# @downinnadesert on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/Db6m170EmC9
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/69746427-downinnadesert-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/abb898e62a.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-08-11T21:57:42.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Down In The Desert🌵 (@downinnadesert) — https://gondola.cc/downinnadesert

## Caption

He’s 89, he’s owned the house for 50 years, and it was built ten years before Arizona was a state.

The Louis Emerson House sits at Fourth and Pierce in downtown Phoenix, a 1902 Queen Anne on the city’s Historic Property Register. The Board of Regents went to court to take the lot for ASU’s new medical school headquarters. They offered Robert Young $990,000. Young said moving the house again would cost $2 to $3 million, and he’d already moved it once in 1990 to make room for the Arizona Center.

On July 17, ASU dropped the case. Young said he was blindsided, that there had been no recent talks, and that he’d been getting ready for a September hearing he believed he was going to win.

Country singer John Rich, now a Trump administration envoy for American landowners, says he saw the story online and called ASU President Michael Crow directly. Young credits Rich as a deciding factor and says the two talked twice before the news came. ASU hasn’t said what changed its mind. Preserve Phoenix had been working the case for months and a petition to save the house pulled nearly 12,000 signatures.

An 89-year-old kept his house. Who actually saved it?

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#Phoenix #Arizona #DowntownPhoenix #ArizonaHistory #DownInnaDesert

## Stats

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## Tags

arizonahistory, arizona, phoenix, downtownphoenix, downinnadesert

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