Phoenix Archives - Page 3 of 7

Encanto Park in old Phoenix

A city such as Cincinnati built great parks, from the showpiece Eden Park, home to the Cincinnati Playhouse, Cincinnati Art Museum, Kron Conservatory and Mirror Lake Fountain, to the exquisitely designed Ault Park near the tony Mount Lookout and Hyde Park neighborhoods. Eastsiders who won't venture beyond the "Sauerkraut Curtain" may not even know about Mt. Echo Park, one of my favorites with its awesome views of downtown and the Ohio River.

The Queen City of the West had the good fortune to come of age in the golden age of park design and have the wealth to pull it off. Phoenix, a modest farm town at this time, built only one: Encanto. That makes it all the more a civic treasure. This Saturday Encanto Park will celebrate its 75th anniversary.

I write this not to take away from the city's achievement with desert parks, especially South Mountain Park and Papago Park. But they are what they are, often stunning preserves of the Sonoran Desert for hardy hikers and, more often, drivers.

Encanto was different, built as an oasis of shade and grass and City Beautiful Movement design, meant for people, picnics and strolling. Now more than ever, you can feel the instant cooling of the park and golf courses when you drive south of Thomas on 15th Avenue on a summer night. It's not like the Midwest — for that kind of lush greenery, look to Cincinnati. It lacks the size and resources that Los Angeles could put into Griffith Park. Encanto, inspired by San Diego's grand Balboa Park, is its own enchanted feat. It is a capsule of old Phoenix, a magical refutation of those who say "Phoenix has no soul."

Jon Talton November 25, 201015

Downtown & central Phoenix Phoenix

Tom and Mike

When Michael Ratner passed away this week, Phoenix lost one of its true heroes. He bought the revived Tom's Tavern downtown in 1992 and never stopped fighting to keep this landmark going. Tom's played a big part in my personal history: It's a setting in many of the David Mapstone books, and Mike played host to the launch party of my first mystery, Concrete Desert. For years, he had my books for sale at the tavern. On our columnist lunches, E. J. Montini, Richard Ruelas and I sometimes went to Tom's. Tippling happened.

Tom's was one of my hangouts, and Mike always wanted to know how I was doing, even when I paid visits after being thrown out of Phoenix. He was that kind of man, caring about others, not one to dwell on his battle with cancer. He'd sit me at the "governor's table" or the "mayor's table," then join me to talk. Mike was a worrier. Tom's always seemed on the edge, even with its history and location at the foot of the Renaissance Towers close to city and county government. He hung on through light rail construction, creating events for symphony and other event-goers. The Great Recession was another storm to weather. He lovingly preserved history, from the portraits of past and current leaders to mementos of the tavern's rich past, in a town that has no use for it.

He transcended the era of John Teets, Jerry Colangelo and other bigs who had the vision and means to work for a great city. In his modest way, he was one of the last stewards standing. A great restaurant operator, he could have made big money in Scottsdale or the other 'burbs. He chose to make his stand in the heart of the city.

Jon Talton November 18, 201012

Downtown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Growing up in old Phoenix

I grew up in a small town. Its name was Phoenix, and even though it had 439,170 people by the time I was four years old, in 1960, it still seemed like a place I could wrap my arms around and carry with me, just like the little towns in the movies. We lived near Cypress Street and Third Avenue, about a mile from the border of downtown. The houses faced the street, many had porches, the lawns were lush, the shade inviting.

My friends and I stashed fallen oranges and rolled them out into the rush-hour traffic on Third and Fifth — back then, before the Willo Soviet tried to wall off this neighborhood, these streets had three lanes each and carried substantial traffic twice a day, people going to and from work downtown. The oranges were also useful in friendly alley fights; more serious conflict escalated from dirt clods to rocks. Oh, we also ate them, because everyone had citrus trees in their yards and it was a quick drive out to the groves, where boxes of oranges could be purchased at roadside stands surrounded by the lavish bounty of the Salt River Valley. Some days we lay under the trees at Paperboys' Island, a pocket park at Third and Holly, and just stared into the cobalt sky, dreaming the dreams of young boys.

By the time I was eight, I was mobile and free, within limits. Specifically, I could ride my bike from Thomas to Roosevelt and Third Street to Fifteenth Avenue. It was an amazing landscape for a child. The library, art museum and Heard Museum were there. Soda fountains proliferated at drug stores, from the Rexall on Roosevelt and Third Avenue to Ryan-Evans at Seventh and McDowell to shops on Central. Every gas station had a drinking fountain with cold water, an essential for young desert rats. The firefighters at the old Station 4 on First Street and Moreland, as well as the Encanto/Seventh Ave. station indulged us. We bugged the people at Channel 12 and Channel 5 (Wallace & Ladmo's home!) for old reels of commercials — the apex of our ubiquitous trash picking. Encanto Park was a favorite hangout; it was where I decided I wasn't cut out to be a fisherman, but that didn't stop me from endless fishing journeys to the lagoons. The lovely moderne Palms Theater at Central and Virginia offered movies if we didn't want to hitch a ride downtown.

This part of the city was dense then with businesses. This was long before entire blocks were bulldozed or turned into dead space by parking garages. The buildings on the northeast and southeast corners of Seventh Avenue and McDowell, for example, were chock-full of small businesses. So was today's mostly empty Gold Spot — I got my hair cut there by Otis Kenilworth. Downtown was still the busiest shopping district in the state, followed by Park Central mall — both bracketing our neighborhood. I wasn't as fortunate as someone born a few years younger to sample the old city, but it was still pretty intact in the early and mid-1960s.

The big Valley Bank sign turned atop the art deco tower and other neon signaled downtown. Among the downtown landmarks was the Hotel Westward Ho, with its famed Thunderbird Room, where presidents stayed well into the 1960s. The skyscrapers going up along Central seemed signs of progress, not incoherent planning. I watched so many of them being built. My grandmother and I took the bus to shop downtown or at Park Central. This daughter of the frontier "traded," as she put it, at the small A.J. Bayless store at Central and Moreland. Just west were the shady median parks along Moreland and Portland, two of the few City Beautiful Movement touches Phoenix received. The parkways were lined by lushly landscaped apartment buildings. Every day, we drove downtown at 5 p.m. to pick up my mother at the Greater Arizona Savings Building, where the Interstate Stream Commission had its offices. It was amazing to see the crowds on the streets, just like a big city.

Jon Talton August 9, 201023

Phoenix

Phoenix recovery? Part II

The data and just driving around town make it clear that the Phoenix economy is not recovering. That the news snippets and economic forecasts desperately trying to spin things otherwise are almost exclusively focused on real estate is telling. Metro Phoenix so narrowed its economy that it was America's last big factory town, building houses. When this unsustainable game of risk crashed, the region was devastated. But like a dying rattler, it is still snapping its fangs, wildly hanging onto the hope that the Growth Machine can be started up again. It's always worked in the past! This is the forlorn cry of so many caught in past depressions and economic turning points. Buffalo… Youngstown…Detroit…

The old housing economy is not returning. The one based on large-scale output of tract houses built by national builders on a foundation of liar loans, high leverage and vast government subsidies for the suburban or exurban "American dream." Now that dream is a nightmare. The nation is much poorer after the Great Recession, yet the imbalances and high debt remain. Incomes and living standards for average people are in deep trouble. Millions of houses remain to be sold, with many more in the private "shadow inventory" as well as in the toxic "assets" taken off the hands of the banks by the Federal Reserve. Nowhere do these realities operate with more ruinous consequences than Phoenix. Any "new normal" will provide little relief for a regional economy whose business plans were based on an unsustainable profligacy of building and population increases. That little blip that might mean "the bottom" or "stabilization." So?

What's astonishing is the lack of realistic or imaginative thinking on the part of what passes for Arizona leaders faced with this harsh future. Or faced with the mounting evidence of how distorting, costly and damaging to the earnings of average people the real-estate monster had become. Metro Phoenix has never been so dependent on real estate, yet no one seriously wants to break the jones. To understand the future of discontinuity. Pinal County, a national ground zero of exurban crisis, sees only one way out: More sprawl. In fact, Pinal should be returning to agriculture as fast as it can; Arizona needs the exports to a growing Asia, as well as the capacity to feed itself in a high-cost energy future. But the self-destructive hits just keep coming:

Jon Talton July 1, 20107

Politics: National

And that’s the way it is

I wondered if Barack Obama became a one-term president with his astonishingly vapid Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil disaster. But maybe Mr. Obama has the pulse of the nation better than any of us who wanted real change and the fierce urgency of now. It was grotesquely ironic that a few days after offering the usual presidential platitudes about the need to wean ourselves off oil, he was in Columbus, Ohio, touting his stimulus by dedicating work on a road expansion. It was, he said, the 10,000th road project that the stim has funded.

Around the nation the transit systems that had been dramatically expanding ridership as gasoline prices rose are now starving from state and local fiscal crises. Amtrak, despite the vice-president's supposed love of it, remains a shadow of the passenger rail system it succeeded and a political pawn awaiting further cutbacks and the demand that it "pay for itself." This even though no major transportation network pays for itself, certainly not roads. And this despite evidence that road projects don't even have much of a positive effect on unemployment. High-speed rail? It's being studied, even though other advanced and ambitious nations already have systems and are expanding them. Cincinnati, a lovely central city that has been devastated by freeways and sprawl, can't even
muster the civic sanity to fund a streetcar line. America will continue its dependency on roads and cars — something far beyond our competitors in Europe or China. Why? Because that's the way it it.

We care about the poor birds and fish being killed by the oil spill. But not enough to give up our cars. We live magical thinking: That technology will simply replace the inexpensive light sweet crude that powered the automotive age. Rather like the technology that was supposed to allow BP to drill miles down into the earth to extract the remaining crude in the Gulf of Mexico. Electric cars will be expensive and require minerals from places other than America — many of them unstable — as well as demanding electricity from power plants that will be run on…what? Fossil fuels most likely. Beyond that, the dreams become loopy. Space aliens are not going to drop by and give us magical hydrogen cars. Tar sands are not going to yield inexpensive gasoline. Few seem to understand that the fossil fuel "imputs" into most alternative fuels are greater than the new energy produced; many also have nasty environmental or other unintended consequences. Nowhere is this more true than with any alternative to the big oil hog: automobiles.

Jon Talton June 21, 201017

Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Myths and lies

Plato's "noble lie" is one of the foundations of his mythical republic. It also handily cements the power of the elites. So it is with our city with the name from mythology. Let's take them on one at a time:

Phoenix is a young city. This is a canard tossed out to explain every shortcoming or difficulty that can't be blamed on "the Mexicans." As in, Phoenix lacks the amenities commensurate with a big city "because it's a young city." Phoenix was founded in the late 1860s and incorporated in 1881. That's 129 years for those readers who were home-schooled or graduated from Arizona charters. It didn't become what would be considered a large American city until the late 1950s; by 1960, it was the nation's 29th largest city. That's a half century to get its act together.

Where Phoenix can legitimately claim it was shortchanged by being a younger city is that it was too small to benefit much from the golden age of American urban design and architecture, including the City Beautiful Movement. And most of what it did have was torn down in careless acts of civic vandalism from the 1960s onward.

Phoenix grew into a city in the automobile age and the ubiquity of the automobile suburb, with all the dolorous consequences that followed once that became the only mode of city "planning." Otherwise, the reliance on the "young city" excuse actually undermines itself on close inspection.

Jon Talton June 14, 201025

Phoenix 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.

Jon Talton April 28, 201026

Phoenix 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.

Jon Talton April 26, 20108

Downtown & 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,

Jon Talton April 5, 201013

Downtown & central Phoenix Phoenix Phoenix 101: History

How freeways remade Phoenix

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.

Jon Talton March 29, 201010

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

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