Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Roll over, Gene Pulliam

The Arizona Republic on Sunday published a remarkable front-page editorial concerning the pile of feces into which the state has done a face-plant, otherwise known as its attempt to "address" illegal immigration. It was not remarkable for its placement — old-time newspaper publishers often did page-one opinion pieces, perhaps most famously the Republic's own Eugene C. Pulliam. Rather, this article, pretty as it was with the paper's current obsession with design, proved astonishing in its intellectual shallowness, dishonesty and desperate pretzel-twisting to cast "blame" equally in every direction. And all the while demanding "leaders." Rarely has an institution in the broad land of vapid corporate newspapers made such a gaudy display of its daft cowardliness. One is reminded of Lincoln's line: "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."

"Old Man Pulliam," who ran the Republic and Phoenix Gazette for decades, occasionally published — and even wrote, for he was a newspaperman to his marrow — thundering page-one editorials. They were not intended to compete in the Society for News Design. They were sometimes long, always trenchantly and even intellectually argued. I recall one from the late '60s (I believe) that was a fierce jeremiad against rising government bureaucracy. You always knew where his newspaper stood. Pulliam was a man of the right but he would not be allowed into today's Republican Party or corporate journalism club. He was too independent, endorsing LBJ over Barry Goldwater in 1964 and renouncing the idea of a newspaper as merely a business. It is said he wrote a trust to prevent the sale of his beloved papers to the likes of Gannett, but that's another story.

There's no doubt that were he alive today and running the Republic, he and his famed investigative reporters would make short work of Russell Pearce and Joe Arpaio.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

Arizona crazy

From the Jim Crow anti-immigrant law and birther bill to the reality television show Sunset Daze, Arizona is gaining an international reputation for being crazy. It's not just "image" or "bad publicity." How did this happen to my beloved home? It took decades and tectonic shifts. Some will sound familiar to regular Rogue readers, but for the sake of the thousands of newbies that have found Rogue Columnist and are curious/frightened about Arizona, here's a primer:

The new Republican Party: Arizona always had a strong reactionary element, going back to its dependence on mines and railroads. Even the Democrats were mostly conservative. Arizona never produced, for example, a William Borah, the progressive Republican senator from Idaho. But even among the Republicans, there was independence and an understanding that Arizona would blow away without massive amounts of federal money. Republicans were a minority until Barry Goldwater slowly built them into the state's dominant party in the 1960s. Even then, Goldwater, Arizona Republic publisher Eugene C. Pulliam and others kept the John Bircher element at arms length, happy to use them but never let them take control. This changed with time and massive influx of new people. By the 1980s, conservative extremism was in the governor's seat. From the 1990s onward, the Christian Coalition and other national right-wing groups began taking control of the party from the lowest levels up, and purging old Arizona Republicans who now were labeled RINOS (Republicans in Name Only). They also focused on winning offices that held the most budget power, from school boards to the Legislature. The result is an entirely different creature: militant, frozen in ideological conformity, hostile to the facts, deeply committed to enacting "conservative" abstractions with little evidence they succeed. And, as the evidence shows, racist. Now, the Republicans have pretty much ruled for decades and the state is a catastrophe. Questions? That doesn't stop them from acting like victimized outsiders and the duhs and ignos in this ill-educated state fall for it.

The Big Sort: The journalist Bill Bishop used this as the title of his book on the dramatic clustering of like-minded people in different regions. It's a big change from most of American history, and as Bishop puts it, the Big Sort "is tearing us apart." Arizona is Exhibit A in this self-selecting process, especially among the Anglo population that votes, has money or is easy pickings for the demagogues. Arizona doesn't have its Austin (sorry, Democratic Tucson's strings are ultimately pulled by a car dealer and the sprawl barons). Despite the notion in the mid-1990s that population growth would moderate Arizona politics, or even the Democratic seats picked up during the nadir of the Bush presidency, Arizona has become redder and redder. People increasingly seemed to move to Arizona or the Phoenix suburbs to be with their co-religionists on the right, while progressive-minded folks moved out.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix

Causes and consequences

They came from far away by the millions, bringing strange, sometimes offensive customs and values. They show no interest in Arizona's history or traditions, preferring to keep to themselves. Through their numbers and the way the state uses them for economic gain, they profaned the peerless beauty of the Sonoran Desert and destroyed the magic of the Salt River Valley. They caused billions in public costs that will linger for decades. While many are said to be hard-working, most are in the state for its government-subsidized goodies, and their numbers have included no small share of criminals, even kingpins seeking to extend their dangerous empires across the border. And it's the smaller things, too. As wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III would have it, they deliberately cause accidents on the freeways and otherwise drive like maniacs. I'm no bigot — some individuals are even personal friends — but I even find their accents grating, their clothing bizarre, the ever-growing accommodations we must make for them unfair.

I'm writing, of course, about the other great migration that destabilized my home state: That of the Midwesterners and Californians. We all have our biases. If mine had been acted upon, Arizona would have passed appropriate taxes and strong land-use protections to help mitigate and reduce this wave of destructive immigration. Instead, it has rolled out the nation's harshest law against illegal immigrants. A Legislature whose majority prides itself on disdain for learning and believes the facts have a leftist bias won't solve one of the most complex problems facing America, or any rich nation adjoining a poor one. But it can guarantee racial profiling and provide tools to further oppress the working poor. It has also made Arizona an international pariah, ground zero of crazy. How did we get here?

Arizona was once part of Mexico, and without the Gadsden Purchase the international border would be just south of Phoenix. For generations, people came and went at will between the (territory and) state and Mexico. Mexican-American families predate the arrival of my kin in the 19th century. The economic and social destinies of the Arizona and Mexico were tightly intertwined (rent the movie Lone Star to understand the textures and ironies). The Anglo elites long exploited Mexican workers for the farms and groves of the Salt River Valley (including the Goldwater family's Goldmar), officially for a time through the Bracero Program. The American government implicitly allowed Mexico to use the states as a "safety valve" for lack of economic opportunity at home, in exchange for the authoritarian ruling party's anti-communism. Everything started to change in the 1980s.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

State of cruelty

America is starting to catch on that something's happening in Arizona and that it matters. The New York Times has opened a Phoenix bureau and the LA Times reporting is such that it might as well. This isn't Idaho. This is the third or even second most populous state in the West, contains the nation's fifth most populous city and 13th largest metro. And it's insane.

The focus for now is the draconian anti-immigrant law passed by the Legislature and signed by the Kook-tool Gov. Jan Bewer. It will turn law enforcement into a baby border patrol and essentially require racial profiling and further marginalization of the Hispanic community. This is the capstone of the career of state Sen. Russell Pearce, the Mormon East Valley lawmaker who has gone from the lunatic fringe to the height of power. (And I mention Pearce's denomination to ask, where are the powerful LDS voices denouncing him for actions that go against Mormon values of compassion? I hear many LDS oppose this.). Beyond this, everything gets murky. Arizona can't deport people (they tried with me); it lacks the funding to operate its current prison-industrial complex, much less incarcerate a million illegal aliens. This is only the beginning of what's wrong here.

The measure, like the other anti-immigrant laws of recent years, is hypocritical. Arizona's low-wage, low-quality economy is built around the inexpensive labor of illegal immigrants. Construction, tourism and landscaping companies have made huge profits on the backs of workers making less than citizens and lacking even the minimal protections and safeguards that Arizona provides. Why do you think you "get so much house for the money"? The remains of the state's agriculture industry would die without illegals. Anglos from the toffs in north Scottsdale to working stiffs in Phoenix get housekeepers and yard care for a fraction of its real cost. As Phoenix, especially, became a narrower economy focused on house building, illegals became more important. The people in power sure as hell weren't going to pay competitive wages for citizens, much less allow unions.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Confederates in the attic

The tut-tutting that in some cases verges on hysteria about the
Virginia governor proclaiming Confederate History Month is misplaced on
many levels. For one thing, it only reinforces the bunker mentality of
many Southern whites — who do not by any means all live in the South —
that their customs, culture and history are under attack. Thus, it
drives them even more into the propaganda ministry of the white-right on
Fox "News" and talk radio. I'm also uncomfortable with the implied
censorship of those who would ban discussion of the Confederacy except
as an indictment of slavery. And it's an invitation to yet more
conformity in a big-box, chain-stored America that was once much more
diverse in its cultures.

President Obama is right in saying that one can't understand the
Civil War without understanding slavery. One can't understand even
today's America without understanding the Civil War, a lifetime quest.
And, I am sorry to tell my liberal and progressive friends, that one
can't understand all these things, as well as many of the questions
facing the union today, without a deep study of the Confederacy. Note
"deep study." Not a white-right call to ignorant "heritage."

Slavery was a great evil, one that was only partially atoned for at
places such as Antietam, Chickamuga and Gettysburg. It was not merely
the creation of the South, but the nation as a whole. More and more
histories of slavery are available, showing it in all its brutality but
also the courage of the people and richness of the cultures they
developed. Historians have also made great progress in plumbing
Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the era of lynchings — all essential knowledge
of our quest to make a more perfect union. As for Confederate history,
bring it on.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Conservative history

Reading about "conservative" efforts to change history textbooks, one is reminded of many good quotes. George Orwell, once a hero of conservatives, said, "He who controls the past controls the future. He who
controls the present controls the past." Napoleon: "What is history but a fable agreed upon?" Or, more alarmingly, Hitler, who in one of his many formulations on the topic, said, "Give me the youth…let me control the textbooks, and I will
control the state." On the other hand, I remember high school, and, although I loved history, my mind was consistently on only one thing, and the only historical reasoning involved was "today's miniskirt is even better than yesterday's!" A good and timeless quote, too.

The move in Texas, one of the largest buyers of textbooks and in theory influential nationally, is less about history than propaganda. Thus we get the failure of Jamestown as "socialism" long before such a political-economic formulation existed. As Dick Armey would have it, starvation in the colony was because of those hippy-dippy libs, rather than a variety of complex factors, including that the English noblemen in the party (the class equivalent to what Armey represents today) didn't want to work to grow food, thinking it beneath them. Similarly, Jefferson is to be erased because he advocated separation between church and state (as did virtually all the founders) — a messy inconvenience for those advocating theocracy. We know who they are. We know the power they lust after. This is one more path to it.

My bigger worry is summed up in the fuller quote from Alexander Pope: "A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring." We don't really teach history in most of our schools and haven't for decades, it being subsumed in "social studies," and now sidelined by teaching-to-the-test and indoctrinating young people to be good worker bees. This latter is alarmingly true even at universities, where students are funneled into business schools and vocational training, not the "universal education" including the humanities. And such necessary study for a self-governing society is virtually non-existent at the for-profit "universities" once called business colleges.

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Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix

The CityScape Gamble

CityScape. For most cities of its size, this downtown development would be considered modest, especially with its first phase, which will apparently comprise a 27-story office tower and a retail arcade. For Phoenix, it's a big deal, especially for downtown and the central city. It could provide some answers as to "what next?" in the nation's fifth (for now) most populous city. Unfortunately the odds are long.

When the project was first hyped in the mid-2000s, it was supposed to be a game-changer, with iconic, soaring towers that included offices, hotel and 1,000 condo units. It took over the dismal Patriot's Square, which had been created by tearing down a block of historic, irreplaceable buildings, as well as adjoining vacant lots, which also once held viable commercial structures. Yet when the real renderings came out, the buildings looked very conventional and short (yeah, yeah, FAA…ask San Diego, Boston, etc.). The retail was inward-facing, risking another Arizona Center mistake. When the economy collapsed, even these modest plans were heavily cut back. An anchor tenant, Wachovia, died in the merger with Wells Fargo. The lack of inspiring architecture, a lively streetscape and pleasing spaces is no small thing.

This is a bad time to be bringing new office and retail space on the market, whether you're in thriving downtown Seattle or in a Phoenix which has faced special, self-inflicted wounds to its old core. The commercial real-estate bubble remains a danger. Still, RED Development has stuck with the more modest first phase and continues to roll out announcements of new restaurants, a comedy club and, importantly, a pharmacy. On the other hand, Eddie Basha, in bankruptcy reorganization, couldn't fulfill his desire to locate a grocery there,

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How freeways remade Phoenix
Posted inDowntown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

How freeways remade Phoenix

BlackCanyon1960s
The Black Canyon Freeway, Phoenix's first, in the 1960s.

Motoring around metro Phoenix today, it's difficult to comprehend that this was not always a huge agglomeration of real-estate ventures connected by freeways. In fact, Phoenix didn't want them, would have been better off without many of them, yet couldn't avoid their eventual triumph.

In 1950, when Phoenix came in as America's 100th most populous city, it occupied a mere 17 square miles, with a population density of more than 6,200 per square mile, around what you'd find in today's Seattle or Portland. In other words, a real small city: cohesive, walkable, sustainable and scalable. Remnants of the old city exist, but much has been annihilated, not least by the freeways.

By 1960, the city of Phoenix had 439,170 people and nearly 188 square miles. It was a big city of the automobile age, the old streetcars long gone, and federally subsidized sprawl under way. Around this time, the state Highway Department adopted an ambitious freeway plan prepared by Wilbur Smith & Associates, one of the nation's leading highway transportation planning firms. It envisioned much of the system eventually built. The engineers had wanted to build freeways in Phoenix since the late 1940s. One route would have gone directly in front of the Hotel Westward Ho.

But most Phoenicians were horrified. They weren't enamored with the small Black Canyon Freeway, Phoenix's first (it wound around at Durango Street to become the Maricopa Freeway, rammed through powerless barrios).

An urban legend persists that Eugene C. Pulliam single-handedly defeated the freeway plan in the early 1970s. Although the Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette were indeed powerful in those days and not afraid to crusade (sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes not), freeways were widely resisted.

Phoenicians then didn't want to become another Los Angeles in this bad way, and they had a chance to avoid the fate. LA had shown (and Robert Moses' New York before it) that freeways didn't solve traffic congestion — they generated it through the phenomenon called induced demand. We didn't want worse smog. We didn't want to lose our views to concrete and the citrus groves to further sprawl. Of particular alarm was the 100-foot-high Papago Freeway Inner Loop planned across central Phoenix, with monstrous "helicoils" discharging traffic onto Third Avenue and Third Street. 

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Phoenix 101: Universities
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Universities

PalmWalk
The Palm Walk on ASU's Tempe campus.

Looking at Arizona State University today, with the largest student body in the United States, it's difficult to imagine that it began before statehood as the territorial "normal school," or teachers college. It didn't become a university until 1958, over the intense objections of the University of Arizona, which still considers itself The University, although ASU has eclipsed it in many ways. ASU now bills itself as "one of the premier metropolitan research universities in the nation, an institution of international scope, committed to excellence in teaching, research, and public service." The reality is somewhat different and rooted in the history of the state and the Salt River Valley.

Some sixty thousand souls resided in all of Arizona Territory when the UofA and the future ASU were established. It was frontier wilderness with the settlers scratching out a hard living in mining, ranching and farming. Aside from the occasional big copper strike — Jerome, Bisbee — people were poor. The railroads were only beginning to be built across the vast expanses of deserts, mountains and forests. That territorial leaders created these schools was an act of heroic vision (aided in UofA's case by the federal land-grant program). Later the Progressive state constitution would mandate that Arizona provide a college education for every qualified citizen.

But this rough country was also generally suspicious of colleges, whether from cowboys mistrusting the utility of the endeavor, to the big mining companies wanting cheap labor. Capital was scarce outside of the mines and railroads, controlled by eastern financiers only interested in extracting profit from the land. There were no Arizona Rockefellers or Carnegies who built fortunes, however ill-gotten, that would eventually fund world-class universities. People were scarce. Just before statehood, Tempe's population was little more than 1,400, fighting to make the desert bloom, sweating through summers without air conditioning. No wonder the state's elite, such as Carl Hayden, went to college in California.

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Posted inPhoenix

Eating the future

One of the problems of Phoenix's extremely limited media market is that reporting on such news as the city's new 2 percent food tax fails to go below the surface (and, of course, many vital stories are not reported at all). Funny how the grand new world of "citizen journalists" and "crowdsourcing" has not filled the yawning chasm of serious journalism done by seasoned professionals.

The tax is one of many bad options faced by a city that is at, and perhaps past, the tipping point. It faces a $241 million deficit through June 2011. The latest cuts total $140 million and more than 1,300 jobs, including eliminating 500 police officers and firefighters. But they are not enough. Thus, the food tax. In general, it's a bad idea. Sales taxes are very regressive, taking much more of the income of lower-income individuals than, say, income and property taxes. This is no small thing in the largest city with so many low-wage jobs. They also risk causing additional "shopping flight" to the suburbs (about which, more later).

And yet the city is in a bind. Or should we say, binds.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Teen Age Republican

The maxim holds that people move right as they grow older. I moved left. In each case, I was in the minority. Only one other child wore Goldwater buttons in 1964 at Kenilworth School, Barry's alma mater; LBJ buttons were in profusion. Later I handed out leaflets for state Rep. Betty Adams Rockwell. In high school, I manned the phones for Jack Williams and Richard Nixon. Even on a shallow, but oh-so-important level for a high-school boy (oh, I've grown up, honest…), being a Teen Age Republican was a lonely avocation. Back then, all the pretty girls, much less the pretty and smart girls, were Democrats. There were certainly no blond goddesses such as Monica Goodling, who led the hiring thought police at the Bush Justice Department. 

As a young columnist, I staked out what at the time was the Dead Career Zone in newspapers, as a supporter of free markets, free trade and limited government. Now I feel the need to put all of those goals in quotation marks. For I did move left, knowing, as Whittaker Chambers said in a different context, "that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side."

I must say a few things in my defense besides "young" and "stupid." I was raised in a staunchly Republican family, where my grandmother never voted for a Democrat again because of the way Woodrow Wilson treated Theodore Roosevelt. My mother was involved in Arizona GOP politics. It was an intensely political household, with dinner-table conversations over public policy. My mother's rule was that one could take any position, as long as he could defend it with learning and logic. Barry Goldwater was an icon and seemed to embody the best of Arizona and the West, as did leaders such as Paul Fannin and John J. Rhodes. In a house of books, I gravitated to the ones that tended to support my positions — a fatal intellectual flaw, of course. Buckley and Goldwater conservatism encouraged independent thinking, as opposed to the rigid ideologies of the left, or so it seemed. Growing up in old Arizona, I was in a sparsely populated place where abstractions seemed borne out by everything around us. And the existential struggle of the Cold War towered above all else; here the Republicans seemed stronger, no small thing.

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Phoenix 101: Indians
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Indians

Pima

The many faces of the Pima tribe. In the center is Ira Hayes, the decorated Marine who was among the famed flag raisers on Iwo Jima during World War II.

Phoenix has the largest population of urban American Indians in the United States. It's also the only major metro area that is flanked by reservations: the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community east of Scottsdale, the Gila River Indian Community to the south and southwest, and farther to the east, the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation. With casinos and water rights, the tribes enjoy the greatest economic power in their modern history. This is a story that's only beginning. But of course it's a very old one, too.

The city's name comes from its location atop the ruins of the Hohokam civilization. Like the mythical Phoenix bird, it rose from its ashes (and it is by far the coolest city name in America, which makes it a shame that the suburban mandarins resist using it to describe the metro, as is commonplace in every other major city in America). When the first Anglo settlers came to the Salt River Valley after the Civil War, they cleaned out some of the Hohokam canals and resumed the region's oldest human activity: agriculture. The Hohokam were the most advanced hydrological civilization north of Mesoamerica. The sophisticated dam and canal structure built for today's Phoenix is simply an extension of the Hohokam's work.

Growing up in Phoenix, I was constantly aware of the Hohokam's ghosts — but I was an odd child, enchanted by the place and its history. For most in the 1960s, American Indians were not a common sight there. The reservations were relatively far away then. The stereotype of the drunken Indian was on tragic display in the Deuce. Prejudice was common, even as we romanticized the tribes, particularly the Apache and Navajo. It had not even been a century since the Apache wars had ended. Phoenicians mostly came in contact with the tribes passing by the Phoenix Indian School, an institution now reviled by scholars for destroying native culture but one which may deserve a fresh revision someday. Today's phenomenon of an urban Indian population was very limited. We had a Navajo boy, John Rogers, in my class at Kenilworth School: he had been adopted by a Anglo family. Not to be blind to the challenges he faced, but in the crucible of cruel children he seemed to garner a special respect. After all, in playing cowboys and Indians, we all wanted to be the latter. And growing up in the center city, I drank in the magic of the Heard Museum.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

The Full Kook

Gov. Jan Brewer is pulling Arizona out of the coalition of Western states and Canadian provinces trying to make some regional progress in limiting greenhouse gases. J.D. Hayworth is taking on John McCain in the Republican Senate primary (make your own gasbag jokes). For awhile, I worried Arizona might be denied what I call "The Full Kook," where the Kookocracy implements its most cherished and dangerous proposals, rather than being the crazy aunt in the attic down at the Capitol whose ravings are muted by the adult in the governor's chair. Now I'm more hopeful. Why? Because the Full Kook is the only way I can see that Arizona might save itself. For decades, the creeping growth of the Kookocracy has slowly been damaging every part of the state's social and economic health. But still, the Kooks kept control of the Legislature because most eligible voters stay home. Only the Full Kook might shake most Arizonans out of their torpor — and we'll see if there's what Saint Janet called the "sensible center" majority — or if the Big Sort has turned Arizona into the nation's largest insane asylum.

Brewer is falling into line with the successful reactionary effort to halt any measures to address climate change — or even to accept its scientific legitimacy. Even the New York Times has strangely bought into this. The deniers of established science are "skeptics." What next in the flagship of the liberal media: "Evolution skeptics"?  Thus the big snowstorm in the East is a sign that "global warming is a hoax," when in fact it is confirmation of the destabilizing weather patterns we were told to expect from climate change. In Seattle, we just had our warmest January on record. (Stephen Colbert has a great retort for the deniers, in media most Americans can understand). No matter. The strategy is to keep arguing and prevent action. In D.C., any meaningful action to limit emissions is dead, another casualty of the Hoover/Carter/Obama malaise. What is barely reported is how much money Exxon/Mobil and other corporate giants are pouring into not only lobbying against action, but to prop up the elaborate propaganda machine of the "skeptics." Nor is there ongoing, serious discussion of the costs of inaction, whether because of what's coming from climate change or because we're abrogating opportunities to create new industries to help slow or reverse its effects.

So Arizona needn't worry. America will remain paralyzed. Reality will not, and the costs, destabilization and even national security perils from climate change will continue to creep forward. Brewer doesn't even hear the contradiction in her statement, when she withdraws from the Western Climate Initiative — hardly perfect but a start among serious leaders — and wants to avoid California emission standards, but also wants green-tech jobs. Sorry, the two work together. This is why Germany is solar-power central. And notice that China is working furiously to corner the technology and manufacture of renewable energy. In the U.S., the best shot at ameliorating the effects of climate change are happening in the smart states, not the cheap states. Even if ASU makes some research breakthroughs, Arizona lacks the economic capacity to exploit most of them.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Mad hatters at tea

Now the meme is how we must show the "tea-party movement" more respect. After all, it was responsible for Republican Scott Brown's victory, taking a Senate seat held for decades by Democrats. The "liberal media" flagship, The New York Times, carried an analysis that said, "The remarkable Republican victory in Massachusetts demonstrated
convincingly that the deep populist anger fueling the Tea Party
movement has migrated from the political fringe to the mainstream,
forcing both parties to confront how to channel a growing mood of
public resentment to their own ends." Others have talked about the movement's "diverse" elements, and how we shouldn't judge it merely by its loudest advocates. Some liberal talk-radio hosts have urged progressives to co-opt the tea-partiers.

Anyone who has lived in Arizona knows this is nonsense. The tea-baggers are Republicans, not independents. They an ignorant, easily-led rabble that is energized, most of all, by the fact that a black man is president of the United States. Where, for example, was their outrage when George W. Bush was running up the biggest deficit in history? Gathered and ginned up by Fox "News" and talk radio, they are against government — all government. They are against taxes — all taxes. They are animated by all manner of strange fetishes, from President Obama's birth certificate to communist plots lurking in every element of public policy. They love to hate, no matter the large number who are evangelicals. Force is their first resort, whether dealing with the Muslim world or local gun laws. They make "low information" voters seem like Plutarch, with the most recent poll showing large numbers of Republican voters believe Obama is a racist, a socialist, and not an American citizen.

In other words, the tea party is the Kookocracy taken to a national level.

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Posted inPhoenix

Valley downtowns 2.0?

The previous post on downtown Phoenix generated many comments about other downtowns in the metro area, so let's take a tour.

Some common denominators are found. None of these cites have a real urban downtown. Most also suffer to some degree from land banking, which produces blight and prevents the infill that would create critical mass. Many are far from the residences of better-off folks, so there's little incentive for them to patronize downtown. Most suffer from the dreadful sameness of development in the region, with "master-planned communities" separating themselves from their nominal cities while malls and office "parks" draw off retail and commercial businesses from a central business district. Most are located in what were little farm towns during the golden age of American architecture and civic design, so they lack good bones. A few are attempts at New Urbanist town centers — but that doesn't make them real downtowns, from the lack of diversity to the lack of connectivity. All except for downtown Tempe lack convenient transit/light rail. Despite all the studies and consultants, few city leaders seem to understand urban or even get out much. Beating Fresno is taken as a great achievement. All suffer from lack of serious business-driven investment, depending instead on real estate-driven speculation. Almost all lack the public spaces, much less inviting and inspiring public spaces, essential to real downtowns.

Given its huge population, Mesa should have the region's second real downtown. Unfortunately the city's short-sighted, haphazard development grab in the '80s and '90s, combined with no significant, sustained focus on downtown, leaves it lacking. The arts center was a good start, and Mesa at least didn't tear down its Main Street core (it did allow its lovely Southern Pacific depot to rot, then burn down). Mayor Scott Smith wants a major Mesa Community College presence there — another good start. But the lure of the Gateway land scheme will keep drawing away energy and investment — the Cubs stadium being the latest example (Smith tells me the Cubs wouldn't go for a downtown ballpark near light rail — enjoy $10-a-gallon gasoline). The lack of LDS power to enhance downtown and its connection to the Arizona Temple is bizarre. Meanwhile, Mesa courts dullness and conformity (hiding away its significant poor, Latino population). So its lack of coolness also keeps it from making the most of what it has.

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