Rendering courtesy Civica Development

Imagine a bustling downtown street corner where professors, students, doctors, biotech geniuses and hedge fund managers brush by each other on their way to work or dinner. Residents debate the French philosophies of Voltaire versus Jean-Jacques Rousseau over coffee at an outdoor café.

This is not Tempe’s Mill Avenue, nor is it Roosevelt Street in Phoenix. Give up?

It’s Goodyear at the intersection of Yuma Road and Estrella Parkway.

Stop laughing, because West Valley developer Jack Rose says it can happen. He’s executing a series of chess moves to bring it to life – starting with a 242-acre spring training baseball complex for the Cleveland Indians in downtown Goodyear.

The stadium and its retail space is being developed by Goodyear Baseball, a partnership between Rose’s outfit, Civica Development, and JMI Sports, whose principals were involved in San Diego’s Petco Park.

This month, his team will release new renderings for the $368 million project. They include a five-story parking garage, a top-shelf hotel, a boutique hotel, offices and residential space above retail stores. Crews were expected to finish laying utility lines, pouring concrete footings for foundations, and molding walls for elevator shafts by the end of February.

“You need some excitement, something to anchor it all, to kick things off,” Rose says. “This is crucial for being the spark that really starts downtown Goodyear.”

The vision Rose has for Goodyear is not unlike his plans for the rest of his 42 projects, which are sprinkled throughout the West Valley between 99th and 403rd avenues. But to understand where Rose wants to take the West Valley, one has to understand where he is coming from.

The Rose family arrived in Arizona in 1928 from Michigan. Members had immigrated there after fleeing the potato famine in Ireland. They homesteaded on a hunk of land near 115th Avenue and Hatfield Road and started a dairy farm. (Today, it is a massive sand-and-gravel operation that the family owns and operates with Vulcan Materials.)

Jack Rose’s first job was hoeing cotton in the blazing Arizona heat for $1.75 an hour.

“But I realized after doing that for a few summers that working in the agricultural industry is very difficult,” he recalls. “It’s certainly, in the long run, not very profitable. So I decided to get an education.”

In a family of diesel mechanics, truck drivers and missionaries, he was the kid with a political science degree from Yale, a law degree from Harvard and a Filipino wife who works as a nurse. (Rose also took time off from college to run for and win a seat on the Mojave County Board of Supervisors at age 21.)

Rose, 45, credits his experiences living back East as the driving force behind his vision for the West Valley: fewer cars and more urban density to lure the “creative class.”

“We’re in a dominant free-market philosophy in this state, so the market is going to determine what happens out there,” Rose says. “We’re going to try and nudge it as far as we can in that new direction by providing alternatives.”

To do this, Rose is bringing in a new bank, new colleges and venture capital to give the region its own identity.

He is the principal shareholder in West Valley National Bank. It received $25 million in startup capital from 150 local investors such as Bill Bidwill, Charles Barkley and Cleveland Indians owner Larry Dolan.

Rose also helped lure new schools here: Franklin Pierce University, a liberal arts college in New Hampshire; University of the Incarnate Word, a Catholic college from San Antonio, Texas; Saint Francis University from Joliet, Illinois; and two college prep schools to be run by UIW and the Catholic Diocese.

“Jack Rose is doing a lot for this part of the Valley,” Goodyear Mayor Jim Cavanaugh says. “He doesn’t limit his efforts to Goodyear. He’s a very positive force in our development, and his actions alone will impact citizens of the future by the thousands.”

Rose says Goodyear’s baseball stadium is a big step toward bucking the West Valley’s development trend.

“I really want to see an intensely local community with local businesses,” he says. “Nothing against Bank of America or Wal-Mart, but they’re not the people who build sustainable, lasting and most importantly, prosperous communities. All of these things we’re talking about – great architecture, art, great restaurants – you can’t have that without prosperity. If everyone’s making $15,000 a year, it’s not going to be an attractive community.”