Say goodnight to CityNorth

The Arizona Court of Appeals is doing Phoenix a favor by essentially killing its $97 million CityNorth project. Phoenix just doesn't know it. The Republic reports:

Part of the problem lies in the thinking encapsulated by that sentence. A real city has one downtown: the economic, cultural and retail heart of the city. By that definition Phoenix doesn't even have one downtown yet — but it wants a "second downtown"? But the bigger problem with CityNorth has always been that it is based on a dead business model. The old land-speculation economy is not coming back. These are problems not unusual to American cities. But Phoenix's case is extreme and instructive.

The roots of CityNorth lie with cities' dependence on sales taxes in a state where tax-cuts are religion and jobs in retail (and building retail) are key to its pathetically limited service economy. For decades, cities fought over the next mall or shopping strip. With the rise of Scottsdale, Phoenix responded by courting development right across the border — Scottsdale cachet (whatever that is) and Phoenix tax revenues. Not coincidentally, this status quo — a "blood sport" between cities, AG and former Phoenix Mayor Terry Goddard called it — was very profitable for the Real Estate Industrial Complex. So what if it contributed to sprawl, ugliness, smog, destruction of the desert and abandonment of yesterday's strips and big boxes (Metrocenter is one example yesterday's CityNorth).

But Phoenix's desperation to do CityNorth, alongside the nearby Desert Ridge master planned abortion, is more complex and little discussed. Phoenix houses most of the region's poor, working poor and underclass. It keeps losing what relatively few economic assets it has, either to outside forces or to competing suburbs. "The nation's fifth largest city" is getting poorer, more minority, less competitive. Critically, it is getting less of the old growth machine — and thus fewer state funds, which instead are going to places like Gilbert.

The affluent are happy for Phoenix to become, as a north Scottsdale resident once smugly told me, "the Hispanic Detroit." Curiously, they think this implosion will leave them untouched. But, when you think about it, the Third World is full of places similar to what they envision — rich behind walls, guarded by private armies; the poor outside. Those places do tend to have more water…

Phoenix leaders have met this hushed-up crisis with contradictory, and ultimately conflicting and self-defeating, responses. They have haltingly tried to revitalize the core. But they have tried to play the old suburban sprawl game up north to keep the tax dollars rolling in, and to take the path of least resistance with developers. A classic example is the recruitment of USAA in 2000, the city's last major jobs coup. Leaders allowed the "campus" to go in the far, far north part of the city, completely dependent on single-occupancy car trips — at the very moment it was planning the light-rail system in central Phoenix.

With the long-looming collapse now upon it, Phoenix still can't seem to face reality. The old economy is dead. The housing bubble isn't coming back. The Great Disruption will make Phoenix-style sprawl untenable in a long run coming sooner than anyone realizes. But even if the old growth machine could revive, Phoenix would be playing a losing game. It can't out-Buckeye Buckeye.

The future was presented with TGen and the downtown biomedical campus. It's too bad the city acted so slowly, especially after the ole boys pushed out Deputy City Manager Sheryl Sculley. Now, with the global economy facing depression and the state in the grip of a budget crisis and Government by Kookocracy, this promising project is in grave danger. Yet it will only be through new economic engines, and new thinking that Phoenix can avoid permanent decline.

It's tragically ironic that City Hall would be pushing yet another "downtown" as it prepares to open the $1.4 billion light-rail system focused on what should be the real downtown. Light rail in a revived central core represents the future. CityNorth represents a destructive past.

Read Rogue's Phoenix archive here and Arizona crisis report here.