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.
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