Earlier columns delved into our fair city in this decade and its role in World War II. Here are more images from the decade. Most are thanks to the McCulloch Bros. Collection at the ASU Archives or Brad Hall's archive (click for a larger view):
First Avenue looking northwest toward the Title and Trust Building (now the Orpheum Lofts).
First Avenue and Monroe in 1947.
Inside the famous Saratoga Cafe at Central and Washington.
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This is one of those weaponized words whose meaning is made murky by activists. It often means low-income housing. It doesn't mean I am entitled to afford a place on Sunset Cliffs in San Diego making low pay in "sunshine dollars." This is complicated issue.
So first, some definitions. According to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), "Families who pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing are considered cost burdened and may have difficulty affording necessities such as food, clothing, transportation and medical care. An estimated 12 million renter and homeowner households now pay more than 50 percent of their annual incomes for housing. A family with one full-time worker earning the minimum wage cannot afford the local fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the United States."
A more comprehensive view comes from the Center for Neighborhood Technology's H+T Index, which captures housing plus transportation affordability. Metro Phoenix's H+T costs average 49%, vs. a 68% national average and 46% in pricey Seattle and 55% in San Diego. The research center states, "The traditional measure of affordability recommends that housing cost no more than 30% of household income...However, that benchmark fails to take into account transportation costs, which are typically a household’s second-largest expenditure. When transportation costs are factored into the equation, the number of affordable neighborhoods drops to 26% (nationally).
The National Low Income Housing Coalition's annual Out of Reach report drills deeper. For example, to afford central Phoenix's 85003 ZIP Code requires an average hourly wage of $20.38 for a two-bedroom apartment. Maryvale takes $17.69 an hour (working full time). The once middle-class south Scottsdale's 85257 takes $23.08.
Now we're getting close to the problem in metro Phoenix.
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When I was a little boy, I rode the bus with my grandmother. We would board around Central Avenue and Cypress Street, riding downtown to shop. Such excursions were rare, to be sure. This daughter of the frontier loved to drive as much as she adored sliced bread, paper towels, and her "stories" (soap operas) on television.
In those days, the 1960s, buses were operated by a private company as Valley Transit. The city's surprisingly extensive streetcar system was a fading memory — cutbacks began in the Depression and the last dagger was a fire at the car barn in 1947. The replacement bus system was inadequate from the start.
In 1971, the city regained control of the system. Private ownership hadn't worked. Three years later, the Tico logo appeared on festively repainted Phoenix Transit buses. The mascot showed a sunny dot wearing a smile, sunglasses, and sombrero. It remained on Phoenix buses until the late 1980s.
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James Kwak has a new book that captures the zeitgeist of a Democratic Party that is trying to recreate a left-wing version of what the Republicans did in making itself an exclusively right-wing party. In Taking Back Our Party: Restoring the Democratic Legacy, he lays out our situation of inequality, business monopsonies, and complicit "third way" Democrats pioneered by Bill Clinton. Even Barack Obama bought a $12 million home on Martha's Vineyard.
Kwak writes:
And so, because this is a book about how to make things better, it’s a book about Democrats. It’s about how, in the wake of the Reagan Revolution, we latched onto the idea that a more modern, more sophisticated, more business-friendly Democratic Party could successfully compete for the White House. It’s about how this transformation, while paying off in victories in four of the past seven presidential elections (six if you go by the popular vote), has left us impotent in the face of growing inequality, even when in power, and incapable of making the case that we can help families struggling against economic insecurity and misfortune. And it’s about how a new Democratic Party, dedicated to a progressive economic agenda, can take up the challenge of ensuring a decent life for every American.
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are on board. So are numerous Democratic activists, AOC and "the squad." I'm sympathetic to many of their positions, but I have some misgivings.
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In 2010, Phoenix and Arizona were stuck in the worst (by most measures) bust since the Great Depression. Unemployment peaked at 10.9% in January statewide and 10.2% in metro Phoenix. Single-family housing starts in the metro area plunged from a monthly peak of 6,000 in 2004 to 854. Construction jobs fell from 183,000 in June 2006 to 81,000 in the summer of 2010. Phoenix was a national epicenter of the housing crash.
It was an eerie time. Freeways that had been clogged with tradesmen's pickup trucks were noticeably empty.
Now, nearly a decade later, the economy has recovered. Metro Phoenix joblessness was 4.1% in October, higher than the 3.6% nationally but still a marked improvement. Building permits clawed out of the 2009 trough but are still at levels of the early 1990s.
Population — the holy of holies worshipped by the local-yokel boosters — bounced back. After falling from 2008 to 2010, it rose by 653,000 by 2018 in the metro area. A much ballyhooed snapshot had the city itself the fastest-growing in the United States from 2017 to 2018. But the percentage rate of change looks to be slower this decade than the 2000s or the record 1990s.
True, the decade doesn't officially end until a year from now. But the "twenties" begin in the popular imagination this New Year's. So let's take stock of the "teens":
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A new report from the Brookings Institution highlights how "Superstar Cities" — Boston, Seattle, San Diego, San Francisco and Silicon Valley — captured nine out of 10 jobs at the headwaters of advanced industries from 2005 to 2017. (See the coverage here and here). And it offers an ambitious plan to spread tech centers to "loser cities" in what is mostly considered flyover country.
An interesting footnote: One of the authors of the Brookings study is my friend Mark Muro, who worked at the Morrison Institute at ASU in the early 2000s.
One can't argue with this reality, particularly set against rising inequality and four decades of mergers that took away the economic crown jewels of hundreds of American cities. But some context is also necessary. In addition to these headwinds, many of the "loser cities" made their own fate.
And I'm not talking about Detroit or Cleveland. A better example can be found in Phoenix. Despite being the nation's fifth-largest city and 13th largest metropolitan area, Phoenix punches well below its weight. And no outside force has done this to Phoenix as much as Phoenix has done it to itself.
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In 1967, my mother arranged for me, my friend Billy Warren, and my grandmother to spend much of the summer in Payson. It had not been connected to the outside world by a paved highway for even a decade. The population was around 1,500 and it was clustered around a real tiny town, the enchanting massif of the Mogollon Rim towering to the north above the forest. I was 10.
We lived in a rented house on what's now called Frontier Street, a few blocks west of Arizona 87 (the Beeline Highway). Like almost everything in town, it was built of wood. An early look around was a disappointment to this callow city kid: No trains, no chain restaurants, no easy biking to parks or soda fountains. I don't recall having television, either. Payson revolved around the two-lane highway, with logging trucks rumbling by and everything locally owned. At night, the darkness was primeval under the vault of billions of stars.
The fear of boredom didn't last more than 24 hours at most. The volunteer fire department had a new station a block south, a place to hang around, admire the apparatus, and talk to the firefighters. I got a library card and quickly became a darling of the librarians by being a bibliophile and checking out books every few days.
But the big show was outside.
Both Billy and I were in Scouts — Camp Geronimo was north of Payson — so my grandmother had no concerns about us spending most of the day wandering around the forest. And we did, armed with canteens, pocket knives and compass. She trusted our good sense and caution. In those days, child abductions were rare. Today, Arizona has 909 open cases of missing persons, many children.
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When I was about three, my family was driving from Tucson to Phoenix in those pre-Interstate times. I have three vivid memories. The first is the restaurant where we ate breakfast; it had ancient double doors with windows behind ancient double screens. The second is the fierce rainstorm that cut visibility severely, almost the desert version of a whiteout. We headed out of Coolidge, my mother behind the wheel, me between her and my grandmother. No other cars were on the two-lane road.
My third memory is of a vast torrent of fast-moving latte-colored water that suddenly appeared in front of us.
I'm sure it wasn't as wide or as biblical as I recall it. I had never seen water in a river before! But what was undeniable is that the bridge had washed out — perhaps at the Gila River — and only my mother's caution, slow speed, and fighter-pilot reflexes prevented our deaths.
As I write now, searchers are still trying to find six-year-old Willa Rawlings, lost when her father's "military-like truck" was swept away in flooding Tonto Creek. The bodies of her brother and cousin, both five, were found Saturday. Only Willa's shoe has been recovered. Her parents escaped.
The Republic's Laurie Roberts hit the right notes of sympathy and bafflement — that the driver would try to cross the flooded creek, and that the Legislature in its low-tax religion has failed to build a bridge. Yet I suspect little will change. Especially on the common-sense front, for bridges can be overwhelmed as anyone knows who remembers Scottsdale's comic attempts to span Indian Bend Wash in the 1970s.
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