I made a quick trip back home to speak at the Arizona Library Association annual conference. Sorry to all the friends I couldn't see, but beyond the speech I wanted to drive around and see the city, especially to gather material for the next Mapstone mystery, South Phoenix Rules. Some non-literary observations:
— The gigantic rental car facility is one of those head-shakers. It's so big that I suppose it could become the terminal for the much smaller city that Phoenix may become because of the Great Disruption. In any event, how much did this monster cost and why wasn't that money put into a speed-up of the people-mover to connect with light rail? It's the usual backward thinking and spending, assuming the future will be based on single-occupancy car trips. The "landscaping" and "public art" out front are hideous. Saguaros baking in tightly packed gravel is totally ahistorical for the oasis city that was Phoenix, not a natural look for the Sonoran Desert and plain cayo-ugly. Nice job, Frank.
— Christmas is always magical in Phoenix. As a child, I watched snowy Midwestern holiday scenes on television, but I knew the first Christmas came in the desert. This was especially enchanting with a rainstorm swirling, making the transplanted Midwesterners complain. I let it fall on me as I walked to the hotel next to the Willo district, feeling centered to be in the old 'hood. The rain is so precious, especially in this drought. Has it occurred to anyone that what makes the Sonoran Desert special, so rich in its plant and animal life, is its relatively high rainfall. A few decades like this and it will become more like the Mojave and Chihuahua deserts — bleak and bereft. But you "won't have to shovel sunshine."
— The signs of depression are everywhere. It's especially jarring coming from Seattle, which is struggling with some problems but remains remarkably vibrant by comparison. The "available" signs seem to outnumber the signs of businesses actually still operating. In the center city, the blighted empty lots keep growing. This is probably old news, but I noticed that the old A.J. Bayless shopping center at Indian School and Central has been bulldozed. With it, one of the best art stores anywhere has apparently left the Central Corridor. Steele Indian School Park remains a disappointment, surrounded by wastelands. Where is the tax on land banking? But the problems are everywhere: the rotting frames of failed subdivisions on the fringes, the empty lots in 50-year-old neighborhoods that have always been empty and probably always will be.
— The deadness of the place is reinforced knowing how much the financial panic, real-estate crash and reset is working against Phoenix. The old Growth Machine model is simply not coming back, and yet Phoenix has no other card to play. It was amusing to see the story about the House GOP spending $65,000 to hire "noted economic and real estate expert" Elliott Pollack to make recommendations about how to fix the state. I can save them the scratch: cut taxes, eliminate the departments of environmental protection and water quality, relax development rules, cut education funding, privatize or close two of the state's three universities, eliminate state revenue sharing with the city of Phoenix. Blah, blah, blah. Pollack, who is a pleasant fellow, was an economist but is also a developer. For years he stumped every venue championing the very dependence on real estate that caused this catastrophe. And he's still going strong. (WHY won't the Info Center identify Pollack as a developer??).
— Peyton and Joe stamp and shout, running their own little Jacobin Club to behead their political opponents, bringing ludicrous indictments against Don Stapley and Mary Rose Wilcox. It's not to say there's not back-scratching going on, but this is a case of Mr. Pot, meet Ms. Kettle. And these would at best be misdemeanors. Are the two lawmen going after the lethal gun running that is fueling bloodshed in Mexico? Nope. Are they investigating the truly smarmy connections between legislators and various for-profit ventures, including charter schools, prisons and developers seeking to get around water rules? That would be no.
— I dropped by La Perla, one of the historic gems in Glendale. Invited myself into a conversation with a group in the adjoining pink banquet. They were all natives, in their 70s and above probably, and I could have sat for hours listening to the stories of the old days as they — Anglo and Latino — effortlessly switched between English and Spanish. "Where did you go to school?" they demanded. I said, Kenilworth. "Oh, you were a rich kid!" Me: "No, but I went to school with some" The cheese crisp was exquisite. The company better. That night I went to Sing High downtown, another old-timer's joint — sweet. Tom's Tavern is marking its 80th year. This storied place was where deals were cut and legislation drawn up for decades, a haunt of every important Phoenician. Stop by and thank Mike Ratner for keeping it going.
— The library convention was held at Westgate, a sprawl abortion, a monumental waste of resources. Imagine if the stadium were downtown? The place was so dead that the traffic lights were set to blink red. It's connected to nothing, distinguished by nothing beautiful, uplifting or real. It must be hot as hell in the summer. Scaled at a level that will face a very unkind future. Somebody got rich, aided by taxpayer dollars. I could hear the jets taking off from Luke, and feel the developer tools lusting to shut the base down.
— Drive down 59th Avenue to Lower Buckeye and you can snatch a glimpse of the past: cultivated fields shining green with the Estrellas towering behind them. You have to shut out the distant homely new subdivision, but it's a sight worth seeing. Alas, nothing can really recreate the old citrus groves, much less the Japanese Gardens, lost to endless schlock building on Baseline.
— Back downtown, the biosciences campus looks much as it did when I left town in 2007. The wasted time is tragic. It should have been built out by now with a hospital, larger medical school, more research outfits, the pharmacy school, etc., etc. The future of innovation and sustainability will come from these kinds of dense nodes of smart people, working side-by-side. It's already happening in the top tech centers worldwide. China is leaping ahead. San Francisco built out most of the Mission Bay campus in the time Phoenix was sitting in the headlights. Meanwhile, Mayor Phil defends Dubai and wants to be cleared of any wrongdoing with a girlfriend. I read he was having a "coffee" on the bio campus. Good God. Elsewhere, it was disheartening to see more gravel and half-hearted desert landscaping. The loss of the oasis by the Viad Tower is criminal. This is not historical to central Phoenix, and lack of shade trees and grass is only increasing temperatures and decreasing livability. Good stuff: the green park by ASU is looking better and light rail continues to thrive (we built it, you bastards).
— Union Station still stands in beautiful and neglected isolation. Phoenix remains by far the most populous American city with no intercity train service whatsoever. Some want to study commuter rail that should have been put in place decades ago. When they finally tear Union Station down, it will be a sign not to come back any more.
I visited Phoenix last April on business; it was my first trip back to the city where I grew up since I left for a new job in Boston back in 2004. What a shock — it was everything that Mr. Talton speaks about in this column, and then some. The office “parks” around Metrocenter were decaying and empty, the number of shuttered chain restaurants around the mall was striking. And that was just the Metrocenter area. I drove along Central Avenue north of Camelback and noted many vacant storefronts. Downtown was a pleasant surprise — it was nice to see all of the new skyscrapers going up — and light rail seemed to be quite popular. But those were the lone bright spots in an otherwise decaying city with a bleak future.
I know many Phoenicians still love their city, and I don’t mean to offend anyone with this post. But I spent a generation in the Phoenix area, and it saddens me to read articles like Mr. Talton’s, or have seen firsthand, the ugly metropolitan area that the “Valley” has become.
The art store moved to the SE corner of Indian School and 16th Street.
Metrocenter apparently has a full-service pawn shop inside the mall now.
Tempe’s Mill Avenue, maybe the one real downtown in all of Arizona, is cancer-ridden. The chain stores that took the place of local retail have largely folded up.
There won’t be an AJ’s in Cityscape after all, which shouldn’t be a surprise but it does suggest how immune to learning downtown developers are. Did RED study Arizona Center’s woes in advance of replicating its dreary suburbia-in-downtown master plan?
The Beadle-designed Mountain States building at 3rd St and Earll was finally imploded and yet another huge empty parcel in central Phoenix was created for the duration of my lifetime and probably yours as well.
Of course Seattle is booming; Boeing has the support of the federal Ex-Im bank to finance the sale of its jets. Boeing employment is UP 5 percent this year, thanks to a flood of orders backed by the Ex-Im bank security.
In Arizona, the Goldwater Institute is suing any and every business suspected of receiving government aid. This helps explain why Arizona has the nation’s highest percent job loss; it’s run by a bunch of bright young politicians who are doing their best to go back to 1910.
A couple of other trends: the appearance in neighborhoods throughout the city of dollar stores; the number of check-cashing and payday loan stores.
The latter is an older trend and may be winding down now that the public referendum put a cap on theiry usury, but the July sunset of the legislation enabling their existence may not come soon enough, if Grant Woods (campaign co-chairman of Governor Brewer) and the well-dressed minions of the lobbying firm HighGround (whose executive leadership, Chuck Coughlin and Doug Cole, will be managing Brewer’s election campaign) have any say in the matter.
Unable to defeat the voter proposition despite outspending it 15-1, the payday loan parasites are apparently working to engineer a legislative end-run around popular will. The problem is that whereas their money couldn’t buy the people’s vote, the politicians may be more receptive to it.
https://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/12/01/20091201paydaylenders1201.html
(Predictably, Robert Robb’s editorial column pooh-poohs the idea that where there’s smoke there’s fire: “It requires extraordinarily shallow thinking to conclude that, by hiring Woods and High Ground, the industry has co-opted the governor or the governor is somehow involved in the effort to keep the payday lending industry alive.” Just a coincidence, of course.)
Emil, you always raise valid points, and you’re an excellent writer. Keep up the good work!
Mr. Talton wrote:
“(WHY won’t the Info Center identify Pollack as a developer??)”
There’s something fishy about Pollock.
Meanwhile, it seems that a group calling itself Americans for Prosperity (as opposed to Foreigners for Impoverishment) has beaten Pollack to the punch. The Arizona Republic reports that the group has a surefire plan for “knocking out the deficit” and “clearing out the deadwood” among other mixed metaphors.
The group’s plan calls for eliminating all tax credits EXCEPT for those that provide tax money for private schools. (No, this is not an article from The Onion. Read on.) Also, for “eliminating various state programs and entire agencies, ranging from all-day kindergarten to the Agriculture and Commerce departments”, as well as unidentified “across the board” budget cuts. If that doesn’t sound like a recipe for prosperity, the group also advocates “the budget gimmick of ‘sweeping’ excess funds in various state agencies, and privatizing such offices as the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the state Library.”
https://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2009/12/13/20091213politics-budget1213.html
Meanwhile, Glendale reports that, due to tax cuts by the state legislature in 2006 (coming due in fiscal 2010-11) it expects to collect $11 million less in income taxes (the largest source of revenue Glendale receives from the state each year). Also, that the state legislature’s reduction of assessment ratios for business properties in 2005 will again result in a significant slump this year in property tax revenues.
I absolutely love going to Phoenix. Arizona is one of the coolest dates in the US. On my first visit to Phoenix. I met up with a friend of mine who is an Olympic swimmer in training. There are some great bingo games taking place in Phoenix as well and I’ve not yet seen a gigantic car rental facility that you made reference to earlier on.