Choosing
THE AIRPARK High-flying companies remain partial to an Airpark address
By Jimmy Magahern
C
ompanies choose to set up headquarters in the Scottsdale Airpark area for plenty of reasons. Prestige, for one. In a city where the hot ZIP code is always changing, the airpark section of North Scottsdale is still a prime location for restaurants, shopping and luxury services. It’s also relatively affordable. Compared with other preferred business locations like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Boston, the combined cost of building lease payments, employee payroll and property taxes runs at least $2 million to $3 million per year less in the Airpark, according to the Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce. But perhaps the company with the best reason for relocating the Airpark area is the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Founded in the early ‘70s as, originally, a mobile surgical unit for another cryonics organization in the San Francisco Bay area, Alcor has since grown to become the world’s largest provider of cryopreservation services, with more than 1,000 members signed up to be preserved in liquid nitrogen upon their passing with the hope of being revived in the future, when new medical techniques may be developed to cure now fatal diseases or conditions. That future couldn’t be guaranteed,
however, as long as the company operated in earthquake-prone California. So in 1994, Alcor moved from its previous facility in Riverside, a city with a 99.47 percent chance of experiencing a major earthquake over the next 50 years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, to Scottsdale, where the earthquake risk is only 11 percent. The last time Scottsdale felt any earth move, the USGS says, was in 1974, when a small 2.5 magnitude quake occurred 30 miles away. “California is not an ideal location when you have to care for cryopreservation clients,” says Max More, Alcor’s CEO since 2011 and a member (he’s signed up to have his head neuropreserved) since 1986. “We have to think very long-term. Unlike a lot of companies, we’re going to be storing our patients for many decades, and having big earthquakes nearby is not a good thing. So we spent quite a lot of time searching for a place that’s very stable and that doesn’t have a lot of natural disasters, and we settled on the Scottsdale Airpark. It’s incredibly stable, it doesn’t have earthquakes, it doesn’t have hurricanes, it doesn’t have tornadoes. We have the occasional haboob,” More adds, with a chuckle, “but that’s not really a big deal.”
Alcor also liked the Airpark for its proximity to the Scottsdale Airport, a big plus in a field where time is of the essence. Cryonics patients are placed into cargo containers within minutes of being declared legally dead, then must be delivered quickly to Alcor’s facility to prevent any cell damage should they eventually be revived. “Just as it is with people who are donating organs,” More explains, “it’s critical how much time is involved in getting them here to perform procedures.” It helps that Alcor’s response team can fly in and out of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, which ranks consistently in the top 10 U.S. airports with the lowest number of annual flight delays, More adds. “But for some of our members, if they have the extra money, they can actually get a charter flight directly into the Scottsdale Airport, which is literally minutes up the road from us.”
Jet Set
Of course, being close to the Scottsdale Airport is a benefit for some living bodies as well. “We have offices in 16 different states, so it’s pretty convenient to be able to hop in a plane and run over to an office and come back in the same day,” says Matt …continues on page 20 August 2015 Scottsdale Airpark News | 19