The Arizona Republic confirmed this week what’s rising on the old Big Surf Waterpark site in Tempe: a 694,000-square-foot industrial park, three buildings ranging from 190,000 to 259,000 square feet, with no tenants named yet. Layton Construction broke ground back in February 2025. The 36-acre site sat vacant for years after Big Surf was demolished in 2021.

America’s First Wave Pool Deserved a Better Ending

Big Surf wasn’t just another Valley attraction. It opened in 1969 as the first wave pool in the country, drew families for 40 years, and earned a spot as a historic mechanical engineering landmark for pioneering inland surfing in North America. Generations of kids grew up jumping those waves. That’s the kind of place that becomes part of a city’s identity, not just a line item on a property tax roll.

Property Rights Aren’t the Same as Good Judgment

The new owners have every legal right to build what they’re building. Nobody disputes that. Zoning allows it, the market wants warehouse space near the freeway, and that’s their call to make. But having the right to do something and it being the right thing to do for a community are two different questions. Trading an iconic, fun place families actually used for an unnamed industrial park isn’t a progress story. It’s a land-use story with a nostalgia problem attached.

What “Progress” Should Actually Mean

Call it inevitable, call it the market at work, but don’t call it progress. Progress means a community ends up with something better than what it had. Three speculative industrial buildings with no announced tenants and no opening date isn’t obviously better than a place where families spent their summers for four decades. It might turn out fine for Tempe’s tax base. It’s still a downgrade for anyone who actually loved Big Surf.

This is the same tension playing out across the Valley right now, warehouses and apartment complexes replacing the places that gave neighborhoods their character. Big Surf is just the latest, and most visible, example of what gets lost when property rights and public sentiment point in opposite directions.