Posted inPhoenix

The vision thing

It's good to know that one sector in Phoenix has escaped the recession: the "visioning" industry. Meetings led by consultants and officials can still be held to get "public input" that will lead to…nothing. I remember such a farce that the "city" of Buckeye paid god-knows-how-much-for in the mid-2000s: Respondents most wanted commuter rail to Phoenix. Where are the trains?

The city of Phoenix's Planning Department has been going around to the assorted "urban villages" of this 500-square-mile collection of real-estate ventures asking citizens to "imagine Phoenix the best it can be in 2050." This is all part of updating the holy General Plan, which supposedly guides all development. As the city presentation puts it, "a General Plan is a comprehensive guide for all physical aspects of a city, but also addresses issues such as building neighborhoods and creating community." Like that General Plan of the 1970s that said Bell Road would absolutely, positively be the permanent northern boundary of Phoenix.

If I'm reading the information from the Downtown Voices Coalition correctly, the attendees at the central Phoenix meeting wanted higher density to support mixed use, downtown and transit. Alas, Ahwatukee's top vision for 2050 was "safety," although it wants light rail. The swells of Camelback East want something called "the village concept" (inbred people with pitchforks hiding a local monster?) — no mention of a downtown at all, certainly not light rail (it might bring "those people"). Far-off Desert View wants most a "small town, large city" feel. Maryvale at least ranks downtown and "proper public transit."

So much for imagining a great city.

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Posted inPhoenix

Dogfight over Luke

We may know as early as today if Luke Air Force Base will be chosen as a training base for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The decision would give Luke further life once its primary tenant, the F-16 fighters, are phased out. Not surprisingly, the western suburbs of Phoenix are ambivalent, even if many support Luke publicly. Built up long after the base had been in operations, its residents are outraged at the jet noise. (Shoulda checked that out before you thought you were getting so much house for the money in that crapola lookalike subdivision). Encroaching sprawl, meanwhile, has had the base on a razor's edge of closing for years.

The group Luke Forward supports the base's continued existence. But Luke faces the mos powerful enemy: the Real Estate Industrial Complex. In other words, these economic elites — including, according to some sources, the Mormon Church, which owns land nearby — want the base to go away so they can continue building on the same sprawl model as the past 50 years. It's a big leap of faith: the old Growth Machine may not regain its health for years, if ever. But the Real Estate Industrial Complex is a simple-minded dinosaur. It feeds (builds tract houses, pockets quick profits). Its brain doesn't even realize its tail is on fire from economic, environmental and social tectonic shifts.

If Luke closes, to be replaced by more subdivisions and shopping strips, it will once again represent the colossal lack of imagination that keeps the Arizona economy backward (but highly profitable for the status quo).

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Posted inPhoenix

The men who would be Frank

Four finalists have reportedly emerged to replace retiring Phoenix City Manager Frank Fairbanks. All are current City of Phoenix employees. They're good men, and David Krietor and Ed Zuercher especially hold promise. Still, the finalist lineup reinforces the sense of Phoenix's parochialism and inward-looking mindset. It's a problem that extends far beyond City Hall. But it's significant given government's huge footprint in a city with no major corporate headquarters, influential civic stewards or powerful business interests beyond building more sprawl (which apparently extends to self-dealing city council members). There is, simply, no other major American city as limited as Phoenix in its economy or centers of power — or its lack of self-awareness. So something that elsewhere might seem routine, carries big weight and risk here.

This is also a portentous moment for a changing of the guard. When Fairbanks became city manager in 1990, Phoenix was in a nasty real-estate recession but otherwise still on a sunny trajectory it had enjoyed since the end of World War II. City Hall's reputation for clean government and efficiency earned it the Bertelsmann Prize as one of the two best-run cities in the world. In the early '90s, the city still had corporate leaders such as Dial and Valley National Bank. Chastened by the real-estate bust, leaders established the Greater Phoenix Economic Council and worked to diversify the economy. Phoenix was the uncontested regional leader; the suburbs were still relatively small. Its population was much more middle class.

Fairbanks' successor will inherit a far different city, and not merely one that has grown to 1.5 million from 983,000 in 1990.

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Posted inPhoenix

Hey, y’all, watch this!

Since at least the 1980s, the Arizona Republic and its successor, The Information Center, have periodically rolled out campaigns to make the economy more than attracting freezing Midwesterners and building sprawl. I did my time in the trenches on several of these efforts earlier in the decade. The work continues with a Sunday story about attracting high-paid jobs and diversifying the economy. On the Viewpoints front, we find a piece explaining the stakes and solutions by Ioanna Morfessis, the first president of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council. Then there is the obligatory rebuttal by the Local Krackpot "Think" Tank: "Cut taxes and incentives to create jobs." Also: "Reducing government red tape would also create a job-friendlier climate."

And does anyone wonder why Phoenix and Arizona keep falling further behind? First, why does the "Goldwater" Institute have standing to weigh in on anything? It's an advocacy group funded by national "conservative" interests, repeating national talking points just like all the other right-wing "think tanks" that were seeded around the country out of the Mont Pelerin Society and other wealthy reactionary groups in the 1980s and 1990s. It is like PETA or the NRA. In no way is it an organization that does real research. And after years of the same old lines, what does it have to say that's new? What does its sock puppet on the editorial page have to say that's new? Nothing. Can't the Info Center find even one independent conservative voice to write something that's relevant and interesting?

More importantly: The ideology so relentlessly peddled by the "Goldwater" Institute has run Arizona for years if not decades. Its polemicists always strike the pose of victims standing up against the hordes of socialists that control everything — but it's a lie. They won. They're sore winners, out to quash any dissenting voices. Now they must continue to distract, keep the poor talk-radio zombies thinking that guv'munt is the problem. They must continue to carry water for the Real Estate Industrial Complex, which really controls the state (Please, God, give me one more boom…). All this because their ideology, implemented with ruthless, relentless effectiveness, has driven Arizona into the worst depression in its modern history. Their ideas have been tried and failed. And still they rule the day.

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Phoenix 101: Mesa
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Mesa

Mesa depot 2

The Southern Pacific depot in downtown Mesa, circa 1963, when six passenger trains a day still served the station.

I got a rare treat in the mid-'60s for a poor kid from the 'hood: Getting to see Willie Mays play in a game of the Giants vs. the Dodgers. It was spring training and we drove to the little ballpark in Mesa. The game was great. Unfortunately, we were in the family 1959 Ford Galaxie, a source of never ending trouble and built, as my mother never tired of saying, during Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's tenure as Ford president. That night the only gear that would work was reverse — and we drove all the way home to Phoenix going backwards.

It's low-hanging fruit to grab this memory as a metaphor for what has happened to Arizona's third most populous city. A city so populous, indeed, that it is larger than St. Louis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis or Pittsburgh — and has nothing to show for it. No major university (an iffy branch of ASU miles from downtown doesn't count); no major corporate headquarters; no great museums; no magical neighborhoods. City Hall looks like a low-end office building. Even the area around the Arizona Temple, Mesa's one majestic asset, has been allowed to crater. The miles of enchanting citrus groves have almost all been bulldozed (and when I asked in 2006 if there was any preservation effort for the remainder, a top city official looked at me blankly).

It's a sad, and in many way surprising outcome. But operating by Arizona's rule of "when in a hole, keep digging," Mesa shows every sign of continuing the practices that got it in what is a morass even by Phoenix standards. The Cubs are playing the city for fools, threatening to leave, shopping spring training sites around the area, including some on the rez. Mesa's response could be to plan an intimate ballpark downtown on the light-rail line. It would enhance critical mass for a walkable urban space that Mesa lacks. It would be much more pleasant that the newer spring-training parks with their endless parking lagoons amid dehumanizing sprawl. It would help prepare Mesa to prosper in the higher-cost energy future.

Not surprisingly, Mesa is scouting two sites in the middle of nowhere, but on the all mighty freeway. When in a hole, keep digging.

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Posted inPhoenix

Oh, for a newspaper in Phoenix

Phoenix, the nation's fifth-largest city, hasn't had a newspaper since 2007. I'm not being snarky. The storied, beloved and hated Arizona Republic was replaced by The Information Center. Its owner Gannett was very clear about this when the change was made. Staffers were told over and over: "We're not a newspaper anymore." It shows.

That's too bad, because troubled places, corruption, exploitation of the weak and the crushing of fair play thrive when there's no real newspaper. Wal-Mart quit the despicable practice of taking out insurance policies — payable to the company — on its minimum-wage, part-time workers only when the practice was reported by the Wall Street Journal. Exposing wrongs in a complex world, and explaining that world, usually takes highly trained, highly motivated, intensely curious veteran journalists. Such work can't be done by "crowd-sourcing" or "citizen journalists" or any of the cheap fads publishers have used to get rid of their cranky, higher-paid intellectual capital. Some fine journalists remain at The Information Center, but they are rarely allowed to really follow their calling, especially upon a growing herd of sacred cows.

Oh, for a newspaper in Phoenix. One to write hard-news-put-'em-in-jail investigative journalism. One to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. To report the news and raise hell. To dig through court, government and business records, and cultivate deep, authoritative sources. To illuminate and hold accountable the most dominant institutions. If it existed, I can think of ten major stories to get it started:

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Posted inPhoenix

‘Why do you hate Arizona?’

This was a question asked by a reader of a recent post. It's a fair question that deserves an answer. I will try to be concise.

1. I am not selling anything associated with the sunshine/real estate Ponzi scheme, so I have no reason to lie to the boobs — oops, potential customers from the Midwest or inland California about the true state of affairs in Arizona.

2. I am not one of the boobs from the Midwest or inland California who bought into what was billed as "a piece of unspoiled Sonoran Desert — with championship golf!," only to find dreary suburbia in a frying pan set on high. And now I'm too embarrassed to admit I was a sucker but angry at anyone who implies it.

3. I am not a member of the Real Estate Industrial Complex or the Kookocracy. Therefore, I don't profit from either the booster growthgasm Kook-Aid, the ongoing destruction of the state or the constant inflaming of grievances against "guvment," brown people or columnists who speak truth to power.

4. I am a mean, mean man.

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Phoenix 101: ‘Master planned communities’
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: ‘Master planned communities’

South Mountain sprawl
Phoenix had perhaps the worst luck of any major American city from the standpoint of urban design and civic beauty. It came of age in a huge spurt of growth in the 1950s and beyond. The City Beautiful Movement was forgotten. Suburbia, lookalike houses, automobiles and long single-occupancy car trips moved to the center of American life.

An old city still exists — what wasn't torn down by City Hall from the '70s through the '90s — but it's not much and most Phoenicians don't even realize it exists. When I lived in Willo, it was always painfully entertaining to be picked up by the airport shuttle, already full of people from the suburbs. They were giddy over the front porches! The shade trees! The old houses and walkable neighborhood and closeness to the center of the city! I learned that their real-estate agents had never even showed them this part of the city.

Suburbia wasn't always, as Jim Kunstler would put it, a cartoon landscape not worth caring about. Willo was once a suburb on the streetcar from a compact Phoenix. In Cincinnati, there's the magical Mariemont, a leafy "planned town" from the 1920s, which accommodated the American longing to "get out of the awful city," while creating a real community and a real human space worth caring about. It was accessible by — especially by — streetcar and interurban railway to downtown Cincinnati. Now the latter two are long gone as America has embraced a life with fewer choices.

A large number of people in metro Phoenix and a majority of the Anglo middle class  live in something altogether different — a radical enterprise that has transformed civic life, urban form and even democracy: the "master planned community."

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Posted inPhoenix

Arizona, unstimulated

The political faith of the Kookocracy is not just that government "is the problem," but that government is outright evil. Without the socialist Jan Brewer restraining them, they dream of a state with a government out of the Coolidge years (without that pesky Herbert Hoover as Commerce Secretary). I'll never forget giving a speech to some Phoenix Young Republicans. A woman in her twenties said all aid to the less fortunate should be terminated. If they protest? "Shoot them in the streets," she said, chillingly serious.

Of course, in the reality based world Arizona is a government creation, and takes more in government services than it pays in taxes. It is a welfare queen. Despite all the cries of "SOCIALISM," it has taken federal stimulus money. Nevertheless, the faith persists. Low taxes, little regulation and a continuing battle to stifle any "activism" (such as funding Science Foundation Arizona or that Don Budinger and his efforts to improve impoverished schools) will produce the best "business climate" in the country. Anybody in need, well, deserves their lot. Best-practices used around the world for economic development are SOCIALISM!!

So how's that working out for you?

Arizona gets an F grade in the new Assets and Opportunities Scorecard from the non-partisan (and backed by big business) CFed. Arizona is one of only five states to get the lowest grade in this report that tracks 92 measures of well-being. Its peers are all in the South. You don't need a report to know the depression that is ravaging Phoenix. One out of four residents is uninsured.

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Posted inPhoenix

Valley of denial

ASU's Morrison Institute has always labored under two Sisyphean tasks. First, its public-policy scholarship necessarily antagonized the state's ruling elites — hence, it was forced to pull its punches to avoid losing funding, and, even then, the elites wouldn't accept its work. Second, it was treated in the media as the "liberal" equivalent of the (Bob) Goldwater Institute. This, even though the "Goldwater" Institute is an arm of the national right-wing advocacy machine, not a genuine think tank that engages in open-minded, peer-reviewed research. With the loss a few years ago of my sometime collaborator Mary Jo Waits, author of Morrison's most prescient and important works (Five Shoes, Meds and Eds), the institute became even more marginalized. Now Morrison is trying once again to become part of the conversation under the leadership of Sue Clark-Johnson, retired Arizona Republic publisher and close friend of ASU President Michael Crow.

Good luck. Unfortunately, the first effort, Forum 411, seems destined for the dustbin of forgotten, well-intended reports at an even faster speed than its predecessors. It is brief, as to be expected from an entity now headed by a former Gannett executive, and strives to be inoffensive. Think of a pep talk. Anthony Robbins on economic development. It states two broad themes: the obvious (Arizona needs to diversify its economy) and the untrue (which I will deal with momentarily). Worst of all, it leaves critical information entirely out. The loss of Waits' intellectual heft is obvious. So, too, is the continued bowing before the Real Estate Industrial Complex (the report's sponsor is the suburban mall developer, Westcor).

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

The Hispanic illusion

Progressives and liberals cling to the expectation that Republican antagonism of Hispanics will lead to electoral disaster. This was ever-present during the confirmation fight over Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Now the predictions of GOP doom are back. This time Republicans are slitting their own throats by using the health-care-for-illegal-immigrants lie to reignite the anti-immigrant (anti-Hispanic) hysteria in The Base. This is suicide to alienate the nation's largest and fastest-growing minority, and it will be especially lethal for Republicans in the Southwest, with its huge Hispanic population. That, at least, is the view from Washington, D.C. The reality can be summed up in two words.

Joe Arpaio.

The Italian-American sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, anchored by the nation's fifth-largest city, Arpaio waged a vicious campaign against illegals ahead of last fall's election. Egged on by talk-radio haters, the "sweeps" were part of a notorious climate of antagonism against all Hispanics, even Mexican-Americans who have been in the country for generations. Arpaio didn't go after the Anglo Republicans who employed the illegals. He arrested the weak, the vulnerable, the already exploited. Maricopa County is at least one-third Hispanic citizens who might object to this racist atmosphere. Risky, no? And it should be added that the incumbent was lacking in many ways that informed citizens of ethnic groups should have found deserving of a swift kick to the door. Arpaio was re-elected by a landslide — and the sweeps mostly stopped, having served their purpose for a publicity seeking hotdog many other cops call "The Badged Ego."

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Phoenix Underworld
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History Phoenix Confidential

Phoenix Underworld

BollesCar

The scene after Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was fatally injured when a bomb went off in his car in 1976.

You don't have to scrape too far beneath the veneer of "a clean, new, well-run city" to understand that Phoenix is perhaps historically one of America's more corrupt, crime-run cities. It didn't get a great city in exchange for its corruption, as with Chicago. And being crime-run isn't the same as being crime-ridden, so whatever statistics the boosters pull out to show community safety are really beside the point.

It's long been this way. When I was a child, Phoenicians sniffed that Tucson was the Mafia town, with Joe Bonanno, Pete Licavoli Sr., and company. Yet the FBI estimated that in the 1960s Phoenix had more mobsters per capita than New York City. I grew up just a few blocks from the house where, in 1958, Gus Greenbaum and his wife had their throats slit in retaliation for Gus' skimming from the casino tills in Vegas (and, local lore has it, the hitmen then ate the steaks the Greenbaums had just cooked). Phoenix was full of bars (Rocky's Hideaway, the old Blue Grotto, Ivanhoe, the Clown's Den, etc.) frequented by made men and the wanna-bes.

This was not the result, as some would have it, of "the Wild West atmosphere." Rather, it was the interface between a city growing too fast with few rules or institutional checks and the migration of Midwestern gangsters to exploit the situation (or, later, to be relocated by the feds). And an establishment willing to look the other way, or join in the "business." A culture of fraud built on successive real-estate booms, or scandals such as the collapse of Arizona Savings in the early 1960s, also made the city a magnet for criminals. The most prominent figure in this was Ned Warren (aka Nathan Waxman), the Kingpin of Arizona Land Fraud. He figured in the Bolles bombing.

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Posted inPhoenix

Arizona: Image and reality

It's easy to return from vacation because the Arizona Laff Riot writes my best material for me. Case in point: A Page One story in the Information Center headlined, "Does Arizona have an image problem?"

When some future Gibbon writes about the decline and fall of American civilization — which you're getting to live through — he or she will find ample material in the treasure paid out to management consultants. One of their favorite tricks is to distract productive employees with drivel over "image" and "branding." This works to the advantage of entrenched management and culture because it avoids dealing with real problems that are substantive, not image. And so it is, especially, with the Grand Canyon State.

The Information Center editors apparently gave the reporter the task of blaming the state's recent high-profile troubles on "the spotlight cast by cable-news pundits, newspaper editorials and blogs – including censure from a world-renowned travel writer" and "the flow of bad publicity." The real danger posed by an assault-rifle wielding man at an appearance by the president — danger in itself, and the menace it unleashes in the minds of the already unhinged lunatic fringe — was merely a "stunt." Phoenix's lethal achievement as America's people-smuggling and kidnapping capital, as well as a major distribution center for drugs to the U.S. and guns to Mexico — all airy misperceptions.

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Phoenix 101: Vulnerabilities
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Vulnerabilities

PaloVerdeNuclearGeneratingStation
The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, built upwind from the nation's fifth-largest city and plagued for years by regulator's safety concerns. It is the only nuclear plant in the world not near a large body of water.

People move to Phoenix bragging about the lack of blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. True enough. Yet they are moving into a place burdened by its own special hazards. They're the ones your real estate agent didn't mention; the ones that what is left of journalism rarely covers. That nobody talks about them besides — I hope — emergency planners, does not make them any less dangerous. Indeed, a case could be made that Phoenix is one of the highest-risk metro areas in the nation. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Risk Index, Maricopa County is rated "relatively high." Higher than "tornado alley" in Kansas and Oklahoma.

One of the most populous metropolitan areas in the nation has been built in a hostile desert. It's isolated, with limited highways, no passenger rail and surrounded by hundreds of miles of inhospitable, waterless badlands. Evacuation in an emergency would be impossible. The closest large cities — Tucson and Las Vegas — are as vulnerable as Phoenix. Gasoline must be brought in by pipelines from refineries hundreds of miles away. Water and the electricity for air conditioning depend on complex, vulnerable systems.

This harsh reality should have been brought home earlier in this decade, when, amidst brutal August heat, a gasoline pipeline broke; a year later, a mid-summer transformer fire threatened to shut down the power grid. The gas crisis was particularly frightening. Fights broke out at filling stations. People drove around in search of a tanker truck to follow. More inquisitive residents were surprised that such a large city has no refinery and is served by only two pipelines, one from the east, one from the west, built decades ago when Phoenix held a fraction of its current population.

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Phoenix 101: The High Country
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: The High Country

East_Clear_Creek_at_bridge

East Clear Creek near the Mogollon Rim

Mention the High Country now and several images come to mind. Escape from Phoenix during the worst days of summer. "Cabins," for those with means, that are usually just subdivisions plopped down amid the pines, sometimes with a golf course attached. Flagstaff's charming downtown. Prescott Valley's hideous sprawl. Wildfire season. The horrific traffic on Interstate 17 and the Beeline Highway.

Thank God, I got to see a very different High Country, as different from what exists now as old Phoenix was from the current migropolis.

Even in the 1960s, it was rough, empty country. The entire state population in 1960 was 1.3 million — smaller than the city of Phoenix now — and 1.7 million in 1970. In 1960, Flagstaff had 18,000 people, Prescott 13,000, Payson wasn't even counted (it had 1,800 in 1970). And yet Arizona had built good highways — and still had passenger trains — so it was possible to explore this enchanted land in relative comfort.

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