Jon Talton Archives - Page 3 of 15

Downtown Phoenix 2.0?

It's surprising that some appear so sanguine about the likely foreclosure of most units at the 44 Monroe condo tower. This, along with a similar fate for the Summit at Copper Square and 44's developer Grace Communities failing to rehab the historic Valley National Bank building because of the Mortgages Ltd. fiasco, represents a devastating setback for luring private investment into downtown Phoenix. Maybe people are too shell shocked to take it all in. Maybe they're willing to settle for things being better than they were 20 years ago, which is undeniably true. Neither option is wise for those who wish the central city well.

Make no mistake: the Phoenix depression is metro-wide. I saw rotting framing and miles of distressed subdivisions out in the exurbs. Tempe foolishly threw away its opportunity to build a mid-rise boutique downtown of national quality — now it has an empty condo high-rise and Mill Avenue is swooning again. But my conviction remains that there is no healthy major city without a strong urban downtown, and center city problems left unchecked have a habit of spreading. (And don't be taken in by the propaganda: Phoenix did have a vibrant downtown — it was killed by civic malpractice).

In Phoenix, the past few years have seen some notable triumphs: the beginnings of a downtown ASU campus, light rail, a convention center worthy of such a tourist-dependent city, a new convention hotel, and a blossoming of independently owned restaurants. The biosciences campus has been planted (although it has been allowed to stall and, I fear, its future is uncertain). Yet major private investment has not followed; 44 Monroe and the Summit represented the strongest chance for that within the existing local business model of "real estate first." The many towers proposed for the entire Central Corridor are now blighted empty lots. CityScape? I'll believe it when I see it. What I see is a homely suburban design, not the soaring "game changer" sold to the public on the front page of the newspaper.

Jon Talton January 25, 201015

Politics: National

Difficult days ahead

Despite all the progressive wishing away, the election of a doctrinaire right-wing Republican to Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat is a calamity and a sign of calamities to come. The implications are national and international. Yes, Martha Coakley was a weak candidate who ran an inept campaign. Sure, the economy is bad and the party in power always suffers. And, yeah, the Obama and progressive voters stayed home in large numbers (this is to be comforting?). Meanwhile, the White House, said to be "blindsided" and "in disarray," seems to have interpreted the special election as an excuse to tack even more to "the center," i.e. the right.

We've got difficult days ahead.

Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had failed in his first term: failed to enact meaningful legislation to immediately address the suffering of Americans and bring some fair play back to the republic; failed to take on, with relish, the "economic royalists"; failed to connect, in a visceral way, with Americans suffering from the Great Depression; failed to be wiley, cagey, downright dishonest in pursuit of his goals; failed to surround himself with a cadre of brilliant, independent, highly competent lieutenants, and failed to be willing to experiment with almost anything but a continuation of the Republican policies that had caused the Depression. Communism was popular, fascism perhaps even more so thanks to the seeming success and popularity of Mussolini. It was especially potent in the hands of populist demagogue Huey Long. The forces of reaction, although in disarray, still commanded great wealth and also had fascist sympathies. "Dictatorship" was a good word at the time.

Jon Talton January 21, 20108

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Sun City

The curvilinear streets and golf courses of Sun City.

Fifty years ago, Del Webb began Sun City. It was just south of Grand Avenue and the Santa Fe railroad amid the flat farm fields of Maricopa County and near the tiny railroad sidings at Surprise and El Mirage. I first saw it from the train — there was no Sun City station, for this was a development built for the automobile. For most Phoenicians, it was a curiosity — or a joke. Pat McMahon's misanthropic, demented Aunt Maud character on Wallace & Ladmo was from Sun City. Photos of oldsters riding around in their golf carts provoked much mirth. When an older lady asked my grandmother if she was going to move out there, this daughter of the frontier was aghast. "Why would I want to be stuck out there with all those old people?" she asked. The older lady was shocked.

Yet Sun City would prove to be one of the most influential events in the history of modern Phoenix, setting in train a series of business, demographic and social changes that have proven to be very mixed blessings. Before Sun City, Phoenix was something like a real city. Tourism and snowbirds were part of the mix. But so was a huge agricultural economy, along with a large — for its population larger than today — and growing number of technology, aerospace and defense businesses. Resorts were limited. The artist colonies in Scottsdale and Carefree were more important than retirees. After Sun City all this would change.

Del Webb had been building in Phoenix for decades before Sun City. Go to the iconic Phoenix Towers at Cypress and Central and you'll see his name on the building, erected in 1956. Downtown sidewalks from years before had it etched in the concrete (although here Webb competed against "Frenchy" Vieux). He grew rich in the New Deal. In World War II, he built military facilities, as well as the concentration camp — there's no polite way to put it — at Poston to hold interned Japanese-American citizens and other Japanese living in America. By the time he envisioned Sun City, he was no longer "ole Del," but a very rich man, friend of celebrities, part-owner of the New York Yankees — and, among Phoenicians in-the-know, trailed by the odor of associations with organized crime and war profiteering.

Jon Talton January 18, 20105

Phoenix

Dreading the Census

The 2010 Census is provoking much angst in the Salt River Valley. Arizona's 40-percent population increase of the 1990s will almost certainly not be replicated over the decade just past, and some worry that at least certain cities could actually see population declines. Such is the damage from the great recession. Such has been the preeminent importance of adding people to the economy and psyche of metro Phoenix. Not growing scientists, corporate headquarters, diverse industries, incomes, high-wage jobs, quality schools, venture capital, the arts, public transit, shade, etc. — just adding people.

A few predictions can be made without much fear: Phoenix will not rise higher than America's No. 5 most populous city, barring a holocaust hurricane hitting Houston. Indeed, Phoenix's population may well be flat or even have fallen since mid-decade. Its poverty will rise. It will move closer to becoming a Hispanic majority city, if the Census count is thorough and honest. The metro area as a whole will have gained, but not nearly as much as it did in some of the preceding decades. De-facto segregation by ethnic group, and especially class, will grow more rigid. The demographic and social changes brought by this first crash of the Great Disruption will be felt in the 2010 Census and continue to reverberate into the new decade. Among them: Americans are moving less.

Taken together, the message of the 2010 Census to Phoenix and Arizona: You'd better find a new gig.

Jon Talton January 14, 20108

Phoenix

Decade of delusion

The Information Center formerly known as the Arizona Republic prominently offers up a breezy feature on how the decade now ending "upturned our touchstones, left us suspended in a mixed-up, flip-flopped, name-swapping, upside-down place." Why, even the FBR Open (the huh?) is now sponsored by Waste Management. The feature quotes, yet again, Elliott Pollack and, yet again, declines to mention that he makes his money as a developer, as well as an economist in the service of developers. " 'Every place we were strong,' he says, such as commercial real estate and the semiconductor industry, has crumbled…. Waste management, indeed." So much for what Jacques Brel would term, "Cute, cute, cute, in a stupid ass way."

As someone who was in the heart of the battle in Arizona for most of the decade, I would describe it in more sober terms, for it represents lost opportunities that the state, and particularly the city of Phoenix, may never get again. Call it the Decade of Delusion. Admittedly a strong term for a place built on a history of boosterism, glasses half full and always, like the Roadrunner, seeming to escape disaster at the last second. Those escapes, in reality, were opportunities tossed aside and hard choices pushed into a future that has now arrived. They were decades spent devouring and profaning the last best place, arriving in 2000 with one more chance to get it right. Instead, delusion prevailed. Now state and city are Wile E. Coyote, standing on air, still not realizing it's a long way down.

I arrived back in Arizona literally just in time to attend a debate between Sandy Bahr of the Sierra Club and real-estate lawyer Grady Gammage over Prop 202. It was September of 2000 and the initiative, which would have placed limits on sprawl and leapfrog development, was leading in polls. What happened next was a remarkable turnaround, as the real-estate interests mustered a well-funded scare campaign against 202. I recall Pollack saying the state would collapse into recession if the measure passed. That was my first red flag: 202 was hardly radical, indeed could have been criticized for not going far enough. It would have made infill profitable and left huge swaths to develop elsewhere. But if its passage meant recession, here was a state too dependent on one sector, despite all the boosterism about Arizona's "vibrant, diverse" economy. Prop 202 was crushed. The land barons set about platting everything from Yavapai County to beyond Tucson. The Decade of Delusion had begun.

Jon Talton December 21, 20099

Phoenix

Phoenix and Seattle

It's been more than two years since I left Phoenix for Seattle and readers have repeatedly asked me to compare and contrast the two. I've hesitated because they are not merely different places but different planets.

As a columnist for the Arizona Republic, I used Seattle as a yardstick for Phoenix in a pair of articles. They were about the same size metro areas, and in 1960, same size cities. Both were weather challenged. Both had sat in the shadows of bigger cities (LA for Phoenix, San Francisco for Seattle). In 1960, Seattle was heavily dependent on Boeing and otherwise held a number of declining industries, as well as a history of labor problems. Phoenix was rich with newly recruited tech companies and a fresh slate. Which city would you have bet on? Of course, Seattle turned out to be a world city and Phoenix a massive real-estate scheme. The second column attempted to explain some of Seattle's strengths that could be nurtured to help Phoenix (yeah, I was the one who was always gloomy, never offering solutions). These columns went into the dustbin of all such writing about Arizona and, as teaching tools, they were also very naive.

In reality, Seattle had so many strengths Phoenix never had or developed. This is why a real compare-and-contrast may be of limited value, as well as being seen as more Phoenix bashing.

Jon Talton December 17, 20099

Phoenix

Phoenix in December

I made a quick trip back home to speak at the Arizona Library Association annual conference. Sorry to all the friends I couldn't see, but beyond the speech I wanted to drive around and see the city, especially to gather material for the next Mapstone mystery, South Phoenix Rules. Some non-literary observations:

— The gigantic rental car facility is one of those head-shakers. It's so big that I suppose it could become the terminal for the much smaller city that Phoenix may become because of the Great Disruption. In any event, how much did this monster cost and why wasn't that money put into a speed-up of the people-mover to connect with light rail? It's the usual backward thinking and spending, assuming the future will be based on single-occupancy car trips. The "landscaping" and "public art" out front are hideous. Saguaros baking in tightly packed gravel is totally ahistorical for the oasis city that was Phoenix, not a natural look for the Sonoran Desert and plain cayo-ugly. Nice job, Frank.

— Christmas is always magical in Phoenix. As a child, I watched snowy Midwestern holiday scenes on television, but I knew the first Christmas came in the desert. This was especially enchanting with a rainstorm swirling, making the transplanted Midwesterners complain. I let it fall on me as I walked to the hotel next to the Willo district, feeling centered to be in the old 'hood. The rain is so precious, especially in this drought. Has it occurred to anyone that what makes the Sonoran Desert special, so rich in its plant and animal life, is its relatively high rainfall. A few decades like this and it will become more like the Mojave and Chihuahua deserts — bleak and bereft. But you "won't have to shovel sunshine."

Jon Talton December 10, 20098

Politics: National

Turning and turning

We are told repeatedly by our rulers in business, politics and the media that the big hurdle to addressing climate change and health care is cost. Somehow war without end, the global effects of climate change and the towering costs of health care even as more Americans do without it are "free." And so it goes.

This is how we live now. There was indeed one conservative in last fall's presidential election and he now sits in the White House. Barack Obama fits the Burkean mold of slow change, respectful of tradition and custom, seeking to preserve the best of existing arrangements. Unfortunately, thirty years of right-wing revolution (represented by Mr. Obama's opponent, the wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III) have driven these laudable benchmarks so far to the extreme that Mr. Obama's innate restraint is exactly the wrong temperament for this pivotal moment in history.

On health care, one wonders if his heart was ever in it. This has been a colossal failure of the Democratic Party. The New Deal was not the product of a single, 2,000-plus page bill, but of scores of pieces of legislation over years. It delivered nearly instant relief to the nation's suffering, in both substance and confidence-building, helping to ensure continued Democratic majorities to keep it going. Under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, we have a massive dog's breakfast that will come to no good, and be undone by the Republicans because its good elements will take too long to kick in. Why, for example, not one bill that outlawed the savage practice of denying insurance based on pre-existing conditions, or charging outlandish premiums for it — and having it implemented the moment the president signed the legislation? Another could have instantly required pharmaceutical companies to bid for Medicare drugs, lowering costs at the stroke of a pen. Yet another would have eliminated antitrust protections for the big insurers. And another still would have been a public option, if not Medicare for all — and let the filibuster happen and its instigators pay the fearsome price in the next election.

Jon Talton December 7, 20094

Phoenix

Reality bites

You know times are tough when even the JPMorgan Chase outlook luncheon, which for years was an orgy of boosterism and denial, sounds like a post from Rogue Columnist. ASU economist Lee McPheters said Arizona may not recover until 2014. McPheters is one of the genuinely intelligent ASU economists who usually pulled his punches because of past Kookocracy threats against honesty, especially the nuts' vendetta against the truth-telling Tom Rex. Elliott Pollack, the booster rubber-chicken-circuit fixture whom the Info Center consistently refuses to identify as the developer he is, even sounded clear-eyed about the dire situation. (You can read the entire report here).

Unfortunately, Phoenicians have two emotional speeds: irrational optimism and suicidal depression. While they should take this highly establishment verdict on the situation as a call to arms, I fear they will break out the cyanide capsules or just go to the booster sweat lodge chanting…all together now…Please, God, just give me one more real estate boom…

The reality is that things are even worse than the luncheon crowd heard. Phoenix is in a depression. I've created a searchable tag for it if you're on Twitter (#PhoenixDepression) to catalog all the news and data (my Twitter feed is jontalton). Yes, as my readers have heard for years, the region is too dependent on real estate and now has an inventory of houses and spec commercial space that will take years to work out. And, yes, contrary to the "Goldwater" Institute's sock puppet on the Info Center's editorial page, Arizona has been hit harder than any other state by job losses. Indeed, metro Phoenix led the nation in job cuts in October compared with the same month in 2008. Alas, the troubles run much, much deeper.

Jon Talton December 3, 20093

Phoenix Politics: National

Go Goddard?

Terry Goddard is a good man. He was a popular and effective Phoenix mayor, and after failing to achieve the governor's office in the '90s came back to become the best attorney general in the state's history. Among his top achievements has been going after the wire transfer companies that are enabling the smuggling of people, drugs and guns. He's also knocked off some of the rough edges he was said to possess as mayor and, I would assume, collected lots of political IOUs. For all these reasons, I wonder if he should run for governor.

A Rasmussen poll showed Democrat Goddard only 9 points ahead of Gov. Jan Brewer and in virtually tied with Treasurer Dean Martin, his likely Republican opponents. Another survey indicated Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio as a huge favorite of Republican voters and, according to the Info Center, leading Goddard by 12 percentage points. It's unclear whether the Badged Ego will run.

This seems like madness, or, if the polls are accurate, the pulse of a madhouse. The Republicans have wrecked Arizona through their policies and set it on a collision course with a very nasty future. The party's cruel, spiteful behavior is epitomized by Arpaio and detailed in the brutal budget cuts of the Kookocracy Legislature. Brewer and Martin are empty suits. Arpaio probably won't run because the exposure of a statewide race might finally cause the mask to slip and leave him exposed as the calculating bully he is. Yet why would any of these clowns even be in contention against Goddard, a man of genuine accomplishments and a centrist one would hope represents the best of my home state and the hope for its future?

Jon Talton November 30, 200914

Phoenix

Sun city

In a place so starved for "good news," Arizona greeted the announcement that China's Suntech would locate its first U.S. manufacturing plant, growing to 250 jobs, in metro Phoenix as if it had won a Boeing jetliner assembly line. "This is a great day for Arizona," enthused Gov. Jan Brewer. "I've been so
determined that we have a business climate that will bring us jobs."

It's important to note that this "business climate" is a complete repudiation of the ideology of Arizona's Kookocracy. Suntech will benefit from tax incentives and was pursued aggressively, a strategy that has worked well for Southern states. This had been dismissed in the past by legislative leaders and other ruling mandarins who argued that all Arizona needed was more tax cuts, less regulation and sunshine to become the Hong Kong of the desert. Suntech was also roped in by the solar and sustainability research at ASU, some long-standing but much ramped up under Michael Crow. The Kookocracy has consistently cut university funding and scoffed at research. Finally, it represented a reaching out to the world economy by a place that was historically inward looking, just waiting for the next wave of house-buyers from the Midwest. This, too, while pushed by Barry Broome of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, had received little traction among the local economic elites for years.

So, good for Phoenix. With one of the worst and least diverse major metro economies in the nation, any boost will help. If the lessons from the Suntech deal are learned and expanded upon, who knows what might happen. Yet, not to sun on their parade, the deal also raises some troubling questions.

Jon Talton November 19, 200917

Phoenix 101: History Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

:Carl Hayden

This week, Sen. Robert Byrd will surpass Arizona's Carl Hayden as the longest-serving member of Congress. As Arizona's only congressman and later its fixture of a senator, Hayden was there for 56 years. The Arizona Republic's Dan Nowicki provides a good primer on Hayden for the majority of Arizonans who have either never heard of him, or merely associate his name with a high school.

When he was alive, Hayden was the most prominent of the walking reminders of Arizona as a frontier state. He had been born when the Salt River Valley was barely settled, had chased outlaws on horseback as Maricopa County sheriff (above left), then had become the Baby State's first representative in Congress.

"Ol' Carl Hayden," as he was known by the time I was alive, will forever be associated with the Central Arizona Project. The best book on Hayden and the CAP is my friend Jack August's Vision in the Desert. It was his life's work, and as it headed toward victory, Hayden realized it would not mean the sustenance and extension of agriculture in the Salt River Valley, but rather its transformation into a megalopolis. I have heard he was ambivalent about this reality, as many who fought for the CAP came to be. Ironically, many of the sustainability issues Phoenix and the Southwest face today were made in the 1950s and 1960s by the CAP adversaries in California — although they were hardly angels.

Jon Talton November 16, 20093

Phoenix

Greenscam

The Phoenix Convention Center is the site of the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, involving, the Info Center reports, "thousands of entrepreneurs, sales executives

and marketers in the fast-growing 'green' construction industry." I'm sure every attendee's welcome kit contained a laminated printout of the Rogue post, "Did you hear the one about sustainable Phoenix?" Or they should, as Phoenix is the capital of denial, pipe dreams of hydrogen cars and cooling sidewalks, and the green of sales, sales, sales. It is an international poster child of unsustainability. Put the conferees on buses, drive them around town, say "Don't do this!" and send them home.

In the same edition of the newspaper, oops, Information Center, was a story about shading the new Diamondbacks spring training structure out on the rez. I'm sure this can be spun as "green" construction, and this is one of the big problems with the entire green-built movement. A new stadium on what was rural land, surrounded by a giant heat-radiating parking lagoon and wholly dependent on long drives in automobiles is by its nature not green, not adding to sustainability. This is hardly a Phoenix problem. One sees all these new houses and
buildings in new office "parks" trumpeting their LEED certification.
Unless they are infill or rehabbing an existing (preferably historic) building, they are not really green. They are not green if they expand the urban footprint. Nor can they be divorced from their surroundings, such as walkable neighborhoods, transit, in-neighborhood shopping, etc. Otherwise, they are greenwash. Still, Phoenix takes the destructive absurdity to operatic levels. The idea that the already too-large Phoenix urban footprint can be enlarged by Superstition Vistas, and all those houses will be "green" (without a mandate, sure) is insanity.

The Info Center likely didn't have an article that came out of the European press, where whistleblowers claimed the International Energy Agency, under political pressure, has been inflating world petroleum reserves. It's a charge backed by academics and the reality of peaking production, the only reliable measure of oil. In other words, the world is running out of oil much faster than we're being told. The world is changing fast — don't forget climate change, too — and the biggest casualties will be cities such as Phoenix.

Jon Talton November 12, 200954

Politics: National

Not like Ike

The nut baggers are right. Socialism has come to America. It is here, now. The government owns the "commanding heights" of this economy, as is the case in classic socialist doctrine. Citizens of this American socialism get free medical care, housing, food, clothing, even travel. They have abundant educational opportunities, including college. It promises and actually delivers both diversity and social mobility. It also has elements of fascism, just as the nut baggers have warned in their rallies attended by hundreds: The socialism has a heavy corporate component, with giant companies moving in lockstep with the regime's demands yet also holding strong political sway within the regime. In exchange for its benefits, members of the society give up certain freedoms — yet they keep joining enthusiastically.

I'm writing about the military, of course, and not just to show the absurdity of the nut baggers' claims. In a nation where six people are chasing every job, where college is increasingly out of reach, the only advanced nation in the world where people go without health insurance — in today's America, the military is often the only option open. It made news last month when a man who couldn't get insurance joined the Army so his cancer-stricken wife could get help. (When I Googled "joined Army to get health care," the second and third hits out of 53 million were Army recruiting sites). Military recruiters have more than met their targets — ones raised for the Army — since the economic meltdown. Even with the danger of war, many Americans just don't see another way.

Elements of this have long happened. There's the classic case of the directionless kid from high school who joins the military — sometimes under a parent or even judge's threat — and becomes an adult. I went to high school with young men who joined up, served honorably and succeeded as civilians — I doubt most of them ever would have chosen the military as a first option. And we honor their service. But the Great Disruption's first act — the crash and its resulting unemployment, combined with two wars seemingly without end — is creating something new. New and unsettling.

Jon Talton November 9, 20094

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

People of color in old Phoenix

The 1948 graduating class from George Washington Carver High School (McCulloch Bros. Collection/ASU Archives).

From its founding until the late 20th century, Phoenix was an overwhelmingly Anglo city. But Phoenicians of color were always here. This column tells a bit of their stories.

Phoenix was settled by many Southerners and ex-Confederates, and it kept that Southern sensibility well into the 1960s. The white Chicagoans who started coming in the 1930s brought their own racial biases that for decades tore that city apart.

Into the early 1950s many places in Phoenix were legally segregated, including schools. Phoenix Union Colored High School, later George Washington Carver High, opened in 1926. Booker T. Washington and Paul Lawrence Dunbar elementary schools were built for younger "colored" children. (Washington is now home of New Times).

Deed covenants restricted many neighborhoods to "whites only." Minorities couldn't buy houses north of Van Buren Street well into the 1940s (and, as the 1913 advertisement shows, often couldn't buy south, either). Many stores and restaurants would not serve blacks, Mexicans, Japanese and American Indians. Swimming pools were segregated, too. Arizona had an anti-miscegenation law on the books from 1865 to 1962.

To be fair, there was no "colored waiting room" at Union Station and Encanto Park golf course accepted minority players in the 1940s. No lynching based on race is on record. Chinese-American children went to white public schools. Early minority businessmen such as Jose M. Iberri prospered. Mexicans who could "pass" for Anglos, such as the Van Harens, could move more freely. But the race and class lines were not hard to find. Phoenix always saw itself as an Anglo city (and the demographics back this up, especially after 1920), unlike old Tucson with its proud Spanish and Mexican traditions.

And consider: For decades the distance between the mansions of "Millionaires Row," Chinatown, and "the slums" were often only a few blocks.

The Salt River Valley, of course, had once been part of Mexico. Prior to Columbus, it was the site of the most advanced irrigation-based civilization in the Americas before being abandoned by the Hohokam. By the time the cavalry forced peace on the Apaches and white families such as mine began arriving in the latter part of the 19th century, Hispanics and Pimas were living in the Valley, too.

The nature of the town was embodied in one of its founders, Jack Swilling. He had a Mexican wife, Trinidad Escalante, as well as an adopted Apache son, Guillermo.

In other words, Phoenix was never Des Moines in the desert.

Jon Talton November 5, 200912