Rogue Columnist

Arizona ends and odds

• The Arizona Republic continues to tiptoe around the water issue. Most recent is a story about the uneven water availability for cities in metropolitan Phoenix. A day before, the paper ran a piece headlined "Buckeye is the nation's fastest growing city. But it doesn't have the water to keep it up."

Where to begin? First, Buckeye is not a city except on legalistic paper. It is a far-flung collection of real-estate ventures ("master-planned communities") connected by wide highways. Buckeye has an astounding 393 square miles of area for 74,000 people. As James Howard Kunstler puts it, "the matrix of single-family home subdivisions, arterial highways and freeways, chain stores, junk food dispensaries, and the ubiquitous wilderness of free parking — the last of these implying just one insidious side-effect of this template for living: mandatory motoring."

By contrast, the city of Phoenix consists of 519 square miles and 1.7 million people — that's a city. Buckeye, once tiny stop on the Southern Pacific Railroad was never meant to be a "city."

But the big enchilada is that Arizona doesn't have the water to continue unlimited sprawl. Who will tell the people? Who will stop the Real-Estate Industrial Complex?

• Phoenix opened the "Grand Canalscape" trail along 12 miles of the Grand Canal from Interstate 17 to Tempe. Mayor Kate Gallego said, “People are surprised when I tell them that Phoenix has more canal miles than Venice or Amsterdam. Today we are integrating the canals into our communities to improve neighborhood access, add new public art spaces and contribute to a healthier Phoenix by introducing them as a recreational amenity."

The Grand Canal, one of the original legacies of the Hohokam, once looked like the photo above. The new "safe, convenient route for bicyclists and pedestrians" is a sun-blasted emptiness. Phoenicians don't even know what they lost. Aside from road-widening, the ministrations of the Salt River Project is the biggest killer of Phoenix's once-abundant canopy of shade trees. And more sprawl is not worth the destruction of even one of those trees, much less tens of thousands. In the meantime, enjoy your skin cancer and heat exhaustion. It's heartbreaking to imagine a shaded canal, even in stretches. But, no.

The road ahead

Oh, the temptation to put up another photo gallery of old Phoenix and let the traffic soar. But duty obliges me to put my shoulder to the task of commenting on our moment.

Forget a Democratic frontrunner. It's too early. I also know that some of you fervently want Bernie Sanders to win the nomination. Were the stakes for the republic and the planet not so enormous, I'd like to see it. When he got creamed, you would still believe — "He is the one!" — and make bitter excuses. But at least the zombie lies about how he wuz robbed in 2016 and would have triumphed if not for the eeevil DNC could finally expire.

America is not Seattle. Sanders can't win a general election. The angry shtick he honed on the Thom Hartmann radio program won't win a single swing-state vote that Hillary Clinton didn't carry and will alienate many that she did. He's not even a member of the Democratic Party and elides over the need for commanding Democratic majorities in the House and Senate to enact his sweeping agenda.

I generally agree with Sanders on many points. But he's not capable of winning. The American electorate is not me.

HRC lost the Electoral College in 2016 because of fewer than 80,000 votes in three Midwestern states. She won the popular vote by 3 million. And all this was in spite of Kremlin meddling, journalistic malpractice, vote suppression, Jill Stein, the Susan Sarandon cohort, and tepid support toward the end of the contest by Sanders. So few votes sealed our fate.

More Phoenix in the '50s & '60s

Last week's gallery of the 1940s was so wildly popular, let's continue on a theme. For readers, I produced columns on Phoenix in the 1950s and the 1960s. I invite you to read them, for they provide important context and history of the photos that follow (images that didn't make the original decade columns).

Enjoy! (Click on image to see a larger version):

Overhead and in color, Phoenix in 1956. In the lower part of the photo are the Southern Pacific tracks and the Warehouse District. In the middle-left is Phoenix Union High School, including Montgomery Stadium. Camelback is bare of any houses, a situation that won't last long.

Roosevelt Row was decades in the future when Birch's Drugs was snapped in 1953. It was part of a larger commercial strip along east Roosevelt and easily walkable from the Evans-Churchill and Garfield neighborhoods.

Another walkable spot. Tenth Street and McDowell, part of the "Miracle Mile" commercial district in the 1950s.

The northwest corner of Indian School and Central shows A.J. Bayless, Bekins moving and storage, and Carnation Dairy's restaurant, soda fountain, and main processing plant. It's 1957.

More Phoenix in the 1940s

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.

Affordable housing

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.

Tico days

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.

Democratic magical thinking

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.

Phoenix in the 'teens'

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":