Those towering apartment buildings currently under construction on Roosevelt Row celebrated a couple big milestones this week: The developers began leasing spaces to tenants on Monday, and the first segment of its building process concluded yesterday with a "topping out" ceremony.
Late last month, the high-end housing complex was also christened with its official name: Roosevelt Point.
Concord Eastridge and EdR, the two local real-estate developers behind the $52 million project, recently completed building the internal framework and internal structures of the two towers that make up Roosevelt Point. And -- as is tradition in the construction business -- the companies marked the "topping out" of their joint project during a special celebration on Wednesday.
Scheduled to open next summer, the monolithic apartment complex (which is located near Roosevelt and Fourth streets) is aimed at students from ASU's downtown campus and other nearby colleges, as well as the 20something urbanites.
And now that it has a name and is past a certain point in its construction process, employees at Roosevelt Point's new leasing office at the nearby Arizona Center have begun marketing the upscale project to the college crowd and getting members of their target audience interested in signing a lease.
But while Roosevelt Point will boast a total of 326 different apartments in both of its buildings, potential tenants will instead rent individual rooms on a per-person basis.
According to its employees, Roosevelt Point will be run almost like a dormitory where the staff will lease out each of the rooms inside the variety of furnished and unfurnished apartments being offered at the complex, ranging in size from two to four bedrooms. (Studios and one-bedroom apartments will also be available and are exempt.)
Each tenant will also get their own bathroom and is responsible for paying their portion of the rent. While their bedrooms are private, they can also access common areas like the kitchen and living room. Roosevelt Point's rental situation is similar in many respects to other high-end student housing like The Vue near ASU's Tempe campus, which lease individual bedrooms in its apartments.
Here's the rub: Roosevelt Point residents could possibly wind up shacking up with total strangers in the same apartment. Per the staff in its rental office, potential tenants who have friends, relatives, or significant others who'd like to be roommates can all live in the same apartment, as long everyone gets through the leasing process (including a credit check) and has the financial wherewithal.
Those who are rolling solo, however, will fill out a questionnaire that Roosevelt Point's rental staff will use to match up compatible people as roommates. They will also have a preference toward matching tenants of the same gender.
And if you wind up hating you like your roomie (either because they're slobbish or keep you up with their lane-night Call of Duty death match sessions) the staff can ultimately can match you with another person.
One Roosevelt Point employee, who declined to give his name, says that's where comparisons between their apartments and a typical ASU dorm end.
"We're not going to be hovering over you, telling you what to do and not to do or whatever," There's no curfew, you can come and go as you please, and do your own thing. It's a normal apartment complex, it just so happens that we're renting it out by the room."
