Many days the Arizona Republic reads like a bad real-estate supplement to the National Lampoon, but today is especially priceless. The editorial proclaims Glendale as "center of the Valley."
Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. And Glendale has quite a group gathering. It includes far more than ever-loyal football fans drawn to University
of Phoenix Stadium to watch the Arizona Cardinals fight for a win. It’s more than hockey fans or screaming concert-goers drawn to Jobing.com Arena. It’s more than the baseball fans who will certainly flock to Glendale’s
spring-training complex near Loop 101 and Camelback Road next spring.
I compressed the dodo short paragraphs and will cut the reminder for the sake of your gag reflex, but you get the idea. It talks about the developers and real estate ventures and concludes, "Wow." I am sure the Pulitzer judges are already taking note.
If Arizona can’t have a serious conversation about issues, a prime suspect is a newspaper that sees itself as a propaganda arm of the real-estate industry and sees its readers as idiots. Metro Phoenix is in a serious recession in no small part because of the brain-washing that all the region needed to do was build more subdivisions and shopping malls.
To use the language of the budding Menckens at the Republic: It’s far worse than the houses sold at auction at some of the most hyped "communities" in the Valley. It’s worse than thousands of lost jobs, foreclosures and bankruptcies. It’s worse than the lost boom time when infrastructure, schools, competitiveness, water resources and global warming were ignored. Wow.
Glendale is not the center of anything, not even Glendale. It is part of the amorphous helter-skelter of lookalike subdivisions, ugly industrial land, linear slums, wide highways, shopping strips and freeway-side schlock that is the "West Valley." Except for a few charming blocks of tiny old Glendale, you would never know where Phoenix or Peoria begin and "Glendale" ends. Metro Phoenix is built to have no center, and in any case, Glendale is not it. Glendale gamed a couple of sports stadiums as sugar plums for developers, and to give a development gift to the Cardinals’ rich owners (thanks for that taxpayer financed stadium). The "center" of power and trashy, boob-job glam remains Scottsdale, if that’s your thing.
For serious journalism, we must depend on other sources, such as the New York Times, which reports on the disaster in Maricopa, a microcosm of the housing bust. Maricopa had been hailed as "the next Scottsdale" in the pages of the Republic. The headline, which could work around "the Valley": "The boomtown mirage."
Sad to see one of the view voices writing actual informed opinion about Phoenix is in – Seattle. I grew up here and love it, but boy can I see things really starting to hit the fan. I hope the populace wakes up to the crap they are being fed by local media and Goldwater Institute flacks. The prospects are admittedly dim.
As a resident of Tempe I find it particularly odd the Republic citing sports franchises as making something the center of Phx. Did the Cardinals leaving have much of a negative impact on Tempe? Hard for me to see any. So it is hard to imagine what exactly they have brought to Glendale.
I’m waiting for: “Scottsdale- the next Maricopa”
Glendale is the center of the valley, like the armpit is the center of human body.
It’s the mini-tax subsidized las vegas of the phoenix metro.