The plot against light rail
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

The plot against light rail

LRT downtownThis is the reality of Phoenix's light-rail system: nearly 16 million passengers carried in the most recent fiscal year; expansion of the original 20-mile starter line to 26 miles; an essential link between ASU's Tempe and downtown campuses; 30 percent of riders use the train for work; large numbers use it to reach sporting events; $11 billion in private and public investment has occurred along the line since 2008.

Light rail has also proved essential in giving Phoenix, Tempe, and Mesa a fighting chance in an era where talented young people and high-quality companies want to be in city cores served by rail transit.

None — not one — of the hysterical predictions of opponents to light rail came true.

No wonder that voters backed light rail in three elections, in 2000, 2004, and 2015. We built it.

But destructive forces never sleep, never stop. Backed by dark money — including the Koch brothers and their nationwide war on transit — here comes Proposition 105 in the Aug. 27th special election. As is often the case, it's presented as an affirmative to deliberately confuse voters. "Vote yes!" hoping some will think they are supporting rail transit by marking that line. Signs say, "Yes on 105. Fix our roads" — but this has nothing to do with fixing roads; that's a different budget and roads are being fixed.

Don't fall for it. Vote no on Prop. 105 and its devilish companion, Prop. 106.

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Ten questions about light rail, answered
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Ten questions about light rail, answered

PhxLRT2
It's the tenth anniversary of the completion of metro Phoenix light rail (WBIYB). I'll have a history of the project in a special insert of the Arizona Capitol Times. In the meantime, some common questions and answers.

1. What decided the route of the starter line? It was a combination of demand, available right-of-way, and cost. The line follows the route of the old Red Line bus, which was at 125 percent of capacity by 2000. This ensured high ridership and a favorable outcome in federal funding (with an invaluable assist from the late Rep. Ed Pastor).

2. Why was it built at grade rather than as a subway or monorail? Cost. While both those modes — especially a subway — would have been preferable to street running, the funding was not available. The federal government once spent heavily for such subways as the D.C. Metro and Atlanta's MARTA (originally meant for Seattle), but that aid largely ended by the 1980s. Monorails also have the problem of controversy about being unsightly to some, although the Skytrain in Vancouver, B.C., part overhead and part subway, is highly successful.

3. Did Mesa almost miss out on light rail? Yes. The most conservative big city in America was especially wary of the project, and the starter line might have ended at McClintock Drive in Tempe. If so, it would have been very expensive to eventually build into Mesa. Mayor Keno Hawker played a leading role in securing city council approval of the line to Sycamore. This set the table for extending light rail deep into downtown Mesa under Mayor Scott Smith (now Valley Metro CEO). With Phoenix, Tempe, and Mesa on board, this helped the metro area rise in the national competition for federal assistance.

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‘Another Los Angeles’
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix

‘Another Los Angeles’

Union_Station_profile _LA _CA _jjron_22.03.2012
It surprised me to still hear Phoenicians say, "We're becoming another Los Angeles" or "We don't want to become another LA." This vox local yokel reminds me that people in Phoenix don't get out much. To be fair, I used to think the same thing. That was until I was 10 years old, when my mother took me to the City of Angels on Southern Pacific's Sunset Limited, and we arrived at LA Union Passenger Terminal (above). I had never seen a building so grand — and the rest of the city was just as stunning. This was the first big city I'd been in, and it was nothing like little Phoenix.

I judge a city by its trains. Union Station has been restored to its grandeur and actually hosts more arrivals and departures than when it opened in 1939. In addition to Amtrak intercity trains to Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, and Seattle, it is the hub for LA Metrolink's six commuter rail lines, plus three subway and light-rail lines. All around it, downtown LA is undergoing a stunning renaissance — not only with new buildings such as the 1,099-foot Wilshire Grand but rehabbing its stock of majestic architecture from the early 20th century. It was never true that Los Angeles "didn't have a downtown." It had several, including Century City, Westwood, Hollywood, and downtown proper. All of them leave Phoenix looking like Hooterville by comparison. LA made a terrible mistake in tearing out the extensive Pacific Electric Railway, but it's making amends fast.

Phoenix becoming another Los Angeles? It should be so lucky. LA is one of America's three world cities, as defined by sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod's famous book of the same name. The influential Globalization and World Cities Network ranks it as an Alpha city, the third highest level of global power (only New York is Alpha ++ among North American cities). Phoenix is gamma, the ninth category. Phoenix peers Denver, Seattle, and San Diego rank Beta-minus. The LA metropolitan area's gross domestic product totaled more than $931 billion in 2017, second only to New York City in inflation-adjusted dollars. Phoenix, although the nation's fifth-largest city and 13th most populous metro ranked 17th, at $220 billion (again, behind peer metros). If LA were a nation, its output would rival Australia.

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Better than nothing?
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix

Better than nothing?

Central_Station_Tower_rendering

A rendering of Phoenix Central Station, the oval-shaped tower that would be built at Central and Van Buren.

This year, Seattle's core has seen 100 buildings permitted, under construction or recently completed. In central Phoenix, by my count, there's the proposed skyscraper above, the University of Arizona's 10-story research building on the Phoenix Biosciences Campus, the ASU college of law, and a 368-unit Lennar apartment complex in lower Midtown.

It's better than nothing, right?

Phoenix Central Station by Smith Partners would be the most interesting, rising 34 stories with 475 apartments, 30,000 square feet of commercial space and, of course, a parking garage.

The tower would rise above the homely central transit station, which nobody will miss, but retain the use as a transit hub. It has its virtues: more apartments for downtown residents, close proximity to ASU and a shape that would provide a bit of variety from the mostly dreary boxes that make up the skyline of the nation's sixth-largest city.

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The death of authentic Phoenix
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix

The death of authentic Phoenix

Durants

Authentic Phoenix can still be found at Durant's.

The impending closure of Baker Nursery and Mary Coyle's raises an issue beyond losing beloved businesses or even the extreme struggle faced by locally owned firms in Phoenix. It cuts to something essential to a real city even if it is difficult to define: authenticity.

Critics may dismiss this as nostalgia, a cheap emotion for a golden past that never was (this is one way Very Serious People invalidate my arguments now). Or some academic fad of the latte-quaffing creative class elitists. Instead, it is critical to a city's success.

"Authentic" in connection with a city involves historic roots, local ownership, places that are valued, human scale and encouraging human interaction, aesthetics, a distinctive vibe ("cool"), and a strong degree of critical mass and density. The asteroid belts of suburbia with their chain restaurants and malls are not authentic — they annihilate it. No wonder educated young people, many empty nest boomers and world talent want to move to authentic cities.

As these losses continue (and Mary Coyle's had been dead to some since it left its 15th Ave. and Thomas location to flee north of Camelback), it's more than the city cratering or looking like Everyplace America. It is the death of a tangable part of the civilization, a concept beyond the MBAs that run the country or the real-estate grifters that run Phoenix.  A point comes where too much driving is required to reach this or that "iconic" survivor.

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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 inUncategorized

Add cities to the list of victims of the Great Disruption

Some of America’s most prosperous cities are also among the casualties of what I’m calling the first stage of The Great Disruption — the current financial crisis.

Charlotte, a middling Southern town built into a city by two money center banks, will see its world changed radically whether Wachovia is bought by Wells Fargo or Citigroup. At least one-fifth of its jobs are in banking, and these are high-paid corporate jobs with benefits. Virtually every advance in Charlotte, particularly its revived downtown, came from the leadership of Wachovia and Bank of America. Now half of that will be gone, and the claim to being America’s second-largest banking center.

I make a prediction: Bank of America will soon move its headquarters to New York. The decision will likely be camouflaged in language of "dual headquarters" or some such corporate claptrap. But BofA’s best and brightest will feel an increasing need to be in what’s left of America’s financial capital. After all, the men who built these powerhouses as a powerful, personal gift to Charlotte are retired.

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