Phoenix, Dubai and other heat dreams

On the ground in Phoenix, and sometimes green sprouts arise even amid the ugliness of the cityscape and thuggingness of the politics. A woman on a walker watched me struggle into CVS; on the way out, she said, "I've been praying for you." It keeps me aloft. Tuesday night saw an overflow crowd at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore for the launch of my new mystery/suspense novel, The Pain Nurse. Today I was on KJZZ with Steve Goldstein, where my friend Grady Gammage and I reprised our good cop/bad cop routine with Phoenix in the interrogation room (guess who plays bad cop).

I got to read the Arizona Republic on blessed, relaxing paper this morning, a welcome break from the Information Center. Today's Phoenix Laff Riot is Mayor Phil Gordon concluding some kind of economic partnership with Dubai. It's hard to know where to begin with what's wrong with this deeply unserious distraction. For one thing, rhetoric about solar power, sustainability, etc. is a joke considering Phoenix is a basket case in all categories. It let solar research and enterprise get away after the 1950s and now has nothing to offer the Mideast kingdom, other than a model of worst practices. Meanwhile, Dubai is in a deep recession, partly caused by overbuilding. So the benefit is, what...?

Phoenix had a slam-dunk in the boom years if it had exploited the winning of T-Gen and the beginning of the downtown biomedical center to build it out as a major biomed hub, including medical, nursing and pharma schools, research, a hospital, pharmaceutical companies and biotech startups. It failed to do this. Similarly, it was easy pickens to lure California's bio-medical manufacturing sector to Phoenix, just the kind of blue-collar tech jobs that had once been a bulwark here. Nothing was done. Phoenix should be focused on California and the Far East, as well as fixing its schools, etc. etc. But, instead, Dubai.

Meanwhile, it's sickly fascinating to all who wish newspapers well to see how much crap is in the paper, stuff that screams "don't read me." One must read some stories as we did Pravda in Soviet days, to try to sift the small hints of truth amid the propaganda and muddle. Amazing what gets hardly any play -- a guy who ran a red light in his pickup truck (any bets on whether it was jacked up?) and killed five people. He received a year in the county jail. This was a paragraph from the AP, on the local front. Now here's a real story, considering the red-light/speed camera "critics" vowing to "fight on," even as their overheated rhetoric came before some poor fool decided to lethally open fire on a camera worker. Nope. No news here. Move along. And, "Phoenix gets failing grade for ozone pollution" -- a brief. What gets the play? "Reds facility is coming along." And they wonder why readers are going away.

I received a hopeful message from a Phoenix friend: "At least you're here for the good weather." Thou sayest. It's so damned hot already I am burning my hands on the car door. The good news about the depression here -- house prices down 50 percent, etc. -- much less traffic.

Comments

[anonymous]

As far as biomedical jobs are concerned, Phoenix is not only too late to the game but never had the right conditions to nurture that particular seed. Medicine will always be highly correlated with government spending. You would be shocked to learn how many graduates with biotech research credentials have to retrain to get employed.

My favorite path to a sustainable industry is via art -- or rather entertainment based on the expression of our cultural diversity and individual creativity. It might also tie into one of Phoenix's strongest industries. Give me a cell phone that can smell....

[Emil Pulsifer]

I'm almost out of online time, but one brief point: Phoenix house prices are actually substantially UP from 2003 -- enough to make them a great investment for anyone who actually bought them back then. It's only relative to the top of the boom in 2005 that they are down.

[soleri]

I heard part of the "debate" between you and Gammage. It's a bit discouraging to hear someone as bright and knowledgeable as him extolling Phoenix's "low-carbon footprint", as if there were something redeeming about being the nation's most autocentric city. To criticize Phoenix's growth pattern is not primarily an environmental argument but a human one. When people drive everywhere, including the corner supermarket, cities no longer fulfill a core function, which is social. That's why this is such a lonely and dispiriting place. Human encounters are minimized by the necessity of driving everywhere.

Of course, the environmental argument does loom large. It has become virtual religious dogma in a place like this that there is no environment beyond the property we buy and sell. That argument explains our devalued landscape, which is not only ugly but expensive to maintain. Many citizens simply abandon the effort and let an anarchy of litter and weeds reclaim front yards and empty lots. The environment here is gradually being reclaimed by forces not only hostile to civilization but to a nature that is complex in its interdependence.

Gammage must see the cracks in this edifice if only to consider how people will create enough wealth do the necessary repair work. The transportaton system is hugely expensive, and car ownership is, after housing, the most expensive item in any citizen's budget. Taxes may be low now but at some point, they will have to go up to pay for necessary maintenance.

I was born here. I've lived here most of my long life. I have to go back to my Sunnyslope childhood to remember a cityscape as impoverished as this one is now. Worse, the city has lost its own connection to its original raison d'être: agriculture. So, while we're reverting economically to a rougher era, we're also exacerbating the tension between nature and a sustainable economy. This cannot last over time. Maybe that's why Mayor Gordon wants a petro/techno-fix via Dubai. What else are we going to do except imagine deus-ex-machina solutions for a city that forfeited its best possibilities for cheap success?

[Derek Neighbors]

I saw the article in the Republic and just stopped reading. I tossed the paper in the trash. Shame we couldn't do the same with the mayor. Do enjoy the weather!

[Jim McPherson]

Hi Jon,

I'm providing a link to our website story on Battelle's recent analysis of Arizona’s emerging bioscience sector. There's positive news to share (in addition to the challenges).

[anonymous]

I just love facts. On the Battelle website http://www.battelle.org/spotlight/6-18-08award.aspx it says "Total U.S. employment in the biosciences reached 1.3 million in 2006, up from 1.2 million in 2004.... U.S. higher education institutions awarded more than 143,000 bioscience-related degrees in the 2006 academic year."

That means that if the yearly output of degrees is relatively constant, roughly two-thirds of those who study bioscience in college won't get employed in their field.

Next question, is this any better than other technical field? The anti-science mood in this country could be related to the lack of rewards for scientific effort.

[Emil Pulsifer]

I may finally have figured out where Gordon is coming from on this Dubai thing. It was actually a comment of Mr. Talton's that triggered the connection:

"...if the economy really does revive, it will put us back on the path of rising energy prices..."

Well, exactly where does that leave petrodollar investors like Dubai? Flush with more cash than they can spend or know what to do with.

Mr. Drysdale, er, Gordon, just wants to make sure they throw some of it our way. And of course, it's Phoenix, so that means -- you guessed it -- real-estate development projects. Because after all is said and done, land isn't going to get any cheaper (as long as more and more dollars, not to mention individuals, are competing for it), so it might even be a good investment.

Dubai, then, is to be Phoenix's angel, or sugar daddy, or whatever you want to call it, when the local economy won't quite support it. And, so far at least, Gordon hasn't spent a lot of tax money (?) baiting the hook. He's a patient angler, he's picked out his stretch of creek, and now he has to hope that the fish are hungry...