Tempe plans affordable housing, fire station at former Big Lots site

A former Big Lots property in Tempe could turn into a place where families live and firefighters answer their next emergency call.

The city plans to combine affordable housing and a fire station at 950 E. Baseline Road. Before construction can move forward, officials must work out how the two would share the property and how the housing will be funded.

“We need housing. We need public safety,” said Kyle Carman, Tempe’s interim fire chief.

Irma Hollamby Cain, Tempe’s deputy community health and human services director overseeing housing, said the need for a fire station encouraged the search for property.

The purchase was the city’s first use of its affordable housing bond, approved by voters in November 2024.

Finding available land in the area where the Tempe Fire Medical Rescue Department needed a station was a challenge, she said.

“The fact that we were able to find a property in the exact zone that fire needed to place a fire station was darn near miraculous,” Hollamby Cain said.

Initial assessments showed both uses could fit on the property, she said. The city is now determining whether the project can be built and financed, as well as how the housing and fire station would run alongside each other.

For the fire department, the location is important to reduce emergency response times.

Sharing a property with housing raises questions about firefighters needing secure access to their station and residents needing separate entrances and ways to come and go.

Carman said streets along the front and back of the property help provide separate access. Officials also need to determine how utilities would work among the two uses and expressed concerns about noise and traffic.

As for the housing side, Hollamby Cain said the city expects a future developer to seek federal low-income housing tax credits. That funding would help build on the city’s investment in the property.

She said income limits could be set at 60% or 80% of area median income, depending on the financing.

The developer would manage the apartments, rather than the city, Hollamby Cain said.

Jennifer Dangremond, Copa Health’s director of communications, said affordable housing projects require coordination between government agencies, developers and funding partners.

Although not involved in the Big Lots proposal, Copa Health’s partnership with Tempe on La Victoria Commons gives an example of the amount of work involved in bringing affordable housing forward.

Dangremond said working families struggle to find housing they can afford, while seniors living on Social Security have similar challenges.

“Generally speaking, what we’re seeing across the valley is seniors getting priced out of housing,” she said.

She also warned that the time spent on planning, zoning and permitting can increase development cost as work, materials and insurance become more expensive.

For the Big Lots property, the city’s feasibility study will help guide decisions about the design, financing and shared operations.

Hollamby Cain said Tempe is looking into other communities that have combined housing and fire stations to learn what worked and what did not.

“We can learn from all their wins and their losses and hopefully avoid their losses and incorporate their wins,” she said.

Addison Beal is a student at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

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