Posted inPhoenix

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.

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Posted inPhoenix

The vision thing

It's good to know that one sector in Phoenix has escaped the recession: the "visioning" industry. Meetings led by consultants and officials can still be held to get "public input" that will lead to…nothing. I remember such a farce that the "city" of Buckeye paid god-knows-how-much-for in the mid-2000s: Respondents most wanted commuter rail to Phoenix. Where are the trains?

The city of Phoenix's Planning Department has been going around to the assorted "urban villages" of this 500-square-mile collection of real-estate ventures asking citizens to "imagine Phoenix the best it can be in 2050." This is all part of updating the holy General Plan, which supposedly guides all development. As the city presentation puts it, "a General Plan is a comprehensive guide for all physical aspects of a city, but also addresses issues such as building neighborhoods and creating community." Like that General Plan of the 1970s that said Bell Road would absolutely, positively be the permanent northern boundary of Phoenix.

If I'm reading the information from the Downtown Voices Coalition correctly, the attendees at the central Phoenix meeting wanted higher density to support mixed use, downtown and transit. Alas, Ahwatukee's top vision for 2050 was "safety," although it wants light rail. The swells of Camelback East want something called "the village concept" (inbred people with pitchforks hiding a local monster?) — no mention of a downtown at all, certainly not light rail (it might bring "those people"). Far-off Desert View wants most a "small town, large city" feel. Maryvale at least ranks downtown and "proper public transit."

So much for imagining a great city.

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Posted inPhoenix

The men who would be Frank

Four finalists have reportedly emerged to replace retiring Phoenix City Manager Frank Fairbanks. All are current City of Phoenix employees. They're good men, and David Krietor and Ed Zuercher especially hold promise. Still, the finalist lineup reinforces the sense of Phoenix's parochialism and inward-looking mindset. It's a problem that extends far beyond City Hall. But it's significant given government's huge footprint in a city with no major corporate headquarters, influential civic stewards or powerful business interests beyond building more sprawl (which apparently extends to self-dealing city council members). There is, simply, no other major American city as limited as Phoenix in its economy or centers of power — or its lack of self-awareness. So something that elsewhere might seem routine, carries big weight and risk here.

This is also a portentous moment for a changing of the guard. When Fairbanks became city manager in 1990, Phoenix was in a nasty real-estate recession but otherwise still on a sunny trajectory it had enjoyed since the end of World War II. City Hall's reputation for clean government and efficiency earned it the Bertelsmann Prize as one of the two best-run cities in the world. In the early '90s, the city still had corporate leaders such as Dial and Valley National Bank. Chastened by the real-estate bust, leaders established the Greater Phoenix Economic Council and worked to diversify the economy. Phoenix was the uncontested regional leader; the suburbs were still relatively small. Its population was much more middle class.

Fairbanks' successor will inherit a far different city, and not merely one that has grown to 1.5 million from 983,000 in 1990.

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Posted inPhoenix

Hey, y’all, watch this!

Since at least the 1980s, the Arizona Republic and its successor, The Information Center, have periodically rolled out campaigns to make the economy more than attracting freezing Midwesterners and building sprawl. I did my time in the trenches on several of these efforts earlier in the decade. The work continues with a Sunday story about attracting high-paid jobs and diversifying the economy. On the Viewpoints front, we find a piece explaining the stakes and solutions by Ioanna Morfessis, the first president of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council. Then there is the obligatory rebuttal by the Local Krackpot "Think" Tank: "Cut taxes and incentives to create jobs." Also: "Reducing government red tape would also create a job-friendlier climate."

And does anyone wonder why Phoenix and Arizona keep falling further behind? First, why does the "Goldwater" Institute have standing to weigh in on anything? It's an advocacy group funded by national "conservative" interests, repeating national talking points just like all the other right-wing "think tanks" that were seeded around the country out of the Mont Pelerin Society and other wealthy reactionary groups in the 1980s and 1990s. It is like PETA or the NRA. In no way is it an organization that does real research. And after years of the same old lines, what does it have to say that's new? What does its sock puppet on the editorial page have to say that's new? Nothing. Can't the Info Center find even one independent conservative voice to write something that's relevant and interesting?

More importantly: The ideology so relentlessly peddled by the "Goldwater" Institute has run Arizona for years if not decades. Its polemicists always strike the pose of victims standing up against the hordes of socialists that control everything — but it's a lie. They won. They're sore winners, out to quash any dissenting voices. Now they must continue to distract, keep the poor talk-radio zombies thinking that guv'munt is the problem. They must continue to carry water for the Real Estate Industrial Complex, which really controls the state (Please, God, give me one more boom…). All this because their ideology, implemented with ruthless, relentless effectiveness, has driven Arizona into the worst depression in its modern history. Their ideas have been tried and failed. And still they rule the day.

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Posted inPhoenix

Oh, for a newspaper in Phoenix

Phoenix, the nation's fifth-largest city, hasn't had a newspaper since 2007. I'm not being snarky. The storied, beloved and hated Arizona Republic was replaced by The Information Center. Its owner Gannett was very clear about this when the change was made. Staffers were told over and over: "We're not a newspaper anymore." It shows.

That's too bad, because troubled places, corruption, exploitation of the weak and the crushing of fair play thrive when there's no real newspaper. Wal-Mart quit the despicable practice of taking out insurance policies — payable to the company — on its minimum-wage, part-time workers only when the practice was reported by the Wall Street Journal. Exposing wrongs in a complex world, and explaining that world, usually takes highly trained, highly motivated, intensely curious veteran journalists. Such work can't be done by "crowd-sourcing" or "citizen journalists" or any of the cheap fads publishers have used to get rid of their cranky, higher-paid intellectual capital. Some fine journalists remain at The Information Center, but they are rarely allowed to really follow their calling, especially upon a growing herd of sacred cows.

Oh, for a newspaper in Phoenix. One to write hard-news-put-'em-in-jail investigative journalism. One to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. To report the news and raise hell. To dig through court, government and business records, and cultivate deep, authoritative sources. To illuminate and hold accountable the most dominant institutions. If it existed, I can think of ten major stories to get it started:

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Posted inPolitics: National

Say you want a revolution?

I was in Phoenix over the weekend to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Poisoned Pen Bookstore and mark the launch of the short-story collection, Phoenix Noir. For those of you with thin skins, be proud of the cool new restaurants downtown. And that Barry Schoeneman of Men's Apparel Club, who sells the best suits for the lowest prices in America and has toughed out a retail-hostile downtown for more than 4 years, is moving to a bigger store uptown, but still in the central core. And if you care (I don't), there are still plenty of hip, skinny, rich people at Snottsdale nightclubs despite the overall depression. More gravel. Less shade. More vacant lots. Fewer completed projects. Light rail still succeeds (gloat). Yea, my hometown.

But what caught my attention most was not this or even another well-intentioned civic project rolled out in the Information Center. It was an article on the front of the Viewpoints section, beneath pieces trumpeting this well-intentioned project. It was headlined, "A rebuttal: Why I am a conservative," by the "school choice movement" activist lawyer Clint Bolick, who now has what seems to be a well-endowed sinecure at the local Krack-Pot "Think" Tank. I thought: Why is this a rebuttal? The reactionaries have won in Arizona and the efforts of the latest well-intentioned project will go nowhere. They, not Bolick, should be the rebuttal to the ruling reactionary/growth status quo. But it was just bad newspaper design. Bolick was chastising my former colleague Richard Nilsen who had the guts to write an op-ed saying why he was not a conservative. In Arizona this is an enterprise akin to trying to teach opera to pigs (it's futile because it can't be done and it irritates the pigs).

Read and enjoy. But the biggest problem with the argument is that the "conservatives" that rose to prominence after 1980, and especially 1994, didn't want to conserve. As Sam Tanenhaus makes clear in his new book, The Death of Conservatism, today's "conservatives" are radicals, with little connection to the Burkean conservatives who sought to conserve the best of the old, showed respect for tradition and custom, etc. But thanks to the fecklessness and corruption of the Democratic Party, these radicals still control the agenda.

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Posted inPhoenix

‘Why do you hate Arizona?’

This was a question asked by a reader of a recent post. It's a fair question that deserves an answer. I will try to be concise.

1. I am not selling anything associated with the sunshine/real estate Ponzi scheme, so I have no reason to lie to the boobs — oops, potential customers from the Midwest or inland California about the true state of affairs in Arizona.

2. I am not one of the boobs from the Midwest or inland California who bought into what was billed as "a piece of unspoiled Sonoran Desert — with championship golf!," only to find dreary suburbia in a frying pan set on high. And now I'm too embarrassed to admit I was a sucker but angry at anyone who implies it.

3. I am not a member of the Real Estate Industrial Complex or the Kookocracy. Therefore, I don't profit from either the booster growthgasm Kook-Aid, the ongoing destruction of the state or the constant inflaming of grievances against "guvment," brown people or columnists who speak truth to power.

4. I am a mean, mean man.

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Posted inPhoenix

Arizona, unstimulated

The political faith of the Kookocracy is not just that government "is the problem," but that government is outright evil. Without the socialist Jan Brewer restraining them, they dream of a state with a government out of the Coolidge years (without that pesky Herbert Hoover as Commerce Secretary). I'll never forget giving a speech to some Phoenix Young Republicans. A woman in her twenties said all aid to the less fortunate should be terminated. If they protest? "Shoot them in the streets," she said, chillingly serious.

Of course, in the reality based world Arizona is a government creation, and takes more in government services than it pays in taxes. It is a welfare queen. Despite all the cries of "SOCIALISM," it has taken federal stimulus money. Nevertheless, the faith persists. Low taxes, little regulation and a continuing battle to stifle any "activism" (such as funding Science Foundation Arizona or that Don Budinger and his efforts to improve impoverished schools) will produce the best "business climate" in the country. Anybody in need, well, deserves their lot. Best-practices used around the world for economic development are SOCIALISM!!

So how's that working out for you?

Arizona gets an F grade in the new Assets and Opportunities Scorecard from the non-partisan (and backed by big business) CFed. Arizona is one of only five states to get the lowest grade in this report that tracks 92 measures of well-being. Its peers are all in the South. You don't need a report to know the depression that is ravaging Phoenix. One out of four residents is uninsured.

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Posted inPhoenix

Cities and ‘markets’

Bashas' filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection is a sad and telling marker for Arizona. You can forget about that downtown Phoenix store. And you can probably forget about Bashas', one of the state's last large, locally based and locally rooted companies.

Today's grocery company was founded in 1932, in the Great Depression, although its Arizona origins go deeper. That it may succumb in the Great Disruption is a tragic, but perhaps fitting bookend. I think of all the times I was out amidst the worst examples of unsustainable, desert-profaning sprawl, be it Gold Canyon, Hunt Highway or the insipid Verrado that was prematurely anointed the future by David Brooks of the New York Times. There would be a Bashas'. As the sprawl Ponzi scheme has collapsed, its not surprising that it takes down another vulnerable player.

This take-down is sadder than most. Bashas' has a great story: immigrant success, ties to Chandler when it was a real town, and keeping its base there even as the anodyne subdivisions encroached. Eddie and Nadine Basha have been civic leaders in a place where they are more rare than shade in mid-summer. This is an unforgiving business with razor-thin margins. If greater Phoenix ends up losing its only locally owned grocery chain — as, say, A.J.'s is sold off — it will only deepen the deep-bore mineshaft that is the hole the place is in.

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Posted inPhoenix

The model modern city manager

One joke around Phoenix involving Frank Fairbanks was that he could never retire as city manager, because then all the scandals would come out. Of course, everybody loves Frank. Except for the ones who don't. Given the lack of curiosity and resources in the local press, we'll never know how true the joke might be. I never ran into evidence that Fairbanks was anything but clean. His problems were more complicated. Since most will be offering rapturous praise as Fairbanks is apparently stepping down, a more serious assessment is necessary.

The zeitgeist of Frank Fairbanks' City Hall was to move across the waters without making waves. He was not a creative thinker or a risk-taker — think of the guy on the Shredded Wheat ad who says, "We put the 'no' in innovation." His career spent with the city led to an unavoidable parochialism, along with perhaps a fatalism that the city's trajectory couldn't be changed, or a willingness to drink the booster Kool-Aid by the gallon. He was in an awkward spot in a systemically dysfunctional city government, mostly trying to keep the peace, even as Phoenix hit a grave turning point. All this would have profound consequences for Phoenix and its future.

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Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Rugged individualism

Phoenix is built on many myths. Perhaps the greatest is that of the rugged individualist, standing in opposition to the statist and collectivist tendencies of "the East" and Europe. It's a familiar myth of the West, but it reaches levels of hilarious dissonance in my hometown.

In reality, Phoenix is the largest-scale example of government social engineering and public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy — i.e. socialism — in American history. Without massive government intervention, Phoenix would be a benighted little farm town of a few thousand, instead of a benighted migropolis of some 4 million, many raging along the public highways in their SUVs imagining themselves as 21st century range riders.

Modern Phoenix began with federal reclamation, the Newlands Act, which would begin the dam building that tamed the Salt River. It envisioned a Jeffersonian yeoman farmer democracy, with plots of 160 acres cultivated by citizens liberated from the dark satanic cities of the East. It didn't quite work out that way — rich farmers emerged and poor farmers (like my family) struggled. But all were being subsidized by federal tax dollars long before the New Deal. Their endeavors would not have been possible without the federal investment.

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Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Phoenix 101: Lost opportunities

My chief goal in writing the Phoenix 101 post about the old city was to dispel the notion that “there’s no history here,” spoken by the transplants as they file into the tract houses of their so-called master planned communities. More, to fight the canard that “Phoenix has no soul.” Well, maybe now in most places, but it wasn’t always so. Yet the post was so popular, it seems logical to follow up with a brief history on choices made and opportunities missed.

It’s important to make a distinction. People have sometimes dismissed my observations with words such as “well, everyplace changes” and “my hometown isn’t the same any more, either.” At the risk of being pedantic, that’s not my point. First, while every place changes, it doesn’t necessarily change mostly for the worse. Cities such as Seattle, Portland, Denver, Charlotte, San Diego and even Oklahoma City have undergone massive changes. Yet they have managed to preserve and revive their center cities, their civic spaces and enhance livability (and they have plenty of suburbs, so Phoenix isn’t special there). I miss the old railroad yards in downtown Denver – but what an amazing city it is now. It’s gotten better. Second, Phoenix is not just any city – so who cares if it’s no worse than Fresno or Youngstown? It sold its magic for dross. And its choices have set the stage for crisis, whether sudden or lingering.

Much was out of the control of Phoenicians and their leaders. Phoenix grew large after the City Beautiful Movement, so it lacked many great civic spaces; it was a modest farm town during the 1920s, so it had relatively few art deco towers. Worst of all, it came of age with the automobile, Levittown-style suburbia, and the savage city planning and dehumanizing design ethos of Robert Moses and Le Corbusier. Still, Phoenix made choices. It lost opportunities. Here are a few.

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Water and Phoenix’s rebirth
Posted inPhoenix Phoenix 101: History

Water and Phoenix’s rebirth

Roosevelt_dam_1915
Theodore Roosevelt Dam and spillway, 1915.

 

On the mountain tops we stand
All the world at our command
We have opened up the soil
With our teardrops
And our toil
–Gordon Lightfoot (Canadian Railroad Trilogy)

That people can move to the Salt River Valley turn on a reliable tap or jump in a shimmering swimming pool, never even wondering where the water originates, is testimony to the mighty acts and sacrifices of previous generations. 

Today's transplants would never know it, but they live in one of the world's great fertile river valleys. But unlike the Nile and Euphrates, the Salt is dangerously unpredictable. It floods. It dries up to nearly nothing. In the end, it destroyed the most advanced hydraulic civilization in the pre-Columbian Americas, which we call the Hohokam.

It very nearly did the same to the Americans who found the valley after the Civil War, having sat there empty for centuries as if providentially awaiting them. Even some of the Hohokam canals were intact, needing only to be cleaned out by the newcomers. But the river had its own harsh logic. The territorial "lifestyle," as related by my grandmother, was unbelievably primitive, even at the end of the 19th century — always dependent on the river's tricks. Phoenix might never have risen from the ashes.

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Posted inPhoenix

Phoenix, Dubai and other heat dreams

On the ground in Phoenix, and sometimes green sprouts arise even amid the ugliness of the cityscape and thuggingness of the politics. A woman on a walker watched me struggle into CVS; on the way out, she said, "I've been praying for you." It keeps me aloft. Tuesday night saw an overflow crowd at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore for the launch of my new mystery/suspense novel, The Pain Nurse. Today I was on KJZZ with Steve Goldstein, where my friend Grady Gammage and I reprised our good cop/bad cop routine with Phoenix in the interrogation room (guess who plays bad cop).

I got to read the Arizona Republic on blessed, relaxing paper this morning, a welcome break from the Information Center. Today's Phoenix Laff Riot is Mayor Phil Gordon concluding some kind of economic partnership with Dubai. It's hard to know where to begin with what's wrong with this deeply unserious distraction. For one thing, rhetoric about solar power, sustainability, etc. is a joke considering Phoenix is a basket case in all categories. It let solar research and enterprise get away after the 1950s and now has nothing to offer the Mideast kingdom, other than a model of worst practices. Meanwhile, Dubai is in a deep recession, partly caused by overbuilding. So the benefit is, what…?

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Posted inPhoenix

How’d that boom work out for you?

The data are in and most Phoenicians have to show for the Great Real Estate Boom…not much. The federal Bureau of Economic Analysis this week released its comprehensive survey of per-capita personal income for metro areas and counties in 2007. It's the gold standard yardstick for measuring how the average person was actually doing after the Bush "boom" and as the nation prepared to slide into recession.

In metro Phoenix, per-capita personal income totaled $35,185, an increase of 1 percent from 2006 vs. the national average of 4.9 percent. From 1997 to 2007, income growth was 3.9 percent, vs. 4.3 percent nationally. More context: Phoenix's 2007 income was only 91 percent of the national average. Although Phoenix is the nation's 13th most populous metro area, it ranks 134th among metros in per-capita personal income. In 1997, it ranked 126th. This should be astonishing, if any one takes note.

Let's drill down deeper. Phoenix doesn't compete for talent and capital against the national average that includes Mississippi and Alabama. It competes against other big cities (here and abroad), whether it wants to or not. How did its competitors do?

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