Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Newspapers are full of retrospectives on the Panic of 2008, the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession. Phoenix and Arizona were one of the ground zeros of the housing crash, the result being the worst recession here since the Great Depression.

True, its effects were buffered by the safety net of the hated Franklin Roosevelt, including the copious amounts of Social Security checks that kept coming from the hated federal government. Still, unemployment shot up to nearly 11 percent statewide by 2010, slightly less in Phoenix and Tucson. The main industry, housebuilding, had been shot in the head. Prices fell 50 percent in many cases. Recovery was much slower than peer metros.

A decade later, single-family building permits are back at early 1990s levels. Construction employment is not only not recovered from the 2000s bacchanal but far below historic trend. This would be good news for conservationists but for the fact that much of existing and planned construction involves suburban pods in bladed desert, farmland, or forest.

So let others discuss Lehman Brothers, the Federal Reserve, how close we came to a second Great Depression, the good and bad of the response and recovery. What's so striking in Phoenix is how little was changed by this tectonic event. 

I see that the local-yokel boosters bamboozled Popular Mechanics into doing a story claiming that Bill Gates wants to build a "smart city" in the Phoenix exurbs. This lacks any corroborating evidence, any skeptical journalism. It is, as the old newsroom joke goes, a story too good to check. What we do know is that Gates' investment arm plinked down $80 million for a stake in the speculative "master planned community" called Belmont. The promoters want to built 80,000 tract houses, along with industrial, office, and retail space.

The whole thing strikes me as dodgy. Water availability, especially in the long-term, is one of the two biggest issues facing Phoenix. A game of musical chairs is being played thanks to the complexity and opaqueness of Arizona's water law and enforcement. But the outlook is not good. The metro area and state are past population overshoot, especially for the one-trick-pony of building single-family detached tract houses in an ever-widening footprint of sprawl. The other unpleasant reality is climate change, which bodes very ill for the state. More sprawl destroys the unique, lovely Sonoran Desert.

The ghost of Ned Warren is looking on the spectacle of taking $80 million in Bill Gates' chump change with envy. As I wrote in a Seattle Times column, being one of the world's cleverest men in one field — bringing enormous riches — does not make you smart in everything else. Maybe he'll make a quick buck if the project is ever built. The suckers left holding the bag won't be so fortunate.

Similar sad hilarity came from a New York Times Magazine piece about Doug Ducey making Arizona the capital of self-driving cars. No regulations, come on down! The problem is that the companies will neither have their well-paid design and engineering jobs nor make the vehicles here. They will merely use our abundant freeways and wide streets to experiment. What could go wrong? 

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell — Edward Abbey

The closed-loop belief system of the local-yokels is that as long as Phoenix is adding people, it can't be that bad. End of discussion. Thus, when the Census Bureau announced that Maricopa County was the nation's fastest growing for the year ending July 1, 2016, it set off earth-shaking, sheet-clawing growthgasms. The gain of 81,000 was still below the pre-recession trend line — even accepting the yokel "logic" — but there we have it. Everything's fine!

Phoenix has operated by this hugely subsidized Ponzi scheme for decades and there's no indication anything will change until the roof really falls in.

As in, when overshoot makes it impossibly costly to sustain such a large population in a frying pan. When the Republicans make retirement a pre-New Deal cruelty so that people don't have the means to retire, much less to the hot climes of "the Valley." When the GOP succeeds in cutting so much federal funding that welfare queens such as Phoenix slink to the national homeless shelter. When climate change makes the place unbearable. The recent calamities of the Great Recession, where Phoenix was an epicenter, did nothing to give a moment of clarity. Even an outmigration wouldn't change things. The boat-rockers who advocated a different city and state were long ago run off or silenced.

Exurban sprawl in the Verde Valley, which competes for water resources with the Salt River Project.

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell" — Edward Abbey
I was reading an Arizona Republic story about the state seeking ways to "prop up" Lake Mead to "forestall painful and chaotic shortages for at least a few years." The number that sat me back was that Arizona draws 40 percent of its water from the Colorado River.

For an old-timer like me this is an astounding statistic. In 1960, Arizona took very little water from the river. Greater Phoenix, which constituted 50 percent of the state's population, received all its water from the dams and reservoirs on the Salt and Verde rivers. The rest of the state was heavily dependent on ground water, the pumping of which was already a longstanding problem, with a few other renewable river sources. But the entire state held 1.3 million people — less than the population of today's city of Phoenix.

What nobody wants to discuss is when does Arizona hit population overshoot? With more than 6.8 million people, a population that places it in the ranks of such states as Massachusetts and Washington, one could argue it already has. This is particularly true considering the combination of an over-subscribed Colorado and the growing stress of climate change.

It's virtually a forbidden topic. Even after the housing collapse, Arizona's economy remains a one-trick pony dependent on adding more people, building more sprawl, creating a Sun Corridor from Benson to Flagstaff. The local-yokel boosters mounted up to attack Andrew Ross' superbly researched and well argued book, Bird on Fire: Lessons From the World's Least Sustainable City, precisely because he crossed the line. He asked the existential questions about the vast Ponzi scheme. I did the same as a Republic columnist, despite being warned from the most powerful levels: Don't write about water. I did and I was out.

The national progressive echo chamber had quite a fit last week when former Gov. Jan Brewer brushed off the suggestion that Hispanics would cause Hillary Clinton to win Arizona. "Nah," she told the Boston Globe, "They don't get out and vote. They don't vote." The thought police pounced, condemnations flooded Facebook, and a Twitter lynch mob gathered at such a racist statement.

But she told the truth. Rare for her, perhaps unprecedented, but accurate for once.

Hispanics made up 30 percent of the population of Maricopa County in 2014, compared with only 16 percent in 1990. Yet in that critical election, their voter participation rate was in the single digits. And it can't be explained away by saying that low-income people vote less. The low-income Anglos vote religiously and conservatively.

Brewer, an accidental governor when St. Janet read the future and decamped for D.C. and then California, did much to help ensure this. As Secretary of State, charged with overseeing elections, she was also chair of the state Bush re-election committee in 2004. I'm sure polling locations were abundant and well handled in majority Latino precincts. Then, running on her own, she defeated the eminently better-qualified Terry Goddard on the strength of her backing the anti-immigrant SB 1070.

As I have written before, SB 1070 had little to do with illegal immigration and everything to do with ginning up the old Midwestern-immigrant Anglo GOP base and intimidating Mexican-American citizens. And one of the dirty secrets was that not a few older Mexican-Americans, who had seen their neighborhoods, schools, and culture most destabilized by the wave of illegals in the 2000s, quietly supported the bill, too.

But the problem of low Hispanic turnout predates the embarrassing, finger-in-the-face-of-the-president Jan Brewer, a woman who would drive down the class level of the trashiest trailer park.