Freeway to hell
What will be the final nail in the coffin of the city of Phoenix? I vote for the Loop 202 South Mountain Freeway.
If the freeway is built, it will be a gamble for everybody. A bet that the old sprawl model can work one last time to generate short-term profits for the Real Estate Industrial Complex by turning largely worthless land into sites for tilt-up commercial space, subdivisions, shopping strips, In-N-Out Burger boxes and the entire dreary aggregation of suburbia. Some stand to get very wealthy off the deal, including, apparently, Phoenix City Councilman Sal DiCiccio. Like so many "local leaders," he is not a high-tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist, stem-cell researcher, professor or clergyman — he's a real-estate guy. But with so much leverage still weighing down the development game and higher energy prices just around the corner, one has to wonder if the ol' Growth Machine has one more go in it. Yet Arizona is like a dinosaur whose tiny reptilian brain hasn't yet processed that its tail is on fire — so it will keep building out a 1965 transportation system.
It worked in LA in 1965 because Los Angeles actually had a real economy, not just a real-estate economy. And gasoline was still cheap; America itself had not yet hit its national oil peak. Now Southern California has destroyed so much of itself with freeways and, facing the damage, has embarked on rebuilding its once-great rail infrastructure. Thus, LA now has one of the nation's most extensive light-rail systems and commuter rail operations. In Phoenix (and this deserves its own Phoenix 101 post), freeways were mostly about maximizing profits for landholders and developers whose property was otherwise good only for agriculture or worthless desert. The real economy always lagged, and finally stopped trying to keep up entirely. But the biggest loser from the freeways was the city of Phoenix.
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