Downtown & central Phoenix

After spending two weeks in Phoenix, I'm tempted to conclude that the central city is undergoing its most robust efflorescence in decades. And it is happening below the "red line" of Camelback Road.

This is not based on any single project — the Central Station tower and new arena for the Suns and perhaps Coyotes may or may not happen. Rather, dozens of smaller projects, mostly residential, are completed, under construction or in advanced site work or planning. Lots that have sat vacant for decades are seeing construction. Buildings are being restored — one example is the nice job the Old Spaghetti Factory did with its two former mansions on Central.

Commerce is happening, albeit on a mostly small scale, with startups and a few companies moving jobs into downtown, Midtown and Uptown. The restaurant scene is booming. We're far beyond the days when we struggled to keep Durant's, My Florist, Portland's and Cheuvront in business. Traffic is busy on Central again; more important, so is pedestrian and bicycle activity. Outside the core but in the old city many shopping strips have been given new looks.

This is small potatoes for what should be happening in the core of one of the nation's largest cities. Seattle has about a hundred major projects recently completed or underway, many of them highrises. The skyline is being dramatically remade. But considering the damage done to Phoenix over many decades of civic malpractice, it is verging on a spectacular rebirth.

So shopping-strip magnate Michael Pollack is worried about potential wording in Chandler's new general plan that might, might, possibly, someday allow light rail.

As the Arizona Republic reported, "It may be years from ever happening, but even the thought of extending the Valley's light-rail system from Mesa south into Chandler along Arizona Avenue is stirring strong opposition from a few key foes concerned that wording in a proposed planning document is a tacit endorsement of such a rail line."

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of people in America: those with urban values and those with suburban values. The latter can sometimes "get it," how the health of an entire metropolitan area is dependent on a vibrant downtown — Oklahoma City is a good example. More often they don't, and the two tribes can't even speak the same language.

One of the biggest points of controversy is transit. Those with suburban values, especially "conservative" ideologues, have made a fetish of opposing any mode of travel that is not based on the automobile. Armed with seemingly economically invincible talking points regarding costs and often backed by Koch brothers money, they have defeated numerous transit measures nationally. They also speak in code to suburban whites, that transit will bring Those People to apartheid suburbia.

This is what makes Phoenix's light rail such a miracle. In the face of hysterical and often thuggish opposition, the starter line was completed and has now been expanded, with more growth on the way. It is highly popular. None of the predictions of doom happened. Even left turns are easy. We built it, you bastards (WBIYB).

Chandler won't. Never fear.

When I was a boy, the Southern Pacific Railroad operated six trains a day between Phoenix Union Station and Tucson. They were part of the fading American passenger-rail system, once the finest in the world.

The top of the line were the crack Sunset Limited, SP's flagship running between New Orleans and Los Angeles (once it went all the way to San Francisco). Phoenix to Tucson took less than two-and-a-half hours. Then the Golden State Limited, another premier train operated by SP from Los Angeles to Tucumcari, N.M., where it was handed off to the Rock Island for the trip to Chicago. Finally, there was the remains of the Imperial, once a fine train in its own right but by the 1960s a mail train with a single coach.

But the trains were dying, helped along by the Postal Service canceling the vital mail contracts in 1967-68. Amtrak took over a much diminished Sunset — three days a week — and it left Phoenix in the 1990s when the state would not help maintain the northern main line. Phoenix is the largest city in America with no passenger trains.

I mention this history as the Arizona Department of Transportation studies passenger rail between Phoenix and Tucson. It has gotten press. But is it possible?

My Seattle Times colleague Geoff Baker has an insightful column about Glendale's NHL arena disaster. Sometimes one needs to be at a distance — and a distance from advertiser and fan pressure — to see things clearly.

The situation remains very much in play. Mayor Jerry Weiers may back down in the face of a lawsuit from the team formerly and rightly known as the Phoenix Coyotes. Or the courts could rule against the city's attempt to break its lease. Then the team can socialize its losses until the contract allows it to leave in three years.

But some aspects of what Baker calls "the Glendale fiasco" require Homey's distinctive local touch. Which I will proceed to attempt.

As with almost everything in Arizona today, Glendale's misery began with a real-estate hustle and taking an asset away from Phoenix, trying to make it the hole in the donut.

Redlining is the practice of, in the United States, denying, or charging more for, services such as banking, insurance, access to health care, or even supermarkets, or denying jobs to residents in particular, often racially determined, areas. — Wikipedia

The SOBs are well-known, and what an appropriate acronym. It means the north Scottsdale fatcats who refuse to go south of Bell (SOB) and measure their specialness by pronouncing the city of Phoenix as "the Mexican Detroit."

Most people with means who move to metro Phoenix don't consider it "home," as in a place to treasure and be invested in the common good. They are drunk with the resort "lifestyle" use-it-up new extraction industry. Being "exclusive" means drawing red lines to show one's superiority. To define zones that are scary and lost, whether this is true or not.

In recent years, I've become more aware of another red line within the city: Camelback Road.