If Arizona was a 'clean slate', how would you do it the second time around?
This challenge, from commenter Rate Crimes, is too tempting to avoid. But it risks being the kind of temptation found in the bars of history at closing time: A pointless counterfactual fling that will end in regret or even worse. No place can be separated from its moment in history, the larger forces at work upon it, the larger-than-life people who mold it, and the masses of people who live there. Arizona and Phoenix were always going to be exactly what they are. Maybe.
Yet here's one imagination exercise: An Arizona with 2 million people, about the population of real-life New Mexico (rather than 6.6 million). Most live in relatively compact versions of Phoenix and Tucson. Every city and town in the state has maintained its distinct identity, look, feel. The larger cities have kept and enhanced key industries while drawing high-value, leading edge sectors proportionate to (or disproportionately favorable to) their population. Housing is a much smaller part of the economy. Smaller places especially have scalable local economies. Multiple universities, federal laboratories and a robust technology cluster are a draw for international talent. Incomes are higher than the national average, as in real-life Washington state or Colorado. Most people are literate and educated, engaged in the community, committed to preserving the environment, part of a vibrant two-party political system that veers to moderation whomever is in power. This outward-looking state is a major trade hub for Mexico and Latin America, comfortable with its Hispanic part, but largely insulated from a huge illegal alien influx by its high-end economy and the cohesion of its cities.
I could get even more specific about Phoenix.
Imagine a city of 100 square miles, densely populated in high-quality urban neighborhoods with abundant shade and grass, surrounded by all manner of agriculture. A larger version of itself in 1950. Yet it would have added two small but excellent universities, kept and improved its downtown, built an efficient transit system and maintained intercity passenger train service. Dig deeper and you'd find this city had saved the historic mansions north of McDowell along and adjacent to a shady Central Avenue, as well as reinvested in the priceless good-bones housing of the 1890s-1920s that existed all around the core, especially in the real-life desolate capital mall. The public schools would be some of the best in America. That would have ensured reinvestment and kept the middle-class and well-off close to the center, as even exists in real-life Charlotte. In addition to agriculture — still vital — Phoenix would be a center of some leading-edge technologies and have corporate headquarters downtown. It would be noted for its arts institutions. And its tolerance. All over the Valley, cities and towns are separated by agriculture and are vibrantly distinct. For example, Tempe is a compact university town with tech companies in the delightful, low-rise downtown (it would never do such a boneheaded thing as build a 40-story condo or a "lifestyle center").
I could go on, but you get the idea. This is a fool's errand. For a slew of reasons documented on this blog, that not only didn't happen, but probably could never have happened. Phoenix wouldn't be Portland or even Minneapolis. Arizona has become a national joke, a tragedy if one loves her, and if she pursues her current path the state will be a national disaster — not tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow. Sooner than most realize.
Another exercise: Where did things go off the rails and become not merely unsustainable, unpleasant and profaned by ugliness, but violently nutty? I'll offer a baker's dozen turning-point mistakes.
- Building the Central Arizona Project (sorry, Mom).
- Failing to use taxes to accurately "price" population growth, including its infrastructure costs, environmental damage, etc., and to enact stringent land-use and water protection laws.
- The wind sown by Barry Goldwater, Gene Pulliam and other Arizonans who played an outsize role in the formation of modern conservatism. It has become the whirlwind of Russell Pearce, "Nickel-Bag Joe" Arpaio, a know-nothing Legislature and, nationally, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and the tea party.
- Failing to invest in quality public schools and universities.
- Building the metro Phoenix freeway system as it exists.
- Allowing wild sprawl of low-density, car-dependent subdivisions far from city centers. Especially bad: "Master planned communities."
- Losing agriculture as a foundational building block of the human footprint in the Salt River Valley.
- Sameness. Take away God's handiwork, and the mass-produced newer parts of Flagstaff are indistinguishable from Surprise, Marana, etc.
- Failure to maintain the trajectory of a diversified, high-wage economy planted by Phoenix leaders in the 1950s.
- Tucson didn't become a Portland or an Austin.
- The death of the old stewards, who cared passionately and deeply about the state, and their replacement by real-estate playerz in north Scottsdale and Paradise Valley determined to use it up. The same is true of the loss of all real major headquarters.
- Building the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, upwind of Phoenix and a heavy water user, a monument to "growth" and California's exploitation of Arizona.
- The development of Scottsdale into the vampire squid which it has become.
Some say I'm too gloomy. That I should be more into solutions. You'll find that here. As an old EMT and paramedic, I'll augment that with some triage suggestions:
- Repeal SB 1070.
- Elect Terry Goddard governor.
- Throw out the Kook majority in the Legislature.
- Raise taxes on the rich and, if the Growth Machine ever revives, enact a real-estate transfer tax and a tax on long commutes.
- Stop all residential development outside existing urban footprints (and the extravagant planning maps of Buckeye, Surprise, Maricopa, et al, are not existing footprints). For one thing, there's not enough water.
- Establish a real state commerce department employing best practices to attract high-wage jobs.
- Build out the Phoenix Biosciences Campus on a speedy schedule to include a hospital, large med school, pharmacy school and private-sector research facilities. Add a full-court press to lure biomed manufacturing from California.
- Eliminate GPEC. Let the cities go their own ways.
- Fund the public schools and universities to compete at top levels.
- Establish real infill incentives along the light-rail line.
- Put a premium on shade, including enhancing and reclaiming the shady oases in central Phoenix.
- Reform the tax structure so cities aren't so dependent on sales taxes.
- Create a climate-change emergency plan now and begin acting by, for example, building intercity rail, commuter rail, light rail, streetcars and an integrated, easy-to-use transit system.
Still, anyone who's ever worked a "code" in the ER knows there's that moment, far from the ears of the family it will devastate, when you "call it." You've done all you can. The patient is lost.
Has Arizona reached the tipping point? I fear it has, and as a result faces a nasty reckoning. Things may be bad enough in the strongest parts of America if the white-right ever regains control, or even if the Obama strategy of accommodation and dawdling persists. For such a vulnerable and self-damaged place as Arizona....
I pray every day that I'm wrong, but today's sunny golf weather for the well-off and all the feel-good propaganda of the elites prove nothing.
When I was a kid a very long time ago, the "destiny" factor had already craned its smiley face above the serrated horizon. Phoenix was a great place and it was going to keep getting better and better. I recall those first moments of doubt in the late 60s when the growth began to seem more like a machine chewing up everything in its path. At that time, Tucson was the counterargument. It still had an intact downtown, a sense of history and tradition, and all those mountains - the "sky islands" - on its flanks. It was heaven.
Tucson relieved itself of much of its charm in the following decades. Today, it might as well be South Gilbert given its pastel stucco skin and suburban crudscape. But the locals fought for it despite the long odds. They even elected a slow-growth majority on the Tucson City Council in the 70s. But the growth machine outlasted them, and the rest is our all-too predictable history.
The counterfactuals are torture to ponder. They were never a real possibility given the obscene ease with which we threw it all away. I still have a few mementos from that time. My father tore down some of those Central Avenue mansions for the salvage rights. One of them was the Heard residence, Casa Blanca. Its replacement, Phoenix Towers, is an artifact itself. Those of us who care to remember should be on the historic registry, along with the quaint dreams of manifest destiny circa 1957.
History is exasperating because its lessons arrive after we broke the heirloom china in a drunken bacchanal. I still drive myself crazy thinking about losses that will always be losses. It's too late and always has been. We remember less to prevent future horrors than to console ourselves with imagination. It's not much but it's the best we can do.
Posted by: soleri | May 27, 2010 at 06:47 AM
This is Jon Talton at his best, in my opinion . . . and I've followed him for quite a while.
Now, what if each of us took on ONE of the initiatives he recommends?
For me, its electing Terry Goddard to put an adult in control and at least partially neutralize the Kookocracy. I promise to work hard for this.
Anybody else like this idea? There are many talkers but fewer do-ers out there.
Posted by: Jim Hamblin | May 27, 2010 at 09:17 PM
Is it just me, or does Mary Rose Wilcox make Bernie Madoff seem like a real nice, trustworthy guy? I pose this question here, because, with "leaders" like her in place here in the Valley of the Sun, I don't see much forward progress being made in Maricopa county. You can have a dozen baker's dozen of hopeful ideas to improve our valley, but it just seems to me that we have way more than our fair share of village idiots running this place. Tomorrow is my birthday and I should be looking forward to a happy day, but I have to be honest with all of you, I'm thinking of spending the day with my good friend Jack Daniels, and trying to forget that I live in this Godforsaken place. Jim, I was a "do-er" for twenty years. I tried, I really tried to convince all of South Phoenix that the key to the future of their youth was education and becoming a part of the new bilingual economy. Instead, they chose pregnancy, guns, Spanish only, isolation and Mary Rose Wilcox. I didn't give up. I was pushed out. Now, in a couple of years I will move up to my place in the mountains and I will spend my remaining years dreaming of what could have been. Happy Birthday to me.
Posted by: AZREBEL | May 27, 2010 at 10:26 PM
I have a feed to Jon's blog on my desktop but I cannot always bear to read him. He is an old testament prophet in a city burning for new testament redemption. I hesitate to hope for a good candidate who will stand up to the nut cases and the greedy, because with the exception of the emergency sales tax election (IV fluids for the terminal patient, not a cure), I wind up with hot tears in my eyes every time. Our future? The Sal Di Ciccios who hold a sly hand of real estate cards, who gouge as much self gain as possible out of every issue, and wait alertly for their moment to spring. And an equally self-interested electorate who will happily put them where they will do the most harm. Will your place up north be the heaven you hope for, AZREBEL? I hear they're going to master plan the mountains as soon as the economy tips up ...
Posted by: Sophiethecat | May 28, 2010 at 07:40 AM
Bicarb!
Posted by: Buford | May 28, 2010 at 08:44 AM
To me, a do-er might be an activist and an advocate for (preferably) a focused cause. For me, the last 10 years has been devoted to shining the light on the Valley's air quality. Some think I've made a difference. Jon would know better than I, but I banged away on the legislature and the media . . and don't intend to quit . . no matter what! Giving up would mean giving in and letting the bastards win!
Posted by: Jim Hamblin | May 28, 2010 at 09:33 AM
A tip of my glass to "pointless, counterfactual flings" and to clarity through the after-hours fog.
Neither Terry Goddard, "a good candidate", nor any other hoped-for messiah can bring redemption to what was long imagined to be an exponentional equation, but is now exposed by the economics of depletion, complexity, and social division as being something akin to a sharp gaussian function. Phoenix, as it is, can now serve only as a warning and a salvage yard.
Taxes are inevitably levied in one way or another.
No regrets.
Posted by: Rate Crimes | May 28, 2010 at 09:33 AM
AXREBEL - Wilcox is right up there with DiCiccio. Never have trusted her and never will.
I'm not crazy about the Goddards either, its' like they think its Terry's birthright to be governor. Last time he ran we ended up with Ev Mecham. We were better off with Mofford (bless her beehive!).
Posted by: eclecticdog | May 28, 2010 at 03:40 PM
That's an accurate, if horrifying, list of our woes. But I do have one quibble. Preserving the old agricultural industry, whatever its other merits, would have been water-intensive itself. Ag places more demands on water supplies that does residential development. One of the theories of the groundwater code was essentially that farmers would be pushed out in order to divert water supplies to residential use. I'm not a fan of sprawl, but the old ag regime wasn't easy on the water supply, either.
Posted by: CDT | May 28, 2010 at 07:07 PM
There's no question that there were limits to how much of the Salt River Valley could be cultivated before the benefits were offset by the costs. But at a certain level, agriculture was very beneficial to the region. It was also the natural human footprint in this fertile river valley (i.e., Phoenix was never like Tucson).
The Newlands Act and the CAP were intended and sold for agriculture. Sprawl was a bait-and-switch. The oft-used pitch that houses use less water than agriculture is misguided on many levels. For one thing, it doesn't take into account pools, lakes, golf courses, etc. Secondly, it doesn't account for the many environmental consequences of sprawl. Third, it doesn't account for the cost of losing agriculture, both on the heat island (which adds costs from increased air-conditioning use as well as loss of livability) and the national/regional food security issue.
Posted by: Rogue Columnist | May 30, 2010 at 10:14 AM
Another excellent article on Phoenix. Well done. This needs to be shared with everyone who lives here.
A friend of mine and I were talking a few years ago about Phoenix and how it should be seen as the front lines for liberal/progressive people. If we really want to make a change in the US then we need to start by changing the worst places such as Phoenix. By moving to Portland or Austin we only add to the status quo's strength by removing our voices and votes.
It is a grim and daunting task but so is Global Recession, Global Warming, and countless other issues. You can move to a more progressive state and in essence hide your head in the sand, or you can speak up and engage people. I truly think we can make a change for the better here. People are fed up with the status quo, the racism, the opportuinists, and most of all Scottsdale.
Rant over, once again great reading.
Posted by: A Facebook User | June 01, 2010 at 11:44 AM