Poor little rich Scottsdale

Some readers have asked me to comment on the latest dysfunction in Scottsdale, including the forced departure of City Manager Jan Dolan. I will, but with more than mixed feelings.

First, I went to high school in Scottsdale when it was a sweet small city and hadn’t been completely changed by money, transience, political extremism and the urban problems (without urban solutions) that plague all of Phoenix. Among its virtues was a small-town merchant class that was genuinely invested in a place of manageable size (Roosevelt to McDonald). My Scottsdale is gone forever, but the small city that it was in the 1970s nurtured much good in my young life.

Second, Scottsdale’s future is already baked in the cake. The thugs that want to recall the mayor for allegedly even thinking about light rail need not worry. They have "won." What you’ve got is what you’ve got, and the world will intrude. Of course their agenda is always more power and intimidation than accomplishing anything.

I found Dolan to be intelligent and progressive, neither virtues worth revealing if you intend to succeed in Arizona government. On the other hand, there have been stories of bad employee morale in City Hall and complaints of top-down management. I suspect she was caught between the rock and hard place that is the City Council, a cauldron of disagreement and grudges where a "veto minority" holds sway. It is especially a creature of a vocal band against everything. Pity the poor bastard who follows her in the job.

Scottsdale has "succeeded" in the Arizona that is, largely by having the greatest concentration of wealth. Money can paper over lots of problems. So the streets are paved and the trash is collected and the cops show up when you call them. The neo-libertarians who moved here from the Midwest and think they are living some great adventure in Western individualism have everything they want. I find Scottsdale tacky, phony and sad, but what it has become is not my thing.

Yet like almost every place in Arizona, Scottsdale is not really a "city." With its manic rape of priceless desert to the north, Scottsdale is a long strip of three urban agglomerations. South of Osborn are the old subdivisions of the ’60s, many teetering on the edge of becoming linear slums and with a growing immigrant population. It is car dependent. It has nothing in common with the rest of Scottsdale. We’ll see if ASU’s dumbly named Skysong can be anything but an office park.

Between Osborn and Chaparral is a reviving "downtown" Scottsdale. It has potential because of its dense, relatively narrow streets west of Miller and old stock of buildings. It has attracted much investment in recent years, including for the delightful revival of the Valley Ho to retro ’50s glory. Unfortunately, it is completely car dependent and traffic will only grow worse. Scottsdale’s insistence on exclusivity means it can’t have the diversity that makes a city interesting. Although the scary bleeding out of Fifth Avenue and Old Town has been staunched for now, those areas aren’t safe because of…

Everything to the north, the third thing that makes up Scottsdale. This area is much richer, much more exclusive — it gets more so the farther north you go — and has nothing in common with the rest of Scottsdale. Its political and lifestyle agendas are in opposition to the urban solutions urgently needed for the other two parts of Scottsdale, yet its political sway is huge. This is the place most likely to have people who want nothing to do with their neighbors, who just want to be left alone, who want no civic duties aside from voting "hell no!" No wonder one of the 9/11 hijackers came here to be anonymous.

For all the money, this part of town has terrible traffic congestion (and the meanest, most aggressive drivers — "I got rich in Minnesota and now I don’t owe nobody nuttin’, get the hell outta my way!!"). Its environmental degradation is on display everywhere. Some of the most expensive houses are mere tarted up versions of the crap built in Eloy, and its shopping is the same tiresome strips as everywhere in suburbia, with blazing surface parking lots but added expensive-looking stonework. Thanks to Arizona urban planning, this exclusive, low density resort area is also jammed with office parks, shopping centers, wide highways and an airport.

The result is a hopelessly divided "city." But because it can attract the lion’s share of investment, rich people and tourism, it will remain Arizona’s strongest place.

Unfortunately the strength doesn’t really help others, except for the resorts in east Phoenix that pitifully put "Scottsdale" on their letterhead. Scottsdale draws so much of the small amount of infill investment available in the Valley that central Phoenix goes begging. Because of Arizona’s nutty tax structure, Phoenix must constantly waste resources and political capital to build sales-tax generating shopping near Scottsdale. More seriously, Scottsdale and its wealthy have a disproportionate ability to weigh in on progressive policies in transportation, education and the environment. They don’t. So, like population-fat slacker Mesa, Scottsdale drags metro Phoenix down. The only difference is that it contributes to the existing low-end tourist economy.

Scottsdale’s fate is set. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

What will be interesting is how it is buffeted by a continuously changing world: Phoenix’s urban ills, higher energy prices, greater competition for tourism, global and local warming, and globalization (immigration and the declining living standards of Americans who once might have worked their way up to afford a house in Scottsdale). I guess it can work for awhile. Even Third World hellholes have their versions of Scottsdale, similarly exclusive and walled off.