Phoenix 101: The East Valley
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: The East Valley

Chandler_neighborhood

A subdivision in Chandler.

Of all the many delusional linguistic constructs in metro Phoenix meant to sell real estate and sustain the unsustainable (think, "The Sun Corridor," "the North Valley," etc.), only the East Valley has the most substance to it. Such was not always the case.

In 1960, when Phoenix's population was 439,170, Mesa clocked in at a mere 33,772. Tempe was a little college town. Scottsdale a small artist's colony/former farm town with "Western" touristy schlock. Chandler was a stop on the railroad for the San Marcos Hotel. The remainder were tiny agricultural villages. All were separated by miles of fields, groves, and history.

Mesa, for example, was distinctive for its settlement by Mormon pioneers. Tempe was the home of the normal school turned Arizona State College and just renamed a university. All the real towns supported separate newspapers. Mesa and Tempe had their own street-grid numbering systems. Guadalupe was its own unique enclave, first settled by Yaqui Indians fleeing the Mexican Revolution and was the most culturally Mexican place in the Salt River Valley.

The common denominators: Economies based on agriculture, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and (with the exception of Scottsdale) being south of the Salt River and thus part of the coalition that fought against Phoenix and north-bank farmers for water rights and allocations before and after the Newlands Act. Power in the area resided with the big growers and prosperous businessmen of Mesa, all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

By the late 1970s, the landscape was changing fast. Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe and Mesa had grown together. The Superstition Freeway was being slowly built east from I-10, reaching Dobson Road around 1977, disrupting and slowly killing the rich cluster of local businesses that lined old U.S. 60 along Mill Avenue, Apache Boulevard and Main Street.

Mesa's population was closing in on 150,000, and it was annexing miles of retiree trailer courts that ran along Main toward the Pinal County line. Samaritan Health Services, the forerunner of Banner Health, opened a new hospital, Desert Samaritan, near the new freeway. ASU had grown to be a large university and Tempe extended south with The Lakes. The first subdivisions of something called Ahwatukee were being finished. From the rise of I-10 at Baseline, the view east glittered like a jewel at night. Still, miles of citrus groves ran east of central Mesa, centered around Val Vista.

Almost everything south of central Mesa and Tempe was still agriculture. Chandler was a small town and Gilbert little more than a crossroads. Williams Air Force Base was in operation and far from everything, linked by the ubiquitous two-lane concrete roads lined on each side by irrigation ditches.

The next two decades would see startling change, and the evolution into a true separate identity within the Phoenix metropolitan area.

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Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Four for Phoenix

In the field for Phoenix mayor, Wes Gullett must show he is more than a Republican political operative with ties to Fife Symington and John McCain, two of the more odious statewide officeholders in Arizona history. Peggy Neely seems to be the candidate of the sprawl developers and considers "standing tall against billboards" an issue of supreme importance. That leaves only two candidates worthy of serious attention: Claude Mattox and Greg Stanton.

Mattox represents Maryvale and much of west Phoenix on City Council. He has shown himself to be a man of integrity, someone who grew in office, and has represented a largely Hispanic, largely poor district well, while also understanding the importance of the Convention Center, ASU Downtown, the biosciences campus, Sheraton and light rail. He's approachable, honest and plays a mean guitar. His rugged face, like something out of a Western, and (when I knew him) sometimes casual-to-sloppy dress causes people to underestimate his intelligence and tactical skill as a politician. He claims an interesting mix of supporters, including Peggy Bilsten (who should have been mayor); Jerry Colangelo (does he care anymore since he's become a west-side sprawl developer?); Matt Salmon (?!?) and former mayor Paul Johnson. The downside? As one person close to city politics put it: "Nice guy, but where's the vision?" Indeed, the issues he's pushing are hardly inspiring: Strong neighborhoods (what does that mean, especially in a city with few real neighborhoods?); safety, and "quality schools" (out of the mayor's control). His bio also lists him as a vice president of something called National Western Vistas Real Estate, whose Web site I can't find, and could Phoenix move beyond real estate, please? Still, Phoenix could do far worse than Mattox. (Update: A reader corrects me, with the Web site here and the BBB file).

Greg Stanton is another candidate who risks being underestimated. Too polished. Too smooth. Too Mister Perfect looks. More than a touch of ambition. Very unlike Mayor Phil Gordon but still another lawyer. But beneath this and the councilman-like talk about "neighborhoods" and "safety," Stanton has an incisive intellect and a sharp understanding that, as he puts it, Phoenix is "a city at a crossroads." More than his rivals, he understands the need to make the transition into quality growth and sustainability. After representing the mostly Republican district (he's a Democrat) that includes Ahwatukee, North Central, Arcadia and Biltmore for nine years on City Council, he went to work as a deputy attorney general for Terry Goddard. Stanton was on the right side in voting against zoning east Camelback for more skyscrapers and in opposing the disastrous sprawl monster, CityNorth. Stanton would be the best choice.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Culture of corruption

In the history of Arizona corruption, the Fiesta Bowl affair seems like small ball. There was the bribe-fest AzScam, which rocked the Legislature in the early 1990s, part of a once-a-generation such skeleton to be kicked out of the closet on 17th Avenue. Around the same time, Phoenix was an epicenter of the savings-and-loan scandal. Don't forget all that slithered out from under rocks kicked over after the assassination of Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles in 1976. He wasn't the first or last to die as a result of Arizona's dark deeds, some leading to the most powerful men in the state before the trail was quickly erased. Bolles was a master of probing the massive land frauds that saturated Arizona, often with Mafia involvement. The Phoenix Police Department's organized-crime unit claimed many scalps, including that of a city manager, until it got too close to big power for comfort and was defanged. Old-timers remember the circa 1960 Arizona Savings collapse and scandal, which again led to the corridors of power. More recently, right-wing darling Rick Renzi lost his U.S. House seat after becoming embroiled in allegations of conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering extortion and insurance fraud — the Bush administration fired the U.S. Attorney in Phoenix for pursuing the investigation of one of Tom DeLay's boyz.

Compared with this, some goodies for John Junker, the once lionized and now forced-out-and-shunned Fiesta Bowl boss, along with allegedly funnelling bowl money to politicians, etc., seems almost petty crime. A charge of $1,241 for a visit to a "high-end Phoenix strip club"? Junker's 50th birthday party at Pebble Beach, $33,188? This was just another day at the office, or bar, back in the day of real Phoenix scandal. That's why I can't stop wondering whether it is the tip of a desert iceberg, something beyond the high dudgeon of Sports Illustrated as something confined to policing the BCS. The question is whether the Arizona Republic, in particular, will let some fine reporters continue to follow this slimy string and pull out some others.

Corruption is supposed to go along with gritty eastern cities, Democratic pols greasing the palms of mobbed up union bosses, waterfronts and Rust Belt decay. But don't be fooled by your new house on a clean street in Anthem. The underworld runs deep here, right into your very street. No place is clean, of course. It's rather like the news stories that tell of the lurid exurban multiple homicide with the mandatory "things like this don't happen here" quote (when sub- and exurbia are actually quite prone to them). The question is why Phoenix remains such a mecca for hustles, dirty dealings and wrongdoing that reaches the top?

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Phoenix 101: ‘The Valley’
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: ‘The Valley’

Phoenix night skyline

Growing up in the Phoenix of the 1960s, "the Valley" was a benign term. It either meant the Valley of the Sun, the touristy moniker of the booster class, or the Salt River Valley, where Phoenix was geographically centered. The city was large and powerful, both economically and politically. The suburbs were small and inconsequential, most just still farm towns or railroad sidings.

Indeed, old Phoenix, central and south Scottsdale, Tempe and old Mesa sit in a real valley. The ancient Salt River Valley dips between the South Mountains (or, on old maps, the Salt River Mountains) and the Phoenix mountains, such as Shaw Butte, North Mountain, Piestewa Peak and Camelback. One could once see this on spectacular display coming north on Interstate 10 as it crossed Baseline Road, or from Baseline and the Japanese Gardens. For much of the early decades of settlement, this posed major flood-control problems. Rains cascaded off the mountains in search of home in the meandering, fickle Salt River. Nineteenth Avenue would become a river flowing down to the capitol before construction of Cave Creek Dam. At flood stage, Indian Bend Wash cut Scottsdale in half well into the 1980s. That same river, carrying rich deposits of soil from upsteam, created one of the world's great alluvial valleys here, custom made for farming that sustained two civilizations.  So whether for tourists or as a geographical reality, "the Valley" was a widely used shorthand, harmless and endearing, often the sign of a native. It was part of the name of the most powerful bank. But there was no doubting this was Phoenix, or, as some called it, Greater Phoenix.

When I returned, the old connotations had changed. "The Valley" was widely used as the proper name of metropolitan Phoenix. This was abetted by the media, including the most influential, The Arizona Republic (the old Phoenix Gazette having been closed; too bad, imagine if it were an online newspaper with an entirely different tone and coverage focus than the big ship). This same media often didn't know where downtown Phoenix was — so many times I heard a radio or television report of some news "downtown," at, say, 24th Street and Camelback Road. I suppose it was a combination of ignorance and an effort at new-style marketing. Hence, we don't have the Phoenix Cardinals or Phoenix Diamondbacks, as most cities do, but "Arizona," which sounds like a college team. And it was an attempt to pander to suburbs that had grown to elephantine population sizes.

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Posted inPhoenix

Positive trend lines

One of my great former teachers posted on Facebook: "Coronado is closing at the end of this semester. Rumor has it that the Salt River Indian community plans to purchase it and turn it into a casino. The stadium will host concerts, and the gym will become a gourmet restaurant." I was pretty sure the Indian part was a jape, but the first sentence chilled me to the bone. He got me with an April Fool's joke — but given the conditions in Arizona, can you blame me for being taken in? Coronado has already been allowed to decline from one of America's best high schools to one stressed by a working poor student population. Meanwhile, a reader writes, "given your thorough knowledge of our situation down here what, if anything, do you see as positive trend lines or unique strengths for Phoenix metro and the state of Arizona?  I know you have written blog entries about the constructive things you would do if you 'were king of the forest,' but I am wondering more about some general comments about what you think are the long-term positives about living here? If any." In further correspondence, I asked him if he wanted me to leave out pie-in-the-sky stuff such as train service between Phoenix and Tucson. Yes. So I'll try to take up the challenge.

1. Climate. A significant number of people will put up with all manner of dystopia for hot weather and sunny days. No matter that the summers are hotter and last longer, that some years Phoenix suffers through nearly seven hot months (100 degrees on April 1st, no joke) — these folks like it. Thus, even though the migratory patterns that built modern Phoenix now face considerable question marks, the heat-seekers will still come. To the extent that population growth and a sizable population are positives, this trend can be counted on, until climate change and costly energy make the place largely unbearable. Even though the sweet season is shorter and shorter, it produces wonderful weather for tourists, snowbirds and part-year residents who aren't put off by extremist politics. This, too, will continue.

2. Sky Harbor. One of the nation's largest airports is a major economic engine, working symbiotically with the tourism industry. If it remains a hub for USAirways or a successor in a merger, as well as Southwest Airlines' busiest station (Southwest doesn't use hubs), this will keep PHX strong. With its own revenue stream and largely protected from the Kookocracy, the airport has the means to do some forward-looking projects such as the air train now under construction.

3. The affluent fringes. In my world, places such as Gilbert, Chandler, Goodyear, Glendale, Surprise and Peoria are mostly negatives. Still, they hold a growing number, probably even a majority, of the metropolitan area's residents with decent jobs or good retirement packages. They are still highly desirable to the sprawl building sector. They have well-funded schools, few poor minorities and new (car-based) infrastructure. And Chandler actually has an economy, with Intel. If this is your thing, these areas offer a very pleasant suburban lifestyle and will continue to hold up and grow. They will also continue to attract some capital investment even in a slow recovery. The potent LDS contingent will continue to add its wealth, cohesion and political clout, especially in the East Valley.

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Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix

The city in mind

As a native Westerner, my problem with "wide open spaces" is how many we've lost in my lifetime and how difficult it is to really live in what's left in a nation of 308 million. The constant move outward in metro Phoenix obliterates anything but the illusion. Today's wide vista out the window will be a Super Wal-Mart tomorrow. People who bought in Fountain Hills years ago — a development that annihilated one of the state's most lush saguaro forests, and it takes a saguaro ten years to grow an inch-and-a-half — are now partly surrounded by schlock. Same with Verrado, where the idiot David Brooks saw "the future." Prescott, a town with history and wonderful bones, is a planning and congestion disaster outside the old town. The same is true with Flagstaff, as with most small towns in America.

If you're rich and lucky enough to buy land adjacent to a National Park, maybe your panorama will have the illusion of the pristine, although we know the pollution, fire, sleazy land swaps and other stresses facing our public lands — and just wait for the GOP to privatize it. Move to the staked plains and you can find real emptiness, but good luck finding work. And if I want wide open spaces, do I profane them further with a new house, which by its very nature can't be "green," and total dependence on the automobile? Good luck finding a real, scalable, sustainable small town on a passenger train route.

For these reasons, as well as growing up in central Phoenix and for the eye-opening years I spent living in real cities, I choose to make my stand in the city. And it's a major focus of this blog. Most Americans don't "get" cities; they don't have urban values. Most want their imitation English country estates crowded together as lookalike tract houses in suburbia. The problems with this are manifold. First, the nation's population has doubled since Levittowns were first laid down. Thus, most suburbs suffer from urban problems without urban solutions. Second, they are artifacts of a moment in history defined by cheap gasoline, now passing away. Third, sprawl destroys vast tracts of valuable agricultural land, rural areas and wilderness, with numerous environmental strains. Fourth, for all the heavy subsidies to make suburbia work (freeways, flood control, etc.), it's a highly inefficient spatial arrangement. Suburbia is not merely boring and filled with anomie (American Beauty, etc.), it is now the epicenter of the housing crash, with attendant debt, poverty and very high carrying costs.

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Posted inPhoenix

‘The Mexican Detroit’

Talk about burying the lede. Last week's Arizona Republic story on the Census started out by reporting on how "Hispanics led Arizona's changing population over the past decade." It's only if one reads deeper, which most people don't, that the real news is found. This was the decade in which Phoenix set its trajectory to become a "majority minority" city. Phoenix added 140,000 Hispanic residents — and this is the official number, for a Census taken during the white-right and the Badged Ego's persecution of brown people. The city also saw the Anglo population decline by 64,000.

Read that again. Read it a third time, and realize, along with the failure to maintain the fifth-largest city position, that Phoenix has finally reached perhaps the most profound tipping point in its history.

You know that during the boom, I was told by more than one smug north Scottsdale toff that "Phoenix will become the Mexican Detroit." My response was usually along the lines of, "We'll be the center of the most important industry in the world, with high-skilled and high-paid jobs, and the richness of Hispanic culture to boot? Sign me up." Or, being a realist about the disaster that has pummeled Detroit for decades, "Do you think that will be good for your property values, even up in Troon North?" They didn't care. I do.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Rumors of moderation

Editor's Note: I especially urge you to check out the comments thread on this post. It veers a bit off-topic, to our beloved, ill-starred central Phoenix, but it's some of the best stuff our fine contributors have done.

The narrative surrounding the defeat of five anti-illegal immigrant bills in the Arizona State Senate goes like this: "Business leaders" finally weighed in to stop the worst excesses of Russell Pearce & Co., worried about their effect on the economy. As the New York Times put it, "In an abrupt change of course, Arizona lawmakers rejected new anti-immigration measures on Thursday, in what was widely seen as capitulation to pressure from business executives and an admission that the state’s tough stance had resulted in a chilling of the normally robust tourism and convention industry."

It's nothing of the kind. When Evan Mecham was forced from the governor's office in 1988, it was indeed driven by the business leadership — because there was one. Valley National Bank and Dial, for example, were still independent, major corporate headquarters, located in the central city, carrying the role of civic stewardship one expects from giants in their hometown. In addition, the Real Estate Industrial Complex saw that Mecham's brand of craziness and racism were badly damaging the state's reputation and ability to draw capital. The Arizona Republic was still locally owned, the flagship of a major newspaper chain headquartered in downtown Phoenix, and it both thundered and investigated, bringing questionable campaign contributions to light. The Legislature still had a Republican Party with a brain, as well as a robust Democratic competition.

Mecham, in some ways a tragic figure, was always an accidental governor, a product of the circular firing squad of the Democrats Bill Schultz and my mother's dear friend Carolyn Warner, and complacency by mainstream GOP candidate Burton Barr. Mecham was proudly ignorant, hostile to education, drunk on all manner of Bircher propaganda. He was, however, a warning of what was coming: The Big Sort bringing reactionary Midwesterners to Arizona who, allied with much of the LDS, promised a new kind of Arizona politics embodied by Pearce and today's state Republican Party. In any event, his undoing was a real example where Arizona came to its senses, led by a business leadership that still saw its interests twined with those of the broader state.

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Posted inPhoenix

We’re Number _ ?

The most telling aspect of Phoenix being surpassed by Philadelphia as the fifth-largest city in America — news that was broken first on Thursday by this humble blog — was the utter silence at the time in the local media. The Arizona Republic story on the Census numbers merely stated that Philadelphia had "retained" its position as No. 5. That's it. The situation was far different in the early 2000s when the Census Bureau officially stated that Phoenix had overtaken the City of Brotherly Love. The Republic had front-page growthgasm stories. My pal Montini, who came from near Pittsburgh so already had a grudge against the big city in eastern Pennsylvania, wrote a gloating, twist-the-knife column with a "Yo, Philly," headline. Now…silence. Cue chirping crickets. Philadelphians were not fooled. One tweeted: "Suck it, Phoenix." Indeed. (Update: the Republic finally produced a non-page-one story on Sunday…or was it Monday?).

When Phoenix began its brief reign as No. 5, the local triumphalism was loud and deep. I tagged along with Mayor Phil Gordon and City Council members who traveled to Philadelphia to meet with their counterparts. The latter were full of praise for my hometown, full of contrition about their corrupt, underclass-ridden city. Full of hubris, we had a grand time in the Center City's restaurants, shopping, parks, historical landmarks and architectural splendor. Back home, top officials talked about Phoenix inevitably overtaking Houston as No. 4 and soon catching up with Chicago. I am not making this up. "Then we'll be a world city," said one economic development leader, and then, presumably, Phoenix would magically create all the elements of such a place.

I take no pleasure in this development, although I warned about it last year. It's hard to shake the culture one grew up in. Bored in school in the 1960s, I would draw maps of the Salt River Valley and sketch avenues, freeways and developments yet to come. It was as inevitable in my ten-year-old brain as in those of John F. Long and the other Phoenix leaders that we would, indeed, become something great. As if a mass of people alone would make that happen. It's tempting to shrug this milestone off. A blow to what little prestige Phoenix enjoyed, to be sure, but what do these rankings really matter? In fact, this is a profound turning point — and not merely because the Texas cities have yet to have their counts revealed and Sheryl Sculley's San Antonio might still surpass Phoenix and knock it down another notch. (Addendum: Phoenix is officially No. 6: San Antonio came in at 1,327,407; this is cold comfort).

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Posted inPhoenix

No way to run a railroad

No other issue personifies the dysfunction at the heart of America — or as they would say on Twitter, #AmericaFail — as much as the inability to move ahead with high-speed rail. The Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress never made a serious effort. The $13 billion initially offered is nothing compared with what's needed. By comparison, China is spending $100 billion a year. Much of the money here would go to higher-speed rail, not the 155-mile-per-hour-plus systems that qualify as genuine high-speed rail. And the choice of Florida for the nation's first HSR line was always misplaced: Florida is a car-culture, suburbanized state, especially in Orlando and Tampa, the destinations of the line, with little appreciation or habit of taking trains. HSR would better be tried in rail-friendly territory, such as California or the Pacific Northwest, or making the Northeast Corridor true high speed. Then Americans could see how well such a system would really work. Now, with Republican governors in Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida refusing the federal money, and the GOP-controlled House solidly anti-rail, it looks as if even this modest start will come to little.

The Republican fetish against trains and transit, so well articulated by George Will (and followed by priceless takedowns by Paul Krugman and Jim Kunstler) has always fascinated me. It was Abraham Lincoln who started the heavily subsidized transcontinental railroad. Republican presidents after him further subsidized more railroads through land grants. "Internal improvements" was a key Republican issue. No more. Republicans routinely refuse to even consider rail or rail transit as necessary options for the nation. They most of all wage war against Amtrak, keeping it too underfunded to succeed with frequent, convenient schedules (and it's still wildly popular). These "conservatives" had no interest in conserving what was once the world's most advanced passenger rail system. Is it that they represent the suburbs and exurbs, so are mindless creatures of car culture. Or is it the billions spent by the oil, auto and sprawl industries to ensure America stays mired in a 1970s transportation system? Indeed, the U.S. government gives oil and gas companies $41 billion a year, nearly 40 times Amtrak's annual budget. As usual, the fecklessness of Democrats enables the problem (oh, for a real opposition party).

In the real world, passenger trains are a major part of the transportation systems of advanced nations. The April edition of Trains magazine, a special report on HSR (not available online, alas), is quite an eye-opener.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

City Hall

The first and perhaps only great mayor was Greek. He was Pericles of Athens, and he lived some 2500 years ago, and he said, "All things good on this Earth flow into the City, because of the City's greatness." Well, we were great once. Can we not be great again? — from the 1996 film City Hall.

Something strange is happening inside Phoenix City Hall, and I can't escape the nagging feeling that the ouster of police chief Jack Harris is part of it. Harris was removed as chief, but not as public safety director, after claims that the PPD inflated kidnapping numbers in order to get federal grants. Mayor Phil Gordon supported Harris, while Councilwoman Peggy Neely was a vocal Harris critic. That's the story so far, and the reporting has been disappointing. The back story has yet to fully emerge. (Here's a 3/11/11 update on council bickering; this is reaching Scottsdale levels of childishness).

To understand the modern Phoenix Police Department, you must go back to 1954, when Charlie Thomas was appointed chief. He was a rough equivalent of LA's William Parker, a modernizer and reformer who created a professional police force. PPD was never as corrupt or brutal as the LAPD that Parker inherited; it was a small force (149 officers for a city of 150,000) with a good-ole-boy culture in a mobbed-up town. It was still haunted by the 1944 murder of one its first African-American officers, "Star" Johnson, by detective "Frenchy" Navarre. Johnson and his partner were walking a beat in the Deuce when Frenchy, a notoriously brutal and racist cop, parked in a red zone off-duty and refused to move. He shot Johnson, who later died, and was acquitted by a Southern-culture Phoenix jury. Johnson's partner later came into Police Headquarters (on the first floor of the lovely, still-standing City-County Building) and gunned down Frenchy, who went down firing the two guns he wore. The bullet holes were in the walls for years. There was also the infamous World War II riot in "(racial slur) Town by soldiers, a rich historical event for some future scholar.

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Posted inPhoenix

The Rule of Holes, II

Seriously, are any accomplishments ever enough or would acknowledging them erode your critical bias of AZ?

So asked one of my sources who is close to the powers-that-be. First of all, this misunderstands several of the missions of this blog, which include holding the powerful accountable, putting the news in context, benchmarking Arizona and Phoenix competitiveness, and providing or seeking context. The state is filled with boosters and cheerleaders, as it was when I was a columnist for the Arizona Republic. But that's not my mission, then or now.

Thus, three solar plants have been announced for the Gila Bend area.  What's unclear: How many jobs these will create; whether and how much water they will require to cool the cells; how many fossil fuel "inputs" are required to make the solar plants and whether or at what point their "outputs" offset these inputs, and other environmental damage and trade-offs involved in using the divine gift that is the Sonoran Desert as a dump for a very intrusive technology. Most importantly, what is Arizona doing to regain the leadership in high-paid solar R&D jobs, a sector that it virtually invented in the 1950s but allowed to slip away to Germany and now China? So, yaaay! Acknowledgement has been made. But questions must be asked.

The same serious skepticism must be applied to Gov. Jan Brewer's $538 million package of corporate tax cuts. The governor and her supporters say this will help lure business and create jobs. Unfortunately, Arizona faces one of the worst structural fiscal crises in the nation, partly because of the recession hitting both sales tax revenues and also the state's main industry: house building. But the roots of the shortfall are years of tax cuts and an ongoing imbalance between revenues and expenses, even with state buildings sold off, university funding slashed, libraries cut back, state employees laid off and now hundreds of thousands of the working poor to be booted from Medicaid. These tax cuts have not produced a vibrant economy. They are based more on ideology than economic pragmatism.

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Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix

The Corner

In this city of loss called Phoenix, where do we even begin to mourn? The closure of the Borders store at the Biltmore gives a new generation something to miss, and a chain bookstore at that. Once the Biltmore Fashion Park was a unique shopping center of outdoor courts, shady trees, grass and low-rise, mid-century architecture. A few years ago, the odious Westcor/Macerich redid it to look like every other crapola shopping mall in suburban Phoenix. Ruined. Who cares if they decide to build a mega-mall in Goodyear — it will just be another lookalike ruin for the near future of this unsustainable place, a ruin no archeo-tourists will ever care to visit. The few who do will wonder how such a wealthy society could have squandered so many resources on such grotesquery (as they will wonder about the sprawl outside Denver, Seattle, Atlanta, etc.).

When I was growing up, the corner of McDowell and Seventh Avenue was but one of the many business districts that flourished in the area (Central was crowded with businesses from downtown to Camelback; McDowell along its length, the same with Thomas; the Gold Spot building on Roosevelt and Third Avenue was aging but busy). On the southwest corner was Val DeSpain's Chevron station and a Circle K, along with a forbidden tavern. Northwest was a gas station. The northeast corner held a distinctive, solid brick business building full of local retailers, including a barber and liquor store, then My Florist — a real flower shop — with its magical neon sign. The southeast corner was a treat: A Ryan-Evans Drug Store anchored a building with several shops, including the Best Cleaners and a Sprouse-Reitz five-and-ten store. The latter had a smashing red-tile front, while the drug store had its name proclaimed in neon. Each store in this strip had its own distinct front.

When I got back to Phoenix in 2000, most of the corner was in disrepair, the remaining buildings holding junk shops and a massively ugly Circle K box holding down the northwest side. But there seemed to be hope with David Lacy rehabbing My Florist as a restaurant. It was a huge success, a forerunner of midtown and downtown eateries to come (and go). The inside was beautifully appointed and at night the grand piano accompanied diners. It was never my florist: I found the menu unappealing, rather attuned to people who didn't really like to eat, and the servers were surly. Portland's and Cheuvront were more my style. But lots of people loved My Florist, many of whom had never even realized that the gems of the nearby historic districts existed. Is is safe to go down there?, some asked at first, living in the soulless suburbs where most of the lurid violence really takes place.

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Posted inPhoenix

Superiority complex

Judging from the comments on the previous post, readers were interested in hearing more about my appearance with former Arizona Republic Editorial Page Editor Keven Ann Willey toward the tail end of KJZZ's Here and Now on Wednesday. It's a measure of the true grit and journalistic integrity of host Steve Goldstein that he has me on his show every year or so. I can only imagine the pushback he gets from the Kooks (so tell his bosses if you like hearing me). But, yes, there's more to be said.

Of course, good people are working hard for Arizona, from the activists behind Save Arizona and the campaign to recall the odious Russell Pearce, to grassroots leaders such as Becky Daggett in Flagstaff and Kimber Lanning in Phoenix, to hard-fighting state Sen. Kyrsten Sinema at the capitol. They are part of the Resistance. But they are losing. Arizona has become dominated by the worst kind of public and private craziness. Things have degenerated badly since Willey decamped for the Dallas Morning News in 2002 and even since I was kicked out of the state in 2007. Yes, she's in Texas, a very red state, but it's also a place with the kind of robust economy, opposition, vigorous media (e.g. Texas Monthly) and truly diverse cities (e.g. blue Austin) that are all lacking in Arizona. Dallas just opened a new 28-mile segment of its 72-mile light-rail system, just one thing that's unimaginable in Arizona. Its red-state Texas-sized braggadocio about conservative governance has run up against one of the worst state fiscal crises in America.

So with all due respect to my friend and former Palmcroft resident Keven, she doesn't know Arizona now. When Evan Mecham was governor, he was eased out of office by the business leadership because he was a national embarrassment. Now the business leadership is gone or hiding or compromised, and worse-and-dumber people than Mecham keep rising in power. Internally, at least, Arizona is rewarded for extremism. Also, as an editorial-page editor, she's paid to temporize. As a columnist, I'm paid, or not, to break china and throw down idols in the name of the truth. As for Arizona, the rocks come with the farm, so quit complaining about being badly treated by the rest of America.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Nullification

The latest Kookocracy folly in Arizona is a nullification bill. According to the Arizona Republic, "proponents, including Gov. Jan Brewer and many GOP lawmakers, call their effort renewed federalism and cheer the push to reassert states' rights." States' rights, of course, is longstanding American paranoid code for de jure racism. Now, beyond that, it's used as a trope to do away with Obamacare and the EPA. But does anyone think a GOP federal government would allow, say, California to nullify a white-right law? This is just another set piece of white-right theater to keep the duhs and ignos distracted. Or is it? With more than six million people, Arizona has turned from national joke to national trend-setter, from its Jim Crow anti-immigration law to its becoming the most prominent hotspot for political violence (and isn't it interesting how quickly the national media backed away from any censure of the climate of violence and "anti-liberal" hate speech that led up to the assassination attempt on Gabby Giffords). What happens in Arizona doesn't stay in Arizona. And indeed, other red states want nullification, especially of the hated Obama health care revamp.

It's useful to recall the last time nullification was part of the national conversation. South Carolina passed a nullification act in 1832, to assert that the state would not be bound by a federal tariff that adversely affected the agrarian South. The South Carolinians backed down when they realized that President Andrew Jackson, no Barack Obama to put it mildly, would administer federal law with armed force — and if push had come to shove, Old Hickory would have done so with a bloody-mindedness than would have made Abraham Lincoln look like a pacifist, and the hotheads in Charleston and Columbia knew it. All this being history about which the Huppenthal home- and charter-schooled white-right are abysmally ignorant. Nevertheless, the Nullification Crisis was a step along the road to the Civil War. It was a sympton of an underlying unsustainable situation.

The crisis took place during a national economic downturn, as well as increasing sectional tension. Both of which apply today — and if the battle lines appeared more neatly drawn than today, it's useful to recall that most Southern states had strong pro-union movements. One of the most articulate anti-secessionists was Sam Houston. Again, we have sectional strife combined with a severe recession, and while the economy is on the mend the federal protection afforded the risky practices of the banksters virtually ensures another panic, sooner than later, and globalization is making the losers hurt ever more. All this drives political extremism.

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