Brief Summary:
Barney Farms illustrates both the importance of good planning and the need for plans to adapt when circumstances or our understanding of circumstances change. The property was rezoned from farming to industrial decades ago in hopes of attracting jobs. But, over time, multiple studies showed Queen Creek had far more industrial land than the market could support. Despite that evidence, changing the plan back to residential took roughly 16+ years because of General Plan expectations, airport concerns, and resistance to revisiting earlier assumptions. That change is still a work in progress 24+ years later. Eventually, updated studies and airport policies allowed Barney Farms to become the residential community it is today. The lesson is not that zoning and planning are bad, but that regulations should provide stability without making sensible change unnecessarily difficult. Good planning requires balance between long-term vision and the flexibility to respond to reality.
Barney Farms Planning History Here
Related: The Importance of Both Planning and Adapting
2014 Shane Krauser Interview Talking About Barney Farms Zoning History
Newell Barney bought raw desert in Queen Creek, Arizona in 1948 and turned it into a beautiful farm. In the late 80's/early 90's new residential development was many miles and decades away, just starting to pick up steam in Gilbert. Queen Creek had just incorporated and become a brand new town. Newell, my Dad, and the new Mayor Mark Schnepf came up with a strategy: Let's rezone this farm to industrial so we can attract jobs out this way. They looked at it like an experiment: "If it doesn't work out, we can always rezone it back."
In 2002 I began working with my Dad. The first thing he did was to pull out a map of Newell's Farm and suggest: hey, this industrial thing isn't really working out, let's go talk to the town about rezoning it back to residential. However, a few things had changed since that earlier conversation about rezoning it back if it didn't work out. By now, there was a new mayor and new council who had not been around for those early plans and ideas. Arizona had adopted "Growing Smarter" legislation in 1998 that required cities to create a General Plan. Queen Creek already had an area plan from when it incorporated, but it adopted its first General Plan in 2002. That was the same year my Dad suggested we should go and change it. Not ideal timing, in hindsight. Many people put a lot of work and pride into that general plan and understandably wouldn't want to see it changed, definitely not that soon. But, we had been living with that land and the market reality of industrial for a long time, so for us there wasn't anything new. Just reality.
Phoenix Mesa Gateway Airport had since converted from military to civilian. Overflight considerations for the airport absolutely factor into this story. Even though the governing Part 150 map said residential was allowed on most of our farm, out of an abundance of caution, the airport took an expansive and rigid policy that prohibited our farm from having residential. That position would eventually change in 2016 when, with strong encouragement from me, they did an updated noise study and revised their overflight study and noise policy to modern flight and noise data. After that, most of our farm was removed from the residential restriction.
To make the airport consideration more personal and real world understandable, this 2014 video looks at details of the airport and overflight noise. In 2023 we bought a home in Morrison Ranch near Recker and Warner. As you watch that video, you'll see that is about as close as you can get to the end of the runway with a home. Barney Farms is around 3-4 miles from the runway on the south side. Our home is 1.5 miles away in a straight line off the end of the runway on the north side. Now, with several years of very direct experience living twice as close to the runway as Barney Farms and planes flying overhead, I can say what I said in that 2014 video with far more conviction: When you buy a home near an airport, you know what you are getting into, and it isn't a problem.
During those years from 2002 to 2016 (14 years), airport considerations aside, Queen Creek felt adamant that the town needed our farm to remain industrial so they could preserve the economic development and job creation potential. Town leadership in a young and growing town was feeling a lot of pressure to do what they felt was the right thing for the future of the Town. This was the 2000s and Queen Creek was just at the beginning of a huge wave of growth coming their way. Of course they needed to be thoughtful about what that would mean. They knew that having the town be more than just a residential bedroom community was part of what they needed to think about. They just didn't know how to define that in terms of scale and market reality. My Dad and I had the benefit of experience being part of similar growth cycles in Mesa and Gilbert, and to a lesser degree, Chandler and Tempe. But, all of this was very new territory for Queen Creek leadership. So, absent good data and clarity about the future, and with the best of intentions at heart, they felt the need to preserve what in hindsight proved to be too much industrial land. In the early 2010's, I made this video speaking to the employment land preservation issue.
During that time, to help bring good data and analysis to the question, I produced two different studies from credible economic analysts. A third one was created by ULI and East Valley Partnership. All of them produced similar conclusions and made it clear that Queen Creek had far more industrial land allocated than they could actually absorb. One of the biggest issues is that Queen Creek doesn't live in a vacuum. The City of Mesa to its north has upwards of 8,000-10,000 acres of industrial land with better access to freeways. Gilbert also factors into that mix. That significantly limits the potential for Queen Creek industrial land to compete and absorb. Like I described above, we were holding our land off the market for what the town perceived as the good of the public. They thought they were doing the right thing for good reasons. But, it wasn't actually doing them any good. And, all the data indicated that was not going to change over time. As a footnote to that, in 2026 we are able to look back and validate through market experience the merit of the data we saw in those studies.
So, the original plan was just hurting all of us, the town, the community, and us the property owners. Over time, new leadership joined Town Council and new staff came on board bringing a fresh willingness to revisit old assumptions. As part of that, the town eventually did their own study in around 2013 that validated the same conclusions of the prior three. By 2016, with the benefit of the town's study and the airport updating their overflight maps, we were finally able to begin updating the General Plan and rezoning to the master-planned residential community we have there today. It took a few more years past that to get all the approvals in place for us to go to market.
16+ years had passed since my Dad and I sat down to "change back" the zoning experiment from nearly 30+ years prior. Now, in 2026, I still have about 40 acres of industrial left just north of Frontier Family Park. We continue the conversation about how the plans from decades ago might still need to change to be more appropriate for evolving market conditions, new surrounding uses (like the new Frontier Family Park to the south), and future needs.
So, as of 2026, I am now 24+ years into the Barney Farms Plan, the family is coming up on 40 years, nearly 80 years of farming. I have much more detail on that history here. Those were challenging years for us. It made me do a lot of thinking about the proper role of government, the origins and purpose of zoning, and many of the other ideas I post online with my web sites Pendulum Balance and Righteous Dominion.
Does all that mean that zoning and general plans should not happen? Of course not! Good planning should happen! As much as I talk about caution against too much government, I also talk about the importance of good government and partnering for the good of future generations. I have pushed back on ideas that would undermine good planning and this critical need for city, community, and developer to collaborate as partners.
But, all this does suggest we ask the question: Should it have been this hard—24+ years hard in my case—to change and adapt when market conditions and reality suggested a long time ago they should? Being that hard to change doesn't just hurt property owners. A regulatory environment that makes it too hard to get new projects approved, while not the only contributing factor, certainly contributes to the housing affordability crisis we now have. Supply and demand economics really are a real thing. Balance is always the foundational theme of everything I write. Balance should be at the core of this issue. Enough regulation to do it right, but not so much that we hurt us all by stifling the very development and progress we all really need.
Maybe it should be hard to change plans? But, maybe it just shouldn't be this hard?
2026