A limited liability company based in Wilmington, Delaware is purchasing a two-story structure in downtown Tucson as part of a larger plan to build multi-family housing.
The building is located at 1010 E. 10th Street and has for years served as the administrative home to the Tucson Unified School District. The purchase price for the structure, officially called the Robert D. Morrow Education Center, is around $17.5 million.
In agreeing to that price, members of the TUSD’s Governing Board have also endeavored to purchase the service annex building that is a part of the main campus of the University of Arizona.
That two-story structure is located at 220 W. Sixth Street, roughly a mile to the northwest of the current TUSD headquarters.
For several months reports have indicated that TUSD was open to selling its long-time administrative headquarters, popularly known as the “1010,” and in so doing avoiding having to take on an estimated $7.4 million in upgrades for a structure that is at least 60 years old.
An earlier bid for the building by the Chicago-based Up from Campus Properties, a national developer of student housing, went nowhere.
The Tenth Street property is roughly a mile to the south of the main University of Arizona campus, in a part of the city that has witnessed a boom in new housing designed to appeal to the roughly 51,000 students attending the school.
By Garry Boulard
