Tunneling into the new boom
Posted inPhoenix

Tunneling into the new boom

Papago_Freeway_Tunnel
While I was in Phoenix last week, the Census Bureau released news showing the biggest annual jump in median household income since 1967 and poverty falling the most in 50 years. Nationally, incomes jumped 5.2 percent from 2014 to last year, to $56,516. The numbers are adjusted for inflation. Thanks, Obama.

The data are more complicated for Phoenix and low-tax/light-regulation Arizona. Income statewide rose 2.8 percent to $51,492. Yet it was down 9.7 percent compared with 2007. Metropolitan Phoenix median household income increased 3.9 percent to $55,547.

In other words, the state and metro area trailed a nation that includes Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia. Phoenix was No. 25 among the largest metros, with Nashville and Birmingham in the lead in percentage increase.

Drilling down to the city level is even more sobering. Seattle, which is undertaking numerous progressive policies that would supposedly kill business, led the nation with a total increase of $9,374 to $80,349. Blue Portland jumped $6,268 to $60,892. Denver, another blue city, saw incomes rise $3,062 to $58,003. And Phoenix? Its income struggled up $523 to $48,452. (No, that's not a misprint).

If any comfort can be had, San Diego's median household income rose a mere $72 to $67,871. But metro Phoenix's underperforming is a serious problem. The city's poor showing is even more troubling, the "hole in the doughnut" effect. More than 23 percent of the city's residents are below the federal poverty line, compared with 13.5 percent nationally and 17.4 percent for Arizona. The state's poverty rate fell 0.9 percent from 2014 to 2015, but had risen 3.2 percent since 2007.

No, purchasing power doesn't cut it as an excuse. The conservative Tax Foundation used federal Bureau of Economic Analysis stats to calculate the real value of $100 in each state. Statewide in Arizona you get $103.73, but that's not much, and I wonder how much it translates to more expensive metro Phoenix. The bottom line is that Arizona's conservative policies have not yielded a strong economy, especially one required for such a populous state.

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Flipping Arizona?
Posted inPolitics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

Flipping Arizona?

Hillary_Clinton_by_Gage_Skidmore_3
The new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll has Hillary Clinton within one point of Donald Trump in Arizona. You read that right. This is in line with a polling average from Real Clear Politics, which even had Clinton slightly ahead during and after both parties' conventions. 

Is it possible that Hillary could flip Arizona to the Democrats? After all, her husband won the state in 1996. I am skeptical.

Bill Clinton won in a very different Arizona. The state was still competitive for Democrats and "experts" predicted that continued population growth would favor the party. Arizona's population expanded by 40 percent in that decade, but it was the "big sort," where people came seeking ideological co-religionists. It was almost entirely on the right. With the exception of the surprise election of St. Janet in 2002 and hopes for her "sensible center," Arizona politics trended ever more rightward. Today not a single statewide office is held by a Democrat.

From the 1980s on, Republicans patiently took control of school boards, municipal offices, tightened their control of the Legislature and Corporation Commission, built a massive infrastructure including fake "think tanks," the charter school racket, private prison racket, and the aid of the Real Estate Industrial Complex. The Democrats never knew what hit 'em. The best Napolitano could do was play defense.

In our Cold Civil War, with the nation more divided than any time since the eve of the Civil War, Arizona sits comfortably in the New Confederacy. I can still start a fight on Facebook by praising light rail (WBIYB).

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Silicon Valley in Phoenix?
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix

Silicon Valley in Phoenix?

Phx_skyline_2010
Earlier this month, the New York Times published a story, most of which could have been written by the chamber of commerce, under the headline, "Bay Area Start-Ups Find Low-Cost Outposts in Arizona."

It rubbed me the wrong way from the start, because the story is not about Show Low or Why, Kingman, or even Tucson, but metropolitan Phoenix. I will never understand why one of the most magical city names in America is banished for the amorphous and sometimes inaccurate "Arizona." Anyway, riding with that burr under my saddle, I tried to approach the article with an open mind.

Unfortunately, it had all of the weaknesses of "parachute journalism." The writer, based in the Bay Area, parachutes into a little-known burg with an angle, assembles a few anecdotes, talks to a local economic development expert, adds some data from Moody's, widens the lens a bit to make the story about a broader trend, and presto! This is not easy stuff, particularly if you're not armed with history and skepticism. The only good parachute journalist I ever personally knew was Leah Beth Ward, my colleague from the Cincinnati Enquirer and Charlotte Observer.

It's not that I don't want success for Phoenix. Far from it. I was the Arizona Republic columnist who wiped out forests and digital space writing about Michael Crow and ASU, Jeff Trent and T-Gen, and Bill Harris and Science Foundation Arizona, the efforts to elevate the economy under Gov. Janet Napolitano and Phoenix Mayors Skip Rimsza, Phil Gordon, and Greg Stanton. I rarely felt that the brightsiders had my back. It is about time to see some payoff.

The story had none of this context and lacked much more. The reporter did not even avail himself of the readily available journalism about Arizona's crippling problems. Which is too bad for those of us who want to know the real score. So Homey did some digging.

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A death observed
Posted inPolitics: National

A death observed

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ObserverSite

Apparently, most Americans learned about the death spiral of metropolitan newspapers and the consequences from watching John Oliver. Then they went back to kitten videos on social media. None of this is new to readers of Rogue Columnist (see here and here). My aim today is more modest.

As Oliver's well-worth-watching segment was going viral, a few of us were following the demolition of the Charlotte Observer building in downtown (or as the boosters insist ahistorically, Uptown) Charlotte. The photo above shows the work about half done a few weeks ago. The building, which took up a city block, was once as substantial on the Tryon Street side (left) as it remained on the Stonewall Street side in the top photo. Below is the site as of August 29th — all gone.

During my 30 years (!) in the working press, I have been employed by 10 newspapers across the country. I never made it to the New York Times, but I was fortunate to work at some of the finest metro papers in America, among some of the best journalists. The Knight Ridder-owned Observer was one. It was here that I was able to hit my zenith of business-section turnarounds — and the credit goes to my gifted colleagues, I only pointed the way. If I live long enough, I'll tell some of the stories. Unlike the Rocky Mountain News, the Observer is still going, in much more modest leased space (the name isn't even on the building).

But today I mostly want to meditate on the building and its meaning. This classic piece of Knight Ridder hulking architecture was no beauty. But it symbolized the importance and power of the newspaper, which not only committed great journalism but was a large employer. Before the collapse, the typical metro daily could employ 1,500 people or more in real jobs, not "gigs," in a multitude of departments from advertising and dispatch to platemaking and the press room. In the lobby, through large windows, you could watch the massive presses run. From college graduates and creative bohemians to skilled blue-collar workers and high-school dropouts — a major newspaper offered secure work and paths up.

If you had paid your dues at little papers, if you earned a reporting or editing job at a well-respected metro, you knew you had arrived and had much proving to do in order to remain — the imposing building alone told you. The building housed not only a newsroom, but a sizeable manufacturing, advertising, marketing, and distribution center. At one time, trucks from here took bundles of the Charlotte Observer to places across the Carolinas every night. It was a major civic institution — Observer Publisher Rolfe Neill was one of the four or five titans who turned Charlotte from a middling Southern big town into a major metropolis of national consequence, and who revived downtown.

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Phoenix in the eighties
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix 101: History Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Phoenix in the eighties

Wrigley_Mansion_looking_south_Estrellas_South_Mountain_1980sThe Wrigley looking southwest over the city in the 1980s (Photographer unknown).

On the night in 1968 after President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill authorizing construction of the Central Arizona Project., my mother took me on a long drive. We went through the citrus groves, the empty farmlands between the towns, the enchanting oasis that was Phoenix. Like many who had dedicated a good part of their lives to win the CAP, she had deep misgivings. She wanted me to see the place, burn it in my brain, and remember. "It will be gone," she said. She didn't live to see her prediction come true. But the ferocious transformation of Phoenix from my beloved old city to the nearly unrecognizable concrete desert of today largely  happened during the last two decades of the twentieth century. The big changes began in the 1980s.

In 1980, Phoenix's population was nearly 790,000, up 36 percent from 1970. The city would grow slower in the 1980s — up 25 percent. But Maricopa County grew almost 41 percent. Yesterday's small communities began to become today's mega-suburbs as sprawl took off as never before. For example, Glendale, which had grown by 168 percent in the 1970s, added another 52 percent in the eighties. It would hold nearly 148,000 people by 1990. Arrowhead Ranch, the citrus groves owned by the Goldwater and Martori families, was being developed into subdivisions, one of the largest new "master planned communities" in the state. Phoenix remained the power center of the state and county through the decade, but its hold began to slip.

In 1980, Phoenix still enjoyed a robust base of major headquarters. By most measures it was never stronger and almost all were located in the Central Corridor. Among them were the three big banks, Valley National, First National, and the Arizona Bank; Greyhound; Arizona Public Service; American Fence; Central Newspapers; Western Savings, and Del Webb Co. Karl Eller's Combined Communications had been purchased by Gannett in 1978 but Eller remained active, taking control of Circle K in 1983 and making it the nation's second-largest convenience store chain.

APS formed a holding company, Pinnacle West Capital, that was not regulated like the utility by the Corporation Commission. Among its ventures was the S&L Merabank. Taking advantage of airline deregulation, America West Airlines was formed by local investors in 1983 — it would go on to merge with USAirways and take over American Airlines. And Phelps-Dodge, which for a century controlled much of Arizona's destiny as the world's leading copper company, moved its headquarters from New York City to a new tower in Midtown Phoenix.

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Dog days of summer
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix

Dog days of summer

After three weeks of commenting on national politics, it's time to return to Phoenix. This was once the time of year to stay inside with the air conditioning and wait for the oven to ease up in September. Now it's snake removal calls in north Scottsdale, idiots hiking in the middle of the day and often putting first responders at risk to rescue them, and an oven that doesn't shut off until close to Thanksgiving. But…"everything's fine!," with championship golf!

CirclesOfCentral• Phoenix rejected a tax break for a developer that partially demolished the historic Circles Records building under the pretext of erecting a 19-story residential tower. The Resistance, which was sandbagged by the tear-down, reacted by a range of "Hell, no!" to quiet negotiations with crisis-management duo Jordan and Jason Rose, brought in to salvage the deal.

Unfortunately, I fear the result will be complete demolition and another surface parking lot to the flipped and reflipped until the day, decades hence, when the property ends up on the books of a REIT in Tel Aviv. It's unclear that the developer ever really had the capitalization to do the mid-rise, and lack of tax incentives makes it even more unlikely. State law gives enormous protection to property owners. So defeating the tax break doesn't mean saving what's left of the former Stewart Motors at McKinley and Central (technically just north of downtown).

It can't be said enough: Downtown Phoenix needs more than ASU, government, and a few modest headquarters. It needs a robust and diverse economy — very much at odds with the spec sprawl model at work elsewhere in "the Valley." Until then, Phoenix will be the only major city in the nation missing out on the "back to downtown" phenomenon you can read about here. It is an astonishing, heartbreaking failure, and saying that downtown Phoenix is better than 20 years ago doesn't cut it.

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It can happen here
Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

It can happen here

Evan_MechamClowns who say outrageous things, who are completely unqualified for office, are very capable of being elected in America. They are entertaining, underestimated, and disasters in office. The highest office reached so far has been governor — think Jesse Ventura in Minnesota and Lester Maddox in Georgia. Closer to home was Evan Mecham, the governor of Arizona from 1987 until he was impeached and removed from office less than 15 tumultuous months later.

Mecham was a clown, given to conspiracy theories and outrageous statements — his "pickanniny" comment and blaming working women for high divorce rates were only two. But he had support from the state's right wing, especially John Birchers and fellow Mormons. He was a populist, after his fashion. In Mecham's world, the government was the enemy and cause of all ills. He wanted to eliminate income taxes and turn over the public's lands to state interests. A theocrat, Mecham wanted to have prayer in public schools. Threats were everywhere, out to destroy real Americans and the real America.

The toupee'd Glendale car dealer and serially failed newspaper publisher gave Carl Hayden a scare in the 1962 U.S. Senate race. Among his issues was a demand that the United States withdraw from the United Nations. Hayden's longtime aide Roy Elson organized a campaign to "reintroduce" the senator to a state he had served in Washington since 1912, but had attracted large numbers of newcomers since 1956. Hayden won comfortably, but many old Arizonans were unsettled. That anyone could get 45 percent of the vote against the state's indispensable man in the fight for the Central Arizona Project was astounding and deeply disturbing.

Mecham ran outsider campaigns for governor again four times before winning. As in 1962, each election he explicitly ran an insurgent campaign against elites and "the establishment."

His election was a fluke. In the 1986 Republican primary, he faced the respected state House leader Burton Barr, who was supported by the establishment, from Barry Goldwater to the Pulliam press. But Barr, a legislative wizard, ran a sluggish campaign. Turnout was the lowest in 40 years. And Mecham cleverly exploited the grievances and paranoia of newcomer retirees, adding to his Bircher and LDS base — people who did vote. On the Democratic side, and back then Arizona was a competitive state, Carolyn Warner was sandbagged by apartment magnate Bill Schultz, who got out of the race only to reemerge as an independent.

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Hillary’s moment?
Posted inPolitics: National

Hillary’s moment?

Hillary_Clinton_March_2016Imagine how social media, cable "news," and talk radio in a misinformed nation would have portrayed some candidates in the past.

A failed one-term congressman, wishy-washy on his party's most important moral issue, no executive experience, too homely for television — and despite the media campaign to make him out as a simple, honest frontiersman, in reality he was a highly successful lawyer for the nation's most powerful industry. His own law partner noted, "his ambition was a little engine that knew no rest." You know him as Abraham Lincoln.

An elitist intellectual, hotheaded, jingoist warmonger, impetuous and too young to be even vice president. Otherwise known as Theodore Roosevelt. The white privilege dandy who concealed his crushing disability and constant pain, running on a balanced-budget promise but in reality holding no fixed ideology and depending on a coalition that included Southern segregationists. That was TR's cousin, Franklin Roosevelt.

On the other hand, there was "the great engineer," a self-made man, the rightly lionized savior of refugees in World War I — the only man who came out of the Paris peace conference of 1919 with his reputation enhanced, according to John Maynard Keynes. This progressive and pragmatic man seemed ideally cut for his time. Yet Herbert Hoover as president was overwhelmed by catastrophe.

You see how it goes. How the digital age distorts. How contingency and crisis reveal character. Now, with the republic facing its greatest danger since the eve of the Civil War, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton steps forward to claim the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.

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1964
Posted inPolitics: National

1964

Goldwater1964SanFranciscoKKK
Twenty years before the "San Francisco Democrats" were reviled with such devastating gusto by Jeane Kirkpatrick, there were the San Francisco Republicans. The Grand Old Party held its 1964 national convention in the cavernous Cow Palace that July. The nominee was Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater. While Barry was no [real-estate developer], the party's path to Cleveland arguably began in San Francisco 52 years ago.

The Republican Party then was still a mass American political party, with conservatives, centrists, and liberals. As the Party of Lincoln, it retained the remnant of decades of support by African-Americans. In 1960, Richard Nixon, with a strong civil rights record and the initial backing of Daddy King, neglected to call Martin Luther King Jr. in jail (John F. Kennedy did), a blunder that some scholars have said cost him the presidency. Even so, Republicans, including conservatives from the Midwest, had been essential to enacting the 1964 Civil Rights Act and, a year later, the Voting Rights Act. Without them, Lyndon Johnson would never have been able to overpower the segregationist Southern wing of his own party.

But Goldwater and his supporters staged a revolution in the run-up to the convention, with conservatives capturing the party machinery for the first time since the 1930s. These were not conservatives such as Ohio Rep. William McCullough, a key leader in passage of the Civil Rights Act. Instead, their lineage went back to the reaction against the New Deal, Sen. Joe McCarthy, and "the paranoid style in American politics," a term coined by the political scientist Richard J. Hofstadter in his famous 1964 essay.

It had received little traction with Republican presidential candidates Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower, or even anti-communist Dick Nixon. But thanks to William F. Buckley's National Review (founded in 1955) and Goldwater's 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, ghostwritten by Brent Bozell, the movement had received new life. It was conservatism 2.0. Behind its appeal were more than anti-communism, a call for low taxes and smaller government, and the perennial claim of Democratic foreign-policy weakness. A special magnet for many disaffected white voters was the right's opposition to the civil rights gains of the era.

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How’s real estate (really) doing?
Posted inPhoenix

How’s real estate (really) doing?

For the Sunday Seattle Times, I wrote on whether Seattle's smokin' hot real-estate sector is in a bubble. My answer is, not yet. It seemed like a good time to check in on Phoenix, using gold-standard metrics instead of the local-yoken cheerleading. Here we go:

Prices are definitely up. They're not in 2000s territory and that's a good thing:

Aprices

However, permits for single-family houses are still way down by historic standards. This is especially true so far (seven years) into a recovery. While good news for the environment and understandable with such a huge inventory from the bubble, it undercuts the prime mover of the metro area's economy:

Apermits

As a result, construction employment is depressed. Not only has it not returned to 2000s levels, but it is lower than in the late 1990s, when the metro population was far smaller:

Aemployees

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Interstate regrets
Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Interstate regrets

 Black_Canyon_Freeway_under_construction_1961 copy
Interstate 17, the Black Canyon Freeway, under construction in Phoenix in 1961.

Sixty years ago last month, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act of 1956. It marked the beginning of the Interstate Highway System, which now bear's Ike's name. It was completed 35 years later and now totals 47,835 miles. The cost: more than $506 billion in today's dollars.

In this era of austerity and gridlock, the Interstate System is like Project Apollo, the discoveries out of Bell Labs, the infrastructure built by the New Deal, and victory ensured by the Arsenal of Democracy and American armies and fleets triumphing in World War II. It was a model of what we could do together, before we became a venal and wicked people, paralyzed by greed, bigotry, and right-wing extremism.

But the Interstates came with a cost, some of it known at the time by a few forward or skeptical thinkers, more of it obvious today.

Walmart is often cast as the force that destroyed Main Street. But before the Beast of Bentonville were the Interstates. By taking traffic out of small towns, they deprived merchants of much-needed customers. As a result, those towns were dying long before Sam Walton's store became a monopolistic empire. You don't have to look far to see the consequences. Downtown Mesa was thriving before U.S. 60 diverted traffic to the Superstition Freeway. Although not officially part of the Interstate system, this showed the results. Mesa is still trying to recover the dense, authentic downtown that once existed. Downtown Kingman, Williams, and Winslow were all dealt death blows by Interstate 40. Flagstaff was a rare exception. Why did Prescott and Wickenburg keep lively, diverse cores? The lack of Interstates, and for many years even multi-lane highways.

Interstates, and freeways in general, did nothing but destroy big cities. In Seattle, for example, Interstate 5 severed Capitol Hill from downtown, causing hundreds of historic buildings to be demolished. As with cities across the country, it made flight from the city to new suburbs easy. The damage from the unnecessary Papago Freeway Inner Loop, Interstate 10, to central Phoenix has been well-documented in these columns. More often than not, these urban freeways became congestion generators — every widening only made traffic worse.

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Trump and the GOP
Posted inPolitics: National

Trump and the GOP

Donald_Trump_2016It's rich that star columnist George "Chickenlips" Will has left the Republican Party because of the likely nomination of Donald Trump. He told the Federalist Society on Friday that he would change his registration to unaffiliated because the party that would have such a standard-bearer "is not my party." In a later interview, he said, "Make sure he loses. Grit (your) teeth for four years and win the White House."

I usually decline to extend [the real-estate developer's] brand by calling him by name, but here I am making an exception for clarity and economy of writing.

Beyond the unseemliness of a working journalist being registered as anything but an independent, Will's statement and even its forum tell us much — but not as he intended.

Columnists such as Will and the vast right-wing infrastructure that includes the Federalist Society (its specialty is the law and courts) have spent decades creating this moment. Decades of seeding the politics of racial antipathy through the Southern Strategy. Decades of teaching Americans to hate their government and be misinformed about its essential place in our society, history, and economy. Decades of creating devils (Hillary!) — and, yes, the left is capable of this, but doesn't have the reach of right-wing media. Decades of pushing policies that defunded schools, ruined our infrastructure, destroyed the middle class. All this was funded by a dark conspiracy of billionaires intent on repealing everything from the New Deal through the Nixon administration.

512px-GeorgeWill06And this was mere prelude to the actions of the Republican Party in the Obama years. Even before Barack Obama was sworn in, we saw the frightening Nuremberg-lite rallies ginned up by Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Things got so bad that an embarrassed John McCain was forced to contradict an old bat who kept saying Obama was a Muslim terrorist. Palin led the party's final exodus from knowledge ("elitism!"), history, common sense. George Will didn't disown any of this; none of it offended his bow-tied Tory sensibility.

Then seven-and-a-half years of scorched-earth policy, where the GOP Congress regularly held the nation's economy and government hostage, even threatening default. Even minor appointments by the president were held up for years. The GOP-controlled House voted at least 60 times to repeal Obamacare, offering no alternative for uninsured Americans. Mr. Obama faced the unprecedented situation where his nominee to the Supreme Court could not even get a hearing. The party bigs and their puppetmasters helped fund the creation of the Tea Party — giving voice to an eager cohort of angry whites — ensuring a GOP so extreme that today Ronald Reagan couldn't win a Republican school-board primary. Not a peep from George Will. He was out to the ballgame.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

It’s a dry heat

Somebody on Facebook posted a T-shirt that said, "If you can't handle Phoenix at 122 degrees, you don't deserve Phoenix at 78 degrees." OK, then. Nothing to see here, move along.

When you're forced to rip off majestic cataclysm Detroit's mordant humor ("Detroit: Where the weak are killed and eaten"), you have issues as a city. The biggest one, climate change, is getting the least attention.

As day after day was hitting record high temperatures and at least four hikers were killed by the heat in Arizona, and untold numbers needing rescue that endangered the lives of first responders (been there, done that, and no, the view doesn't offer comfort when you're lugging some tenderfoot down a mountainside in a Stokes basket), when the heat was so severe it prompted an airliner to turn back because of fears of its tires blowing out on the broiling runway at Sky Harbor, with a possible serial killer on the loose in Maryvale… Amid all this, Phoenix received an unexpected gift.

It came in the form of a New York Times story headlined, "Phoenix focuses on rebuilding its downtown, wooing Silicon Valley."

Here was a godsend that none of the usual it's a dry heat, you don't have to shovel sunshine, I hike Camelback on the hottest days (moron), championship golf local-yokel booster Pravda propaganda could never match. The Newspaper of Record gave us a (if one didn't look too closely) glowing vote of confidence. What climate change? We're gonna be a tech hotspot!

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No, tax cuts don’t help Arizona
Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

No, tax cuts don’t help Arizona

My policy is to never make sport of a person's religion, however fanciful I may find it. So to the extent that Arizona's Republican leaders and their mouthpieces believe, as an article of faith, that tax cuts have made the state economy stronger…as Pope Francis would say, who am I to judge?

Now, if we're going to move beyond religion to facts, the story is different. The Arizona Republic reported that two decades of tax cuts will cost the state's general fund $4 billion this year. This comes from economists at ASU's W.P. Carey School of Business, hardly a hotbed of socialism or "you hate Arizona!"

This is a useful departure point to a deeper examination. Have tax cuts been good for Arizona's economy? Have they been good for Arizona?

In general, the most authoritative study yet, published late last year by William Gale, Kim Rueben, and Aaron Krupkin at the Tax Policy Center, found no connection between cutting top income-tax rates and state growth.

The three researchers hone in on Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback's "real life experiment" in supply side economics for the Milken Institute. The Brownback cuts, enacted four years ago, have been a template for other Republican governors. But they have been a disaster and Kansas' economy is suffering. These GOP cuts also typically result in regressive sales taxes that fall heaviest on the working poor, widening inequality.

Now let's look at Arizona specifically:

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