Posted inPhoenix

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:

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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

Valley of denial

ASU's Morrison Institute has always labored under two Sisyphean tasks. First, its public-policy scholarship necessarily antagonized the state's ruling elites — hence, it was forced to pull its punches to avoid losing funding, and, even then, the elites wouldn't accept its work. Second, it was treated in the media as the "liberal" equivalent of the (Bob) Goldwater Institute. This, even though the "Goldwater" Institute is an arm of the national right-wing advocacy machine, not a genuine think tank that engages in open-minded, peer-reviewed research. With the loss a few years ago of my sometime collaborator Mary Jo Waits, author of Morrison's most prescient and important works (Five Shoes, Meds and Eds), the institute became even more marginalized. Now Morrison is trying once again to become part of the conversation under the leadership of Sue Clark-Johnson, retired Arizona Republic publisher and close friend of ASU President Michael Crow.

Good luck. Unfortunately, the first effort, Forum 411, seems destined for the dustbin of forgotten, well-intended reports at an even faster speed than its predecessors. It is brief, as to be expected from an entity now headed by a former Gannett executive, and strives to be inoffensive. Think of a pep talk. Anthony Robbins on economic development. It states two broad themes: the obvious (Arizona needs to diversify its economy) and the untrue (which I will deal with momentarily). Worst of all, it leaves critical information entirely out. The loss of Waits' intellectual heft is obvious. So, too, is the continued bowing before the Real Estate Industrial Complex (the report's sponsor is the suburban mall developer, Westcor).

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