Rogue Columnist

'Rebound'

A recent story in the Arizona Republic inspired a good deal of commentary on the thread of the last post. I'm going to hang it out there, make a few comments and let you go to town (or suburb). It starts, "The rebound of metro Phoenix's new-home market continues to build." Then:

New-home permits were up 61 percent in the region during March, according to the latest Phoenix Housing Market Letter. The increase is more staggering than the actual numbers, but still it signals "evidence of a new-housing rebound," according the report's publishers, RL Brown and Greg Burger. In March, there were 1,036 single-family permits issued. It was the first month in a while in which home-building permits topped 1,000.

Last year in March, there were 645 single-family permits issued across the Phoenix area. Overall, homebuilding -- one of the region's biggest economic drivers -- was up 74 percent during the first quarter of this year compared with 2011. Here's an even more positive number for the new-home market: Builders reported a spec inventory of only 383 houses during the first part of April.

Tucson drifts

What's the biggest danger facing Arizona's second city? According to Roger Yohem, writing in Inside Tucson Business, it is that the Old Pueblo will become Portland-ized:

Many of Portland’s traits infatuate Tucson’s bureaucrat copycats. To start with the obvious, Portland has a modern streetcar system that serves downtown. The real cost of Portland’s trolleys, infrastructure and tracks can be hard to gauge since much of it was taxpayer subsidized through government grants and tax gimmicks. But based on various public records, the consensus puts the initial cost at $25 million per mile. For $200 million, Tucson’s streetcar system will cost $50 million per mile. When subsidized by taxpayers, perhaps every city is entitled to pricey public transit.

I have no idea who this mammal is, but he perfectly encapsulates the retrograde ignorance that holds Arizona back. And he is an example of the endless streetcar hysteria that has enveloped the city since it began work on a (sit down, now) 3.9-mile line scheduled to open in 2013. Oh, the socialism! The Islamo-fascist-madness!

Opportunity costs I

The Navy has its heart set on building 55 littoral combat ships. So far, each is costing around $700 million. That's about half the annual federal subsidy for all of Amtrak. For one ship. And although it looks "like Darth Vader on the sea," as the New York Times put it, one doesn't have to be an amateur naval historian, although I am, to see this craft could be sunk by the ghost of Billy Mitchell flying a 1920s bomber. This is another deeply troubled defense program, plagued by cost over-runs and likely not just to disappoint but actually put our security at risk. Imagine how we could be using this money, or the trillions we're spending for wars in Afghanistan or Iraq — and there, as Everett Dirksen would say, we're talking real money. Such an exercise lets us better understand the opportunity costs of the course we're pursuing into decline.

One important effort should be retrofitting suburbia for a high-cost energy future, which is inevitable no matter how much we frack or use the dirty oil from our good friends to the north. Of course, most of American suburbia was built for the car. Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built since World War II. Place-making and civic design were lost. Massive, cheap, look-alike construction, laid down on an industrial scale, has continued and metastasized, bigger and uglier, decade by decade. All this was heavily and stealthily subsidized by taxpayers and federal policy,  encouraged by a brief moment in history when gasoline was cheap and America was less populous. Jim Kunstler rightly calls it "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world." Now it's a built environment whose time has come and gone. Exurbia is done. Much of the rest of suburbia will face ever-greater stresses.

Could some of it be saved and improved? Yes.

Green shoots in the desert?

Some old timers still blame a December 1988 Barron's article ("Phoenix Descending") for the collapse of the city's real-estate boom. This is fantasy, of course: The market caved in on its own, pulled down by too many hustles, too much overbuilding and the savings and loan scandal driven by local steward Charles H Keating and his pet senators. Now Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones has tried to make amends with a Wall Street Journal story about Phoenix's "nascent real-estate rebound." Indeed, it "holds lessons for the rest of the country." Another fantasy?

The Journal continues:

Phoenix has found a viable formula. Low prices are igniting demand from first-time buyers and investors who are converting the homes to rentals. The local economy is on the upswing with several big employers like Amazon.com Inc. and Intel Corp. hiring again, which is further increasing demand for housing. And the region is benefiting from a surge of buyers from Canada who are using their favorable exchange rate to scoop up bargains in the desert.

Could this be true? Has long-suffering Phoenix "found a bottom" and is beginning a rebound? As Zhou Enlai may have said when asked about the significance of the French Revolution: It is too soon to say. What it means about the metropolitan area's real competitiveness and future is murkier still.

Mesa rising?

Something is happening in Mesa. Light rail is being extended three miles along Main Street from Sycamore to Mesa Drive, reaching downtown and putting it within walking distance, on a decent day, of the Arizona Temple. A brewery is coming to Main Street. Pioneer Park might get a botanical garden, pushed by a citizens committee that also proposes extending light-rail to Gateway airport. (Building an inspiring city hall would be nice, too). Officials brought in 50 developers to show off potential downtown sites. Council members actually expressed hesitation about some senior housing projects, worried they would get in the way of efforts to attract market-rate, transit-oriented residential development downtown.

The "city with wide streets and narrow minds" is actually attracting higher education: the A.T. Still University branch offers osteopathic medicine, dentistry and health care; Benedictine University is expected to open a campus downtown. This is on top of the downtown branch of Mesa Community College and ASU Polytechnic. When metro Phoenix saw itself in the running for a new Apple campus, which not surprisingly went to Austin instead, it's no secret the company was looking most at Mesa. The Mesa Arts Center has stopped trying to compete with Phoenix and is doing well with, among other things, community festivals.

Could this be Mesa, Arizona? A city more populous than Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Minneapolis, etc. with nothing to show for it? Something seems to have changed.

The exit interview

The urbanist Yuri Artibise left Phoenix last year, returning to Vancouver. It's part of a continuing brain drain, although to be sure such assets as ASU continue to bring in new creatives. I don't know where the tally stands, but I fear Phoenix continues to lose more than it attracts. Architect Taz Loomans recently conducted an interesting "exit interview" with Artibise. It made me realize that it's been five years since I got the first inkling that the Arizona Republic would take away my column, which would eventuate in me leaving town. So I thought I'd use Loomans' questions as a test for myself.

What do you miss most about Phoenix? My good friends. (I tried to select one "most"; for more, see my additions in the comments section).

What did Phoenix have that Seattle doesn’t? It is the repository of so much of my history, so many of my hopes. My mother and grandmother, long dead, are so alive on the streets of Willo, Roosevelt and Storey. The church where I was baptised is still going, as is my grade school, still in its inspiring, grand building, and enchanting Encanto Park. Union Station, where I spent countless hours as a child watching trains and dreaming of far-away places. The streets I worked as a paramedic, learning too much too young. The different mountain vistas that always orient me. Phoenix is the home of my heart, a place so mangled, mismanaged, raped and pillaged, but still worth fighting for. No matter how long I am gone, when I return I can drive the streets and walk the neighborhoods as if I had never left. The ghosts of the Hohokam still speak to me on winter nights when the cold wind blows from the High Country and the peculiar acoustics of the valley mingle train whistles and voices of the beloved dead.

Phoenix 101: Maryvale

In the late 1950s, my uncle bought a house from John F. Long in Maryvale — and I mean he bought it from John Long himself sitting in a trailer on land that would become Phoenix's first major post-war suburb. My uncle was pretty much Long's target demographic: A veteran of World War II and Korea, young with a family and a good job. Tens of thousands more did the same thing. His house was a sparkling new ranch with an "all electric kitchen" and a pool. Every time we visited, I felt inferior, us living in a down-on-its-heels Spanish period-revival house, built in the 1920s with a gas range, just north of downtown. My mother sniffed that his commute faced the sun coming and going. But how I wanted to live in Maryvale. It was the future. Except it wasn't. Now our old house is restored and valuable in one of the state's most desirable historic districts. Maryvale is a linear slum.

It wasn't supposed to turn out that way. Long named the district after his wife and loved it until he died. He was unapologetic about building affordable starter homes for ex-GIs and his company tried to support Maryvale even as it began an inexorable decline. He took the model of Levittown, the "planned communities" built by William Levitt in the northeast in the last 1940s and 1950s. But Long added his own twists, such as the distinct Phoenix ranch house and abundant pools. Like its model, Maryvale was defined by curvilinear streets with cul-de-sacs and walls, providing a sense of privacy. Sometimes the newness could be jarring: I remember walking with my uncle through cabbage fields — across the street (until these were obliterated by more houses).

Phoenix loses spring training

The Oakland As have accelerated negotiations begun in November with Mesa to move spring training from Phoenix Municipal Stadium to Hohokam Stadium in 2015. The Chicago Cubs, the biggest draw in the Cactus League, are leaving Hohokam for the new Riverview development at Dobson and the Loop 202 in 2014. New Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton dryly told Channel 12's Brahm Resnik that he had "inherited" the situation — (and these are my words) one of many messes left behind by the lost weekend that was Phil Gordon's second term. Stanton promised to do "anything reasonable" to keep the As, but "we have to be fiscally responsible." Meanwhile, the Milwaukee Brewers' contract at the stadium in Maryvale (to me the most pleasant spring training venue, but one that lacks the splash and comfort of north Scottsdale) expires this year and it's unclear if they will renew.

Spring training in Arizona was once a sweet, simple thing. After World War II, the then New York Giants started play at the old Municipal Stadium, while the Cleveland Indians built Hi Corbett Field in Tucson. In 1951, the Cubs came to the old Rendezvous Park Stadium in Mesa. The teams traveled by train and their arrival at Union Station was always a big event. For years, the Cactus League had eight teams (although they came and went). When I was a child, tickets were cheap, even star players were close and the atmosphere was easy-going and small town. This persists today at some spring training facilities, but it's become big business, and like much else in our society, cities are played off against each other to surrender the most tax dollars to further enrich the already rich.

The question is whether Phoenix should do much, if anything, to keep spring training in the city?

Hell on wheels

High-speed rail is dead in America. In Slate, Will Oremus does a postmortem that isn't as clueless as most of what one would find in the mainstream media. It makes some points familiar to my readers: The Obama plan wouldn't have been genuine high-speed rail, except in Florida, merely higher-speed; the funds were insufficient and dolled out helter-skelter across the country rather than focusing on corridors likely to bring success, etc. I would add that the Florida HSR was foolish from the get-go, aimed at a suburbianized, car-crazy state, rather than, say, California, the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast Corridor, where train travel is already popular and in demand.

In any event, this is a catastrophe for the nation.

On a general level, it is another sign that America just can't do great things any longer. It's an emphatic indication of the nihilistic paralysis of our politics, with one of our major political parties captured by extremists whose mission is pure destruction. It highlights yet another blow to the commons. It's a lost economic opportunity. High-speed rail would have created tens of thousands of jobs, for operating and not just construction. It had the potential, properly done, to seed new industries here to build the trains. It is exactly the kind of infrastructure spending that would stimulate an economy that as things stand faces years of high unemployment and stagnation. From an environmental standpoint, rail is much less destructive than cars and moves far more people with a small carbon footprint.

Graveyard of sprawl dreams

Just in time for Halloween, the Arizona Republic published a story headlined, "Massive West Valley development to launch." It reads in part: "Two Phoenix-area developers, John F. Long Properties and the Alter Group, are planning a massive mixed-use commercial development in the West Valley that will span Phoenix, Avondale and Glendale. The project is made up of three separate parcels totaling 1,500 acres and likely will take decades to complete, the developers said." It went on to promise 3 million square feet of "employment space," 10,000 jobs and represent an investment of half-a-billion dollars.

The immediate "deliverable" is much more modest: A 60,000-square-foot medical office building at Thomas and the 101, for an unnamed client (guesses whether it is one stolen from elsewhere in the region?). Long and partners have been assembling and hanging onto this land for decades — that's part of the back story not mentioned in this article. Another is that many of these plans were rolled out in the mid-2000s before the roof fell in. Unanswered is who would finance such a massive project in one of the worst real-estate markets in the country, or how it could be filled with so much unoccupied space already sitting on the market where such deals as exist are filching clients from existing buildings rather than growing the economic pie.

The reality confronting the Phoenix real-estate economy is far different from the closed loop of local-yokel zombie boosterism.

How the West was...

Phoenix once boasted two Cinerama movie houses: the Cine Capri and the Kachina in Scottsdale. Both were bulldozed. In Seattle, thanks to the stewardship of Paul Allen, the Cinerama theater downtown was saved and renovated. It just completed a three-week festival of movies originally filmed in 70 millimeter, which even with all the technology available to Hollywood today is something worth experiencing. Despite facing the terrible commute and traffic of going one block, I went anyway yesterday to see How the West Was Won, the 1962 epic.

At the risk of provoking readers, I must confess that I was deeply moved. Yes. The film has more than one historical inaccuracy. The cognoscenti will always condemn it as a celebration of genocidal Manifest Destiny, although for the era it shows a much more nuanced portrait of Western expansion. Still, with a grand old-time movie score, a battalion of big stars, surprisingly good dialogue and the scenery on that wide, curved screen, it was hard to resist. (An added treat: One of the card sharks was a dead ringer for JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon). At the end, the packed house of Seattle lefties gave long applause.

I was moved partly because the story, which follows four generations of a family from 1839 to 1889, could have been about my family, too. The migration routes were somewhat different and my kin fought on both sides of the Civil War, literally brother against brother, but in both cases the family ended up in Arizona. Yes, in hindsight we were part of the problem, but I can't imagine any nation just walling off settlement beyond the Alleghenies. It wasn't going to happen. But this personal connection wasn't all that provoked strong emotions.

The periphery

When you're talking Europe, the periphery (Greece, etc.) is ailing, while the core, especially Germany and Scandinavia, is doing well. In Phoenix, the situation is reversed. To be sure, the depression has clobbered huge swaths of Phoenix suburbia, left Pinal County circling the drain and driven a stake into the dreams of Superstition Vistas and Buckeye with 400,000 poor boobs from the Midwest. Glendale is underwater on its super mortgage to hucksters and Westgate is in foreclosure. And the compromised, local-yokel professional seers have once again pushed out their prediction of "recovery," this time to 2015. Still, what little economic activity that's happening is occurring in places such as Scottsdale and Chandler.

The news for the city of Phoenix is gloomy. What few companies are coming to the metro area are setting up shop on the periphery. Banner Health, which killed a hospital on the Phoenix Biosciences Campus that would have led to a quantum leap in its synergies, has teamed up with the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center to establish a "world class" treatment facility in Gilbert. (The irony here is that Anderson is part of the Texas Medical Center in central Houston that should be the model for the Phoenix campus). ASU and the Mayo Clinic are setting up a medical school in north Scottsdale. Even as central Phoenix is clearcut with huge swaths of empty land, a big data center chose Chandler for a new operation, among the other new projects and expansions that the suburbs can boast. Even within the city, venerable law firm Fennemore Craig stabbed downtown (well, Midtown) in the back, relocating to 24th and Camelback.

As far as I can tell, this isn't even being discussed in the Phoenix mayoral race. Yet it's one of the biggest problems facing the city and metro area.

The new neighborhood

It's been four years this month since we sold our 1914 house in Willo and moved to Seattle. It was not a voluntary move, but one necessitated by the Republic ending my column after years of pressure to silence me, and then my inability to find work in Phoenix. We had hoped to live in this house, located a block from where I grew up, for the rest of our lives. Things didn't work out. The new neighborhood is very different. Here's the front-porch view from the condo downtown (in Belltown) looking east to Capitol Hill:

A pocket park is right below the balcony.

Did Phoenix light rail fail?

My first experience with light rail came living in San Diego in the early 1980s. One segment linked downtown with the border crossing at San Ysidro. It was popular and uncontroversial. "I didn't think one of these could run without graffiti all over it," I heard a visitor from then dysfunctional New York exclaim of the new, bright red trainsets. As a reporter, I wrote about the Trolley, especially the ambitious expansion plans. San Diego is the most Republican of California's big cities, but the light-rail system was begun under Pete Wilson, a mediocre U.S. senator, bad California governor, but stellar San Diego mayor (he was also, along with developer Ernest Hahn, the father of the spectacularly revived downtown). Today, the San Diego Trolley extends 53 miles on three routes.

Then I lived in Denver, where the city started a segment downtown. It too, was popular and widely embraced. Now it comprises 39 miles with another 12 due in two years. I was in Charlotte for the planning of the now-operating Lynx light-rail, a relatively modest 10 miles, but more is in the works. It was the first modern light-rail system in the Old South and, again, widely supported, especially by the business leadership and developers who built hundreds of millions of dollars of projects near the line. Similar success happened in other cities, especially Dallas (!), with its 72-mile system and clammoring of suburbs to get the next line.

The story didn't play out that way in Phoenix. Yes, we built it, you bastards. But it's also time to take stock.

Phoenix 101: South Phoenix

South Phoenix encompasses so much history, so many cultures and distinct districts, it deserves more than one post. Every square mile is special. Still, a start. It's not a separate city such as South Tucson, so I'll go with the style "south Phoenix." When I hear the words "urban village," I reach for my Colt Python plus Speedloaders, so forget about the city's developer-speak term "South Mountain Village." Then there's the matter of geography. For many Anglo Phoenicians, when the city still had some cohesion, "south Phoenix" began at the Southern Pacific tracks. This was, and latently remains, a place where "the other side of the tracks" is a powerful totem (it helped do in the unfortunately named Bentley Projects, the galleries, bookstore and cafe). A subset of "south Phoenix" emerged in the 1960s, to define everything below the somber wall of the Maricopa Freeway. And true south Phoenix is south of the Salt River. All must be dealt with.*

Phoenix's relatively small Mexican-American and African-American populations were historically located south of the tracks. Well into the 1970s, the commonplace offensive term for the latter was used by whites. Schools were segregated and inferior. Poverty and injustice were severe. Corruption by city officials legendary, at least through the 1940s. Most property ownership was controlled by deed covenants that largely excluded minorities (I told you this was a Southern town). Ownership was more possible south of the river, and minorities gathered there. (Most of the city's legendary and now largely lost barrios were north of the Salt, but a few, such as the River Bottom, were in south Phoenix proper). Minorities were also heavily employed as agricultural labor. This was farm country, especially after the completion of the Highline and Western canals by 1913.

The most successful farmers were the Japanese, who arrived early in the 20th century and were able to purchase farms in the 1930s, after Arizona's anti-"Yellow Peril" law was found unconstitutional. Arizonans my age remember them for the stunning Japanese Flower Gardens that ran for miles along Baseline Road. But the Japanese were among the most innovative growers, raising a variety of crops. This also raised much jealousy among Anglo farmers, who were happy to see them, including American citizens, interned during World War II. After this shameful episode, the Japanese, including many of their sons who had fought in the U.S. Army, returned to south Phoenix and farmed again.

The ambition deficit

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood... — Daniel Burnham

Hard as it is to believe for someone my age, it's been 50 years since construction began on the Space Needle, the iconic symbol of Seattle and the centerpiece of the 1962 World's Fair. Seattle leaders elbowed out much better-known cities, including New York, to gain international accreditation of the event, which was a coming out party to the world for the Emerald City. The site is now Seattle Center, a cultural mecca in the central core right down the monorail from downtown. It was actually Seattle's second world's fair and had initially been developed to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, whose grounds became the University of Washington campus. Another one of my adopted hometowns, San Diego, also held two world's fairs, in 1915 and 1935 — their legacy was magnificent Balboa Park.

My real hometown never did one world's fair, even though it passed the population mark to be a big city more than half a century ago. It may be just as well. Unlike Seattle or San Diego (or even Knoxville, Tenn.), Phoenix would have built something out in the middle of nowhere and, unlike Seattle lucking out with the timeless Space Needle, suffered the worst of modern architecture. Maybe the dusty streets for an empty subdivision would have been left behind. Indeed, I was approached by a group of well-meaning folks in the mid-2000s to promote a world's fair in the former gravel beds of the Salt River. That it was far from downtown never seemed to have occured to them.

Still, this is another sign of Phoenix's astounding lack of ambition. It plays in the majors. It just doesn't want to admit it. I recall hearing from someone who moved to Phoenix and tried, within his modest means, to push forward a project of civic betterment. He was taken aside and told, "People move to the Valley to be left alone. That's the way they like it. You either have to live with that or move." He moved.

Off the edge

Yet another pipe dream has exploded in the Phoenix Depression. This time Steve Ellman's Westgate "City Center," — the Republic story pimped the development as "the flashy dining and shopping complex that anchors Glendale's football stadium and hockey arena" — is facing foreclosure.

This is time to revisit my 2010 post on Glendale's folly. It's also relevant coming directly after the popular Phoenix 101: Malls. Yet more needs to be said; not to make thin-skinned Phoenicians feel depressed, as is the usual criticism, but to learn something from these costly debacles to move the metro area forward into some kind of broad, non-heat-island-scorched uplands.

The only ones that could be surprised by the Westgate mess are those millions who drank the developer-speak Kool-Aid ("flashy dining and shopping complex" blah blah blah). Every time I was forced to go there for an event, the place was dead. It was far from anything else besides a too-narrow freeway, unless you wanted to farm some cotton or throw up the frames of subdivisions on former farm land. Nor is it flashy, aside from the sun blinding you when it hits the bumper of some jacked-up truck in the parking lot. It is off-the-shelf suburban stuff found everywhere, with the unfortunate distinction that all the asphalt and concrete, besides being ugly, adds a special hellish ambiance even when the surface temp is not 140 degrees.

Phoenix 101: Malls

Sing a city of malls. Actually, I believe the first modern mall west of the Mississippi was built in Dallas and the first suburban mall was Northgate in Seattle, but you'd think Phoenix invented the infernal things. When I write "mall," I don't mean the beautiful and now dead 19th century Arcade in downtown Dayton. I mean a shopping center built around the automobile. Park Central was Phoenix's first, developed by the Burgbacher brothers on the site of a former dairy and opening in 1957. It was anchored by Diamonds, Newberry's and Goldwater's, the latter closing its downtown store two miles south and beginning the end of downtown retail. Even so, in the early- and mid-1960s, downtown held its own as the state's busiest shopping destination — but the die was cast. Most natives don't even remember when Phoenix was more than a city of malls.

I grew up within bicycle distance of Park Central (had my bike stolen there, too). It was open air (the city was not yet devastated by the heat island), convenient and wildly popular. It anchored Midtown, along with the twin towers across the street, the taller of which sported an outside glass elevator and the shorter being home to the Playboy Club. Old Park Central was semi-urban, contiguous to the city and human-scaled. It was followed by Biltmore Fashion Square, which until Westcor turned it into another lookalike suburban soul-killer, was also open air, with plenty of shade and in a pleasing scale. Across the street was the open-air Town and Country shopping center (which was not an empty name, for the city around it was still meshed with citrus groves and horse properties). Chris-Town became the first enclosed, air-conditioned mall in 1961.

By the 1960s and 1970s, Phoenix developers went on a mall binge. Among them: Thomas Mall, built in the classic enclosed configuration of a long rectangle of shops with an anchor department store at each end, and Los Arcos in Scottsdale, an L-shaped Spanish design with Sears and the Broadway. These competed with Tower Plaza, Papago Plaza and others, which were older shopping centers with the shops facing the parking lots. If you grew up in Phoenix, you didn't know any better. The mall was a magical thing: New, clean, easy, cool. In 1973, what seemed would be the granddaddy of them all was completed: Metrocenter. It broke the old two-anchor mold with five department stores, two levels and even held an ice rink. My buds and I would drive out there just to see it. But it was on the outer edge of the city. And while it was promoted as a super-regional mall that would be absorbed by future growth, it just didn't seem right. Downtown was dead. Park Central was struggling. My first stirrings of an urban sensibility were offended by Metrocenter.

Amtrak at 40

On May 1, 1971, the private railroads ceased passenger service and it was taken over by Amtrak, the government-owned National Railroad Passenger Corporation. Dozens of trains that ran on April 30th ceased to exist. Hundreds of cities lost their trains. What remained is largely the bare-bones operation, outside of the Northeast Corridor, that still exists today. This even though the nation has added 100 million people, become much more densely populated, and oil prices will make the car- and airline-based future seen as inevitable in 1971 increasingly difficult to sustain.

Amtrak was created because of a massive grassroots campaign. It was also an effort to help save the bankrupt Penn-Central and the freight railroads in general. But it was also born in sin as a deeply flawed political compromise, dependent on a federal subsidy that few lawmakers would or will admit is necessary, and a political plaything depending on who controls Congress and the White House. Something had to be done. Whether Amtrak was the answer is open to debate. America once enjoyed the best and fastest passenger rail system in the world. It was killed by automobiles and airlines that were heavily subsidized by the federal government (and continue to be), even as the private railroads were taxed and regulated heavily. Nor were the externalities priced in: Pollution, energy consumption and the resulting geopolitical instability, sprawl and its environmental consequences, etc. After spending heavily on new streamliners after World War II, railroads saw passenger business steadily fall off to this subsidized competition. Some fought on with top-notch service, notable the Santa Fe. Others couldn't wait to kill their trains, notoriously the Southern Pacific.

Both served Phoenix in the 1960s. The Santa Fe ran a classy little train from Union Station to Williams Junction, where it connected with the road's premier transcontinental streamliners, including the Super Chief, El Capitan, Chief, San Francisco Chief and Grand Canyon Limited. The SP operated three trains in each direction until the mid-1960s: the crack Sunset Limited, the Golden State and the remnant of the once grand Imperial. By 1970, only the Sunset survived, a raggedy thing that usually had a couple of coaches and a vending-machine car (a decade before, the Sunset routinely had 14 cars, including sleepers and full-service diner). Cities such as Cincinnati and St. Louis had dozens of trains, right up to the eve of Amtrak. After Amtrak, cities usually had one train, often at inconvenient hours (Phoenix had service until the mid-1990s, when the state government refused to help upgrade the northern main line of the SP).

Phoenix 101: The East Valley

Of all the many delusional linguistic constructs in metro Phoenix meant to sell real estate and sustain the unsustainable (think, "The Sun Corridor," "the North Valley," etc.), only the East Valley has real substance to it. Such was not always the case. In 1960, when Phoenix's population was 439,170, Mesa clocked in at a mere 33,772. Tempe was a little college town. Scottsdale a small artist's colony with "Western" touristy schlock. The remainder were tiny farm settlements. All were separated by miles of agricultural land and history. Mesa, for example, was distinctive for its settlement by Mormon pioneers. Tempe was the home of the normal school turned Arizona State College and just renamed a university. All the real towns supported separate newspapers. Mesa and Tempe had their own street-grid numbering systems. Guadalupe was its own unique enclave, first settled by Yaqui Indians fleeing the revolution and the most Mexican place in the Salt River Valley. The common denominators: Economies based on agriculture, the Southern Pacific Railroad, and (with the exception of Scottsdale) being south of the Salt River and thus part of the coalition that fought against Phoenix and north-bank farmers for water rights and allocations after the Newlands Act. "Power" in the area resided with the big growers and prosperous businessmen of Mesa, all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

By the late 1970s, the landscape was changing fast. Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe and Mesa had grown together. The Superstition Freeway was being slowly built east from I-10, reaching Dobson Road around 1977, disrupting and slowly killing the rich cluster of local businesses that lined old U.S. 60 along Mill Avenue, Apache Boulevard and Main Street. Mesa's population was closing in on 150,000, and it was annexing miles of retiree trailer courts that ran along Main toward the Pinal County line. Samaritan Health Services, the forerunner of Banner Health, opened a new hospital, Desert Samaritan, near the new freeway. ASU had grown to be a large university and Tempe extended south with The Lakes. The first subdivisions of something called Ahwatukee were being finished. From the rise of I-10 at Baseline, the view east glittered like a jewel at night. Still, miles of citrus groves ran east of central Mesa, centered around Val Vista. Almost everything south of central Mesa and Tempe was still agriculture. Chandler was a small town and Gilbert little more than a crossroads. Williams Air Force Base was in operation and far from everthing, linked by the ubiquitous two-lane concrete roads lined on each side by irrigation ditches.

The next two decades would see startling change, and the evolution into a true separate identity.

The city in mind

As a native Westerner, my problem with "wide open spaces" is how many we've lost in my lifetime and how difficult it is to really live in what's left in a nation of 308 million. The constant move outward in metro Phoenix obliterates anything but the illusion. Today's wide vista out the window will be a Super Wal-Mart tomorrow. People who bought in Fountain Hills years ago — a development that annihilated one of the state's most lush saguaro forests, and it takes a saguaro ten years to grow an inch-and-a-half — are now partly surrounded by schlock. Same with Verrado, where the idiot David Brooks saw "the future." Prescott, a town with history and wonderful bones, is a planning and congestion disaster outside the old town. The same is true with Flagstaff, as with most small towns in America.

If you're rich and lucky enough to buy land adjacent to a National Park, maybe your panorama will have the illusion of the pristine, although we know the pollution, fire, sleazy land swaps and other stresses facing our public lands — and just wait for the GOP to privatize it. Move to the staked plains and you can find real emptiness, but good luck finding work. And if I want wide open spaces, do I profane them further with a new house, which by its very nature can't be "green," and total dependence on the automobile? Good luck finding a real, scalable, sustainable small town on a passenger train route.

For these reasons, as well as growing up in central Phoenix and for the eye-opening years I spent living in real cities, I choose to make my stand in the city. And it's a major focus of this blog. Most Americans don't "get" cities; they don't have urban values. Most want their imitation English country estates crowded together as lookalike tract houses in suburbia. The problems with this are manifold. First, the nation's population has doubled since Levittowns were first laid down. Thus, most suburbs suffer from urban problems without urban solutions. Second, they are artifacts of a moment in history defined by cheap gasoline, now passing away. Third, sprawl destroys vast tracts of valuable agricultural land, rural areas and wilderness, with numerous environmental strains. Fourth, for all the heavy subsidies to make suburbia work (freeways, flood control, etc.), it's a highly inefficient spatial arrangement. Suburbia is not merely boring and filled with anomie (American Beauty, etc.), it is now the epicenter of the housing crash, with attendant debt, poverty and very high carrying costs.

'The Hispanic Detroit'

Talk about burying the lede. Last week's Arizona Republic story on the Census started out by reporting on how "Hispanics led Arizona's changing population over the past decade." It's only if one reads deeper, which most people don't, that the real news is found. This was the decade in which Phoenix became a "majority minority" city. Phoenix added 140,000 Hispanic residents — and this is the official number, for a Census taken during the white-right and the Badged Ego's persecution of brown people. The city also saw the Anglo population decline by 64,000.

Read that again. Read it a third time, and realize, along with the failure to maintain the fifth-largest city position, that Phoenix has finally reached perhaps the most profound tipping point in its history.

You know that during the boom, I was told by more than one smug north Scottsdale toff that "Phoenix will become the Hispanic Detroit." My response was usually along the lines of, "We'll be the center of the most important industry in the world, with high-skilled and high-paid jobs, and the richness of Hispanic culture to boot? Sign me up." Or, being a realist about the disaster that has pummeled Detroit for decades, "Do you think that will be good for your property values, even up in Troon North?" They didn't care. I do.

The Great Disruption

I am suspicious of all unified field theories, including my own. Still, we have entered a new age and must try to explain and understand it. I am with James Howard Kunstler's "Long Emergency" in many areas. But I don't think the federal government will collapse anytime soon; crises tend to centralize power — even the Roman Empire took centuries to fall apart in the West, longer still in the East. Nor do I think small-scale food production and small towns will replace cities; cities have the power and wealth to draw resources, and metropolitan areas will be the economic and organizing entities of the 21st century, barring a major nuclear war. Nor do I accept Dmitry Orlov's theory that America will collapse along the lines of the Soviet Union.

I call the new age the Great Disruption. It is on display in Japan, where one of the most advanced nations in the world is struggling with a devastating earthquake and an unfolding nuclear disaster. The planet is at 6.8 billion people, at or beyond its carrying capacity. This will amplify the natural disasters that are a normal part of the world, bringing much more widespread death and misery to the Haitis and Indonesias, but not sparing advanced nations. The United States has nearly doubled its population in my lifetime. This not only adds huge costs that we have not addressed, in infrastructure to use one example, but also vulnerabilities (and lack of spending on infrastructure to soften disasters, e.g. New Orleans). A major earthquake in Seattle or San Francisco today would be catastrophic, and both are inevitable. And lest Phoenicians feel smug, they are downwind from the largest nuclear power plant in the nation, one with a highly checkered safety record, getting older, and whose water supply in an emergency should be question No. 1 for the press. This on top of (over) populating one of the most hostile desert valleys and basins in the world, a totally manmade environment, totally vulnerable to tribulation.

Overpopulation is a backbeat for most of the other elements of the Great Disruption. But most of all it is about discontinuity The next 30 years are not going to be a replay of the past 30, only with cooler personal tech toys. Why not?

We're Number _ ?

The most telling aspect of Phoenix being surpassed by Philadelphia as the fifth-largest city in America — news that was broken first on Thursday by this humble blog — was the utter silence at the time in the local media. The Arizona Republic story on the Census numbers merely stated that Philadelphia had "retained" its position as No. 5. That's it. The situation was far different in the early 2000s when the Census Bureau officially stated that Phoenix had overtaken the City of Brotherly Love. The Republic had front-page growthgasm stories. My pal Montini, who came from near Pittsburgh so already had a grudge against the big city in eastern Pennsylvania, wrote a gloating, twist-the-knife column with a "Yo, Philly," headline. Now...silence. Cue chirping crickets. Philadelphians were not fooled. One tweeted: "Suck it, Phoenix." Indeed. (Update: the Republic finally produced a non-page-one story on Sunday...or was it Monday?).

When Phoenix began its brief reign as No. 5, the local triumphalism was loud and deep. I tagged along with Mayor Phil Gordon and City Council members who traveled to Philadelphia to meet with their counterparts. The latter were full of praise for my hometown, full of contrition about their corrupt, underclass-ridden city. Full of hubris, we had a grand time in the Center City's restaurants, shopping, parks, historical landmarks and architectural splendor. Back home, top officials talked about Phoenix inevitably overtaking Houston as No. 4 and soon catching up with Chicago. I am not making this up. "Then we'll be a world city," said one economic development leader, and then, presumably, Phoenix would magically create all the elements of such a place.

I take no pleasure in this development, although I warned about it last year. It's hard to shake the culture one grew up in. Bored in school in the 1960s, I would draw maps of the Salt River Valley and sketch avenues, freeways and developments yet to come. It was as inevitable in my ten-year-old brain as in those of John F. Long and the other Phoenix leaders that we would, indeed, become something great. As if a mass of people alone would make that happen. It's tempting to shrug this milestone off. A blow to what little prestige Phoenix enjoyed, to be sure, but what do these rankings really matter? In fact, this is a profound turning point — and not merely because the Texas cities have yet to have their counts revealed and Sheryl Sculley's San Antonio might still surpass Phoenix and knock it down another notch. (Addendum: Phoenix is officially No. 6: San Antonio came in at 1,327,407; this is cold comfort).

No way to run a railroad

No other issue personifies the dysfunction at the heart of America — or as they would say on Twitter, #AmericaFail — as much as the inability to move ahead with high-speed rail. The Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress never made a serious effort. The $13 billion initially offered is nothing compared with what's needed. By comparison, China is spending $100 billion a year. Much of the money here would go to higher-speed rail, not the 155-mile-per-hour-plus systems that qualify as genuine high-speed rail. And the choice of Florida for the nation's first HSR line was always misplaced: Florida is a car-culture, suburbanized state, especially in Orlando and Tampa, the destinations of the line, with little appreciation or habit of taking trains. HSR would better be tried in rail-friendly territory, such as California or the Pacific Northwest, or making the Northeast Corridor true high speed. Then Americans could see how well such a system would really work. Now, with Republican governors in Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida refusing the federal money, and the GOP-controlled House solidly anti-rail, it looks as if even this modest start will come to little.

The Republican fetish against trains and transit, so well articulated by George Will (and followed by priceless takedowns by Paul Krugman and Jim Kunstler) has always fascinated me. It was Abraham Lincoln who started the heavily subsidized transcontinental railroad. Republican presidents after him further subsidized more railroads through land grants. "Internal improvements" was a key Republican issue. No more. Republicans routinely refuse to even consider rail or rail transit as necessary options for the nation. They most of all wage war against Amtrak, keeping it too underfunded to succeed with frequent, convenient schedules (and it's still wildly popular). These "conservatives" had no interest in conserving what was once the world's most advanced passenger rail system. Is it that they represent the suburbs and exurbs, so are mindless creatures of car culture. Or is it the billions spent by the oil, auto and sprawl industries to ensure America stays mired in a 1970s transportation system? Indeed, the U.S. government gives oil and gas companies $41 billion a year, nearly 40 times Amtrak's annual budget. As usual, the fecklessness of Democrats enables the problem (oh, for a real opposition party).

In the real world, passenger trains are a major part of the transportation systems of advanced nations. The April edition of Trains magazine, a special report on HSR (not available online, alas), is quite an eye-opener.

The Corner

In this city of loss called Phoenix, where do we even begin to mourn? The closure of the Borders store at the Biltmore gives a new generation something to miss, and a chain bookstore at that. Once the Biltmore Fashion Park was a unique shopping center of outdoor courts, shady trees, grass and low-rise, mid-century architecture. A few years ago, the odious Westcor/Macerich redid it to look like every other crapola shopping mall in suburban Phoenix. Ruined. Who cares if they decide to build a mega-mall in Goodyear — it will just be another lookalike ruin for the near future of this unsustainable place, a ruin no archeo-tourists will ever care to visit. The few who do will wonder how such a wealthy society could have squandered so many resources on such grotesquery (as they will wonder about the sprawl outside Denver, Seattle, Atlanta, etc.).

When I was growing up, the corner of McDowell and Seventh Avenue was but one of the many business districts that flourished in the area (Central was crowded with businesses from downtown to Camelback; McDowell along its length, the same with Thomas; the Gold Spot building on Roosevelt and Third Avenue was aging but busy). On the southwest corner was Val DeSpain's Chevron station and a Circle K, along with a forbidden tavern. Northwest was a gas station. The northeast corner held a distinctive, solid brick business building full of local retailers, including a barber and liquor store, then My Florist — a real flower shop — with its magical neon sign. The southeast corner was a treat: A Ryan-Evans Drug Store anchored a building with several shops, including the Best Cleaners and a Sprouse-Reitz five-and-ten store. The latter had a smashing red-tile front, while the drug store had its name proclaimed in neon. Each store in this strip had its own distinct front.

When I got back to Phoenix in 2000, most of the corner was in disrepair, the remaining buildings holding junk shops and a massively ugly Circle K box holding down the northwest side. But there seemed to be hope with David Lacy rehabbing My Florist as a restaurant. It was a huge success, a forerunner of midtown and downtown eateries to come (and go). The inside was beautifully appointed and at night the grand piano accompanied diners. It was never my florist: I found the menu unappealing, rather attuned to people who didn't really like to eat, and the servers were surly. Portland's and Cheuvront were more my style. But lots of people loved My Florist, many of whom had never even realized that the gems of the nearby historic districts existed. Is is safe to go down there?, some asked at first, living in the soulless suburbs where most of the lurid violence really takes place.

Downtown, again

Susan Copeland, chair of the Downtown Voices Coalition, recently wrote an op-ed in the Arizona Republic, entitled, "A realistic downtown assessment." It was mostly a clear-eyed look at the reality of downtown Phoenix's challenges: Expecting too much from sports teams, failure to integrate ASU into the city fabric, too many surface parking lots and chimerical hopes from an "entertainment district." Copeland rightly adds that CityScape is "suburban mall stylistically dating to the 20th century," although I have a hard time mourning the brutalist "park" of Patriot's Square. She adds:

With all the damage done, there are still hopeful signs, if only our city officials and civic leaders follow their own community vetted and charetted ideals. The Urban Form Project; Arts, Culture, and Small Business District Overlay; and Adaptive Reuse Program are smarter moves for aspiring urban infill than another stab at a faux urban Entertainment District. When the city actually listens to its citizens rather than check-marking the input box, great things happen, like the improved ASU Nursing School exterior or the forthcoming Washington Street Centennial Project.

Well, fine (Her piece was written in response to this one). And good on her for searching for realism. But regular readers will have to forgive me if I cover some familiar ground as well as discuss the deep problems and real opportunities facing downtown Phoenix. I'm still not sure people fully get it.

Tucson rallies

The white-right has been quick to deflect any criticism after the Giffords shooting, including Sarah Palin's appalling, but somehow strategic, use of the term "blood libel." The media have been willing accomplices, as usual. Anyone who has been paying attention since the frightening crowds egged on by Gov. Palin during the closing phases of the 2008 presidential campaign, the staged August disruptions of meetings with members of Congress in 2009 and the Tea Party and all its violent rhetoric and imagery — the connection to the shooting is unavoidable. And, as Pima County Sheriff Dupnik had the guts to say, there is a peculiar accelerant of Arizona political extremism applied to this fire. In the end, however, few minds will likely be changed.

But other factors are at work, too. We can debate and weigh them, but they must be considered.

I've driven by the place where the shooting took place many times. It's one of hundreds of off-the-shelf Spanish-Tuscan-schlock shopping strips with a huge, blazing parking lot plopped down across the state by the Real Estate Industrial Complex: ugly, characterless, dehumanizing and killing of genuine community. The same is true of the endless subdivisions of lookalike tract houses, built around a garage door rather than a front porch. The built environment does influence behavior and souls. It's telling that the attack took place there and not, say, along the Fourth Avenue business district in central Tucson. Most Americans like to believe crime happens in center cities; in reality, much of it, including some of the most hideous murders, occurs in suburbia and exurbia. Also, the 8th District, like most of Arizona, is so lacking in inviting public spaces that this is where Rep. Giffords had to set up her table to meet constituents.

Phoenix 101: Tucson

The Ronstadt house on Sixth Avenue in Tucson.

Early in the 20th century, Phoenix surpassed Tucson in population and never looked back. The old joke: Tucson hates Phoenix and Phoenix doesn't pay any attention to Tucson, which makes the Old Pueblo hate Phoenix even more. I don't claim to be a Tucson expert, but a reader new to the city asked to learn more. So what follows is a Phoenician's idiosyncratic take on Arizona's second city.

Tucson is much older than Phoenix, having been founded by the Spanish (led by an Irishman in the pay of the Spanish crown) in 1775, a tenuous foothold in Apache country. It was a part of Mexico until the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 (otherwise, the border would have been as close as Goodyear — how'd that sit with the white-right Midwesterners?). Thus, Tucson always wore its Hispanic side with ease and pride. Tucson got the first main line of the Southern Pacific Railroad in the late 1880s and for decades was the most populous city in the territory and young state. It was also a bastion of the Democratic Party, long after the state as a whole turned Republican. This was Mo Udall, Dennis DeConcini and Raul Castro country.

Growing up as a child of the Cold War, I knew Tucson would be a first-strike target in a "counterforce" nuclear exchange, because of the Titan II missile silos that surrounded the city. My first visits were on the train. My mother and I would board the remains of the once-grand Imperial, now a mail train with one coach, at Union Station, and travel south. We would spend the day in downtown Tucson and take the still crack Sunset Limited back home that evening. Early memories: The Santa Catalinas towered over the city in a way no mountains did Phoenix. Tucson was dry, a desert city, so different from the (then) lush oasis of Phoenix. Downtown was busy and vibrant, but no more so than Phoenix. I wasn't impressed.

The best of the year

The most popular Rogue posts of 2010:

Difficult Days Ahead

Friday Night Lights

Blue Highways

Phoenix 101: The Economy

Phoenix 101: Growing Up

308,745,538

"Too many people spoil everything," my mother said. This when Phoenix passed the intolerable level of 600,000 residents and America 200 million. Now we're more than 100 million beyond that and it's difficult to argue we're that much better as a nation. The suburban apologist Joel Kotkin has written a book entitled, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His thesis, as Publisher's Weekly puts it: "a very sunny...forecast for the American economy, arguing that despite its daunting current difficulties, the U.S. will emerge by mid-century as the most affluent, culturally rich, and successful nation in human history. Nourished by mass immigration and American society's proven adaptability, the country will reign supreme over an industrialized world beset by old age, bitter ethnic conflicts, and erratically functioning economic institutions." Funny, that dystopia sounds much like America in 2010. The success like America in 1970 or even 1990.

Thank God I saw the West when it was still relatively empty, when Arizona was such an exotic locale that most Americans had only seen it in Westerns. That's gone forever, especially in my home state, replaced by unmitigated ugliness almost every place that has been touched by human hands.

Interestingly, the decade's 9.7 percent growth rate nationally is the lowest since the Great Depression. Arizona clocked in as the nation's second-fastest growing state, at 24.6 percent, to reach 6.4 million. It probably would have seen an even larger population if not for the white-right war against Hispanics. Yet it is hardly 24.6 percent better by any other measure, certainly those involving quality of life or economic competitiveness. It barely made a dent in paying for the infrastructure to accommodate the 35-percent rise in the 1980s and the 40-percent rate of the 1990s. Nevada, No. 1 in growth this decade (35.1 percent), is an economic, social and environmental disaster. The nation as a whole is poorer, deeply in debt, mired in imperial adventures and falling behind the advanced nations of the world.

Phoenix 101: The Phoenix 40

Once upon a time, the Phoenix 40 ran this town, got things done, showed real leadership. The Phoenix 40 was an exclusionary bunch of powerful white men trying to hold onto their power in changing times. The Phoenix 40 was only the tip of an iceberg of evil and corruption that sits deep in the DNA of the city and state. So go the tales, myths and realities long after the legendary group morphed into the benign and toothless Greater Phoenix Leadership.

The real Phoenix 40 was formed in 1974 by Arizona Republic publisher Eugene Pulliam, lawyer-civic leader Frank Snell and KOOL owner Tom Chauncey. They sent a letter to prospective members and 40 leaders, including Gov. Raul Castro, showed up at the Biltmore for the first meeting in early 1975. The group hoped to focus on transportation, crime and education — crime getting top billing after the murder of a key witness in the land-fraud trial of Ned Warren Sr. The original membership is no secret, not quite 40, and reads like a Who's Who of mid-1970s Phoenix: Clarke Bean, Hayes Caldwell, Chauncey, Msgr. Robert Donohoe, Junius Driggs, Karl Eller, George Getz, Sherman Hazeltine, Robert Johnson, George Leonard, Stephen Levy, James Maher, Richard Mallery, Samuel Mardian, Jr., James Mayer, Rod McMullin, Loyal Meek, Dennis Mitchem, Pat Murphy, Rev. Culver Nelson, William Orr, Jesse Owens, Pulliam, William Reilly Sr., Newton Rosenzweig, Raymond Shaffer, Bill Shover, James Simmons, Paul Singer, Lawson Smith, Snell, Franz Talley, Thomas Tang, Maurice Tanner, Keith Turley, Mason Walsh, Robert Williams and Russell Williams.

And, yes, it's telling that the list didn't include, say, Lincoln Ragsdale or Rosendo Gutierrez. Yet the Phoenix 40 was never as dangerous as its critics feared nor as benign as it claimed to be, but it's an important touchstone in the city's evolution to the current unpleasantness.

Book 'em

A column recommending books for the holidays might seem like a lazy columnist's trick (and I know 'em all). But as we collapse into a society of limited attention spans, where even smart people rarely venture outside their bunkers of expertise, where fewer and fewer American men are reading(!), let us brace ourselves to read and give books. Here are some that touch on issues we regularly address on Rogue:

The shelves groan under the number of books written about the financial crisis, its aftermath, causes and needed fixes. My favorites are Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy, by nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz; 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, by Simon Johnson and James Kwak; Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance, by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm, and Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, by Robert Reich. It's a soup-to-nuts telling of the bought-off politics, bad policy, deregulation and greed that brought on the crash, to the steps we must take in order to save ourselves. Not that we will.

The latest cooked-up "conservative" distraction is about American "exceptionalism." If you want to see us at out best, and worse, and exceptional, read Taylor Branch's magisterial trilogy on America in the King years: Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire and At Canaan's Edge. Every literate citizen should know these books and this history.

Phil for Phoenix

Amid the wreckage and inertia that now define the nation's fifth (soon to be sixth?) most populous city, it's difficult to recall the near euphoria that greeted the inauguration of Phil Gordon as mayor. It was 2004, the metro area was booming, at least in real estate, and here in Phoenix, finally, was somebody who "got it." He got city, as opposed to suburbia. He got economic development, especially for the central core. He got the urgent need to diversify the economy. For "ADHD Phil," even his early speeches soared with a grand vision for Phoenix. A great city. A great mayor.

Alas, it was not to be.

If any historian cares to write about Phoenix's collapse, about how it became "the Hispanic Detroit" as the north Scottsdalers say, the mayoralty of Phil Gordon will be an essential chapter.

Phoenix 101: Midwesterners

The comments section has been busy with musings about the Midwest migration to Arizona and the degree to which it is to blame for the disaster facing the state and Phoenix. I've offered my assessment in previous posts (it's a great deal to blame). That doesn't mean every midwesterner is at fault, much less that I hate the Midwest. I spent nearly a decade there, in southwest Ohio, and hold it warmly in my heart. I saw it at its best and lately I've seen it at its worst. But no discussion of Phoenix is complete without assessing this huge tide of immigrants and the things they carried.

The first Anglo settlers of Phoenix were a ragtag group of tough adventurers, everybody from "Lord" Darrell Duppa, namer of Phoenix, who was born in England (maybe France), to the father of Tempe, Charles Trumbull Hayden, a Yankee who had worked the Santa Fe trail. The Mormons settled Mesa. But Southerners and former Confederates were arguably in the early majority, personified by founder Jack Swilling, CSA. This gave the town a peculiar Southern-Western character that persisted into the early 1960s. My family came from Indian Territory and before that the pre-Civil War Texas frontier. Midwesterners arrived in more numbers with the completion of the Santa Fe Railway and its direct connection from Chicago. Among them was Dwight Bancroft Heard, who bought the Arizona Republican in 1912. He was a major landowner and farmer, and was the driving force behind the region's cotton industry. Along with his wife, Maie Bartlett Heard, he founded the Heard Museum.

Other midwesterners of note: Kansan Eugene C. Pulliam, who built a publishing empire including the renamed Arizona Republic. Lawyer Frank Snell was from Kansas City. (His partner Mark Wilmer, the star litigator who won Arizona v. California before the Supreme Court, came from Wisconsin by way of Texas.) Another former Chicagoan was Walter Bimson who built Valley National Bank into a powerhouse. Heard, Pulliam, Snell and Bimson were city builders. The latter three, for example, in the late 1940s and 1950s, recruited the high tech industries whose fumes the metro area still runs on. All loved Phoenix. It was their home. In every way they connected the health of the city to that of their companies.

Kenilworth at 90

I was asked to speak at the 90th birthday of Kenilworth School, my alma mater, on Oct. 23rd. Obligations keep me from attending, but this is what I would say:

Ten years ago I had the great fortune of speaking at the 80th birthday of Kenilworth School. I had come a long way from a child for whom this school held so many good memories, but also one for whom it held anxieties and fears, an average student except in reading, one who was poor in athletics, a target of bullies, who watched the clock on the wall in every classroom waiting for each school day to end, who quailed in terror when we were herded into the auditorium and made to lean against the walls and cover our heads as protection against Soviet missiles.

Ten years ago I had returned to a Phoenix spread across 1,500 square miles. A huge freeway cut its way beside Kenilworth. "Master planned communities" were where many people chose to live, even as they complained that Phoenix had no soul and no history. Natives were hard to find among the huge Midwestern influx. The temperature had risen 10 degrees and the summers were hotter and longer. Downtown and north Central had been denuded of retail and jobs. And yet Kenilworth School still stood. My message then was how Kenilworth and everyone who loved it — lawyer Fred Rosenfeld and other alums maintained an association to help the school — had kept faith. Here was Phoenix's soul and history.

It's morning (after) in Glendale

News item: Glendale is stuck figuring out, in a shifting economic landscape, how to deal with roughly $500 million in borrowing for the sports district. By the time Glendale pays interest over three decades, the city will have spent close to $1 billion.

The common cover story, bought into by the Republic, goes like this: "Glendale had been on track to stunningly remake itself into a sports mecca with four major sports: hockey, baseball, basketball and football. Then the economy collapsed." In fact, Glendale epitomizes everything nearly wrong with metro Phoenix economic development. It was not so much a victim of the Great Recession as it invited a reckoning no matter that happened to the national economy. That's why, aside from its dark comedic value, this disaster is worth dwelling upon.

This was once one of the sweet and distinct farm towns of the Salt River Valley. It depended on a diverse array of crops grown in the surrounding fields, which were then packed in town and loaded on the Santa Fe Railway for shipment back east (a passenger train stopped daily, too). Other businesses supported the ag sector with supplies and equipment. The railroad itself had a large icing dock in the days before mechanical refrigerator cars. Nearly every retailer was local. The population was about 15,700 in 1960. This was the most scalable and sustainable it would ever be. Then it was absorbed by the Growth Machine and became just another Phoenix suburb with all the attendant drawbacks.

Phoenix 101: The economy

How did Phoenix get in this mess? A mess where the economy is in an outright depression after outperforming much of the nation, by some measures, for decades. A mess where its grades in quality economic circumstances are among the worst in America, and where it may be America's fifth most populous city and 13th largest metropolitan area but underperforms its peers by an embarrassing gap.

It took a lot of work.

When I was growing up, people talked about the Four Cs of Arizona's economy: Copper, cotton, cattle and citrus. The fifth C of climate — I don't recall that, and it may have been added later to justify the machinations of the Growth Machine. For much of the territory and state's history, its climate was a decided negative. In any event, even this was an over-simplification, leaving out railroads, other agricultural sectors and the condition of the state. Arizona was a frontier state with harsh conditions and sparse population. In 1950, the population of the entire state was 750,000. Thus, its carrying costs were low, its sustainability high.

Flagstaff had timber and the Santa Fe Railway. Globe and the mining districts had copper, one of the state's most important industries. Other minerals were mostly played out, leaving ghost towns, except for Prescott, which was a division point on the railroad. Even so, in the early 1960s the copper industry paid 22 percent of the state tax load and provided thousands of good jobs. Tucson was a major rail center on the Southern Pacific and a military base. Cattle ranches proliferated; this industry was valued at $200 million in 1962 (about $1.4 billion now). But most of the state was wilderness. The exception, mid-century, was Phoenix.

Phoenix 101: Growing up

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.

Water and Arizona's future

 “There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.” — Edward Abbey

Asked to write about Arizona and water, I fear I will disappoint. My take is now too idiosyncratic, too impossible for the state's residents to even contemplate or for the economic and political elites to allow. Still, a reader asks; I'll deliver and at least start a conversation/argument.

In its particulars, Arizona's water issues are complicated, making them inaccessible to a population with lower levels of education and civic involvement, as well as little connection to the state's history. They did not, as I did, grow up with water — my mother working as part of the effort to win the Central Arizona Project. In general, Arizona's water issues are stark and simple: The state can't sustain double-digit percentage population increases every decade, particularly in subdivisions apart from historic urban footprints. This statement is anathema to the Real Estate Industrial Complex and what passes for an "economy" that Arizonans keep looking to resuscitate. But wait... In reality, Arizona probably doesn't have the water to support its current population for long. Beyond these basics, it's all over but the shouting.

Here's what I don't trust: The state Department of Water Resources or its active water management areas. The risks of compromise to water rules by the development elite is too great, exacerbated by continued under-funding of state government. And the 100-year supply "rule" for new development? Even if it's enforced what does it mean? One thing it does, because water is divorced from land-use regulations, is to cause a land rush to lock up aquifers that have taken eons to create — all to provide the illusion of security so another "master planned community" can expand out beyond the White Tanks. Meanwhile, much of the state lacks even this suspect oversight. Mojave County, notorious for its lack of water, was a hotspot for wildcat exurban sprawl before the housing collapse.

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:

Peak oil and its deniers

UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong has a running feature on his blog called, "Why, oh why, can't we have a better press corps?" Amen, brother. But even the best newspapers have blind spots, and that has especially unfortunate consequences when those dark zones concern some of the biggest issues of the day. The New York Times is already terrified of climate-change stories and won't plumb seriously into the soft empire we've created and its crushing costs. One of its biggest deficiencies is coverage of energy, especially the oil industry. Hence, we were served a story on Sunday about peak oil that failed to define the term and consigned the people in the story to the survivalist fringe. This from a newspaper that also publishes a deferential story about the retrograde nihilist Rand Paul and shrinks from nailing the tea party for its racist supporters, incoherent positions and — especially — shadow control by big corporate money.

Peak oil doesn't mean "we're about to run out of oil." Even defining it as "demand outstripping supply" is incomplete. Peak oil means the world has reached a point where half of the planet's oil has been burned up (see, "climate change"). The remainder will be increasingly hard to reach and more expensive to refine. America hit its national peak in the early 1970s. The North Sea has passed peak. Several of the world's giant "elephant fields" are near or past peak. This is a simple fact of geology about which there's no disagreement among most experts (the outlier: the oft-quoted and highly-paid-by-industry Daniel Yergin). Peak oil was being used in ads by major oil companies and speeches by their CEOs in the mid-2000s. As with climate change, the debate is over details; in this case, when will peak hit and what will be its effects?

Not for nothing did America fare well in World War II because it was a petro superpower and the world's leading oil exporter. Neither Hitler nor the Japanese Empire had much in the way of oil resources. Hitler failed to make the Caucasus oilfields an immediate priority in his attack on the Soviet Union, a geopolitical example of when cops say, "Thank god for stupid criminals." Now, more than three decades after hitting peak, America still produces oil, especially in Texas, Alaska, California and Louisiana. We're even still one of the world's larger oil producers, but that is way outstripped by our appetite.

Phoenix 101: Scottsdale

My earliest memory of Scottsdale is what would most intrigue a little boy: The fire station. The Rural Fire Department sat at Second Street and Brown. It had long outgrown its small building, so yellow-painted fire apparatus were parked all around. In the early 1960s, Scottsdale still retained much of its flavor as one of the minor farm towns that surrounded Phoenix. To that had been added "Western-style" storefronts: It was "the West's Most Western Town." With a few blocks on Fifth Avenue, Main and First Avenue, it was a tourist trap. It had a few hotels, such as the Valley Ho and the Sahara, as well as the wooden-sided stadium — continuing the playfully fake frontier theme — and a modest art colony.

We moved from Midtown Phoenix to what is now south Scottsdale in 1970. My mother had been alarmed by an incident at West High where a student had been kicked to death. Despite our modest means, she wanted me to attend the excellent Coronado High. I got to know Scottsdale very well. The neighborhoods around Coronado and Los Arcos mall were still separated from downtown Scottsdale by farm fields and vacant land. Scottsdale Road lacked curbs, gutters or sidewalks. Our house sat a block east of Scottsdale Road; one old, unoccupied house faced on Scottsdale Road across the alley, leaving a spectacular view of the Papago Buttes. It was an alley prowled by the "Refuse Wranglers" city garbage men. Closer to downtown was the YMCA, where I did a stint as a lifeguard, and the Scottsdale Daily Progress building. Then came the new Scottsdale Baptist Hospital and downtown.

In the early '70s, much of downtown was seedy, with old houses now rented to anybody, including bikers. City Hall was only being planned. The police were based out of the old schoolhouse. But close to Scottsdale Road and Main Street, local businesses flourished, from Lute's Drugstore to Saba's Western Wear, along with the gas station with the iconic cowboy sign promoting community events. It was still a small town run by a local merchant class. The future giant Fashion Square was a Goldwater's department store. Newer suburbia marched ahead, of course, especially around Saguaro High. But most of Scottsdale ended just north of Camelback, where the horse ranches took over, then breathtaking empty desert. The airport was little more than a former Army airfield with a handful of newer, small buildings. Drinkwater's Liquors, a Circle K and a few other buildings sat at the crossroads with Shea "Boulevard." That was two lanes out to the Beeline Highway. On the way, you could make the long trek through nothing to reach Taliesin West. My friends and I launched model rockets in the desert southwest of Bell and Scottsdale. I got a glimpse of the plans "somebody" had for the place when the Hilton was built in the middle of nowhere on Lincoln Drive and Scottsdale Road; I worked as a bus boy at Paul Shank's, riding my bike every night along that no-shoulders, no sidewalks, no streetlights highway.

Second time around?

If Arizona was a 'clean slate', how would you do it the second time around?

This challenge, from commenter Rate Crimes, is too tempting to avoid. But it risks being the kind of temptation found in the bars of history at closing time: A pointless counterfactual fling that will end in regret or even worse. No place can be separated from its moment in history, the larger forces at work upon it, the larger-than-life people who mold it, and the masses of people who live there. Arizona and Phoenix were always going to be exactly what they are. Maybe.

Yet here's one imagination exercise: An Arizona with 2 million people, about the population of real-life New Mexico (rather than 6.6 million). Most live in relatively compact versions of Phoenix and Tucson. Every city and town in the state has maintained its distinct identity, look, feel. The larger cities have kept and enhanced key industries while drawing high-value, leading edge sectors proportionate to (or disproportionately favorable to) their population. Housing is a much smaller part of the economy. Smaller places especially have scalable local economies. Multiple universities, federal laboratories and a robust technology cluster are a draw for international talent. Incomes are higher than the national average, as in real-life Washington state or Colorado. Most people are literate and educated, engaged in the community, committed to preserving the environment, part of a vibrant two-party political system that veers to moderation whomever is in power. This outward-looking state is a major trade hub for Mexico and Latin America, comfortable with its Hispanic part, but largely insulated from a huge illegal alien influx by its high-end economy and the cohesion of its cities.

I could get even more specific about Phoenix.

Arizona depression III

I'll wrap up my trip back home with the question that started it: What now?

In numerous conversations with the well-connected and just average 'Zonies, nobody has an answer. "Every time things seem to be improving, we take a step back," said one prominent player. "We have an unerring ability to shoot ourselves in the head." I would add: "And reload." While the state is very different from metro Phoenix in many ways, economically it has become an even less diverse mirror of it, depending on population growth, housing and tourism. The "plan," such as there is one, seems to be hoping the Growth Machine can sputter to life for one more good run. The white-right rhetoric about cutting taxes and regulation to gain business is nonsense: If that were the key, Mississippi and Somalia would be economic giants. The reality: There's no plan B.

In my old haunts, every little triumph is offset by a heartbreak or moronic misstep. Some new restaurants have set up along the light-rail line — wish some productive businesses or headquarters with high-wage jobs would do so. The historic districts continue to hold on, despite scads of "for-sale" signs. ASU downtown seems there to stay, no small accomplishment. Yet the number of empty storefronts is astounding, a sign of the lack of capital coming to the city. The city can't afford to keep up iconic Encanto Park while what was the shady oasis adjacent to the Viad tower has been turned into a horrid faux desert radioactive zone. Every time someone throws down rocks and removes shade trees and grass from the old city, it only increases the heat island and decreases the livability. "We're in a desert!!" No, Mr. or Ms. Transplant, old Phoenix was always an oasis.

A volcano at the party

A tiny pinprick in the earth, as author Simon Winchester puts it, offered an object lesson in just how vulnerable our high-flying, high-tech civilization has become. The American media are obsessed with the grounded airline passengers, and, because our society now must always put a price tag on everything, how many hundreds of millions of dollars it is costing the airlines.

They are oblivious to other things: How much of Europe is doing fine because of its excellent rail system. How the global interconnections that have arisen over the past 30 years bring dangers more profound that the intertwined investment banks that nearly blew up the world economy. These connections are complex yet highly limiting and unsustainable. Consider Wal-Mart's 10,000-mile "supply chain" facing a future of higher energy costs and shortages. Yet just as America once had a great intercity rail system, it could once feed and clothe itself. In many cases, that's no longer true. Phoenix once produced a huge variety of foods, from strawberries to steaks. Now if the global links shut down, Phoenix would starve. You can't eat foreclosed houses.

I think about that when I am at Pike Place Market in Seattle, five blocks from my home, watching the tourists ooh and ahh over the bounty of food and flowers, most of it grown and harvested locally. Then they go back home and shop at Wal-Mart. Do they even wonder if their towns once had such markets? Most did, if not the size and abundance of choices available here. Now, except for a few hippy-dippy eat-local places, they're gone. It might not prove to be the best choice in the decades to come.

Sense of self

Amid all the tribulations of Phoenix and Arizona, this seems like a small one. If the NHL Coyotes ultimately remain, they will drop the name "Phoenix" and replace it with "Arizona" or even "Glendale." What the hell?

I lived away from Phoenix from 1979 until 2000, and one of the striking changes upon returning was not merely the reluctance to use Phoenix as the name for the metropolitan area, but the outright and growing hostility to it. "The Valley" was no longer a nickname, a la, the Mile High City, but almost a mandated moniker for a region that was ashamed of its major city. This was propelled in no small measure by the media, especially the Arizona Republic. What's lost is far more than one of the most magical names among American cities — Phoenix. The failure to capitalize on the name is one more thing holding back the entire metropolitan area.

It's difficult to think of another example. Seattle makes up less of its metro area than Phoenix in either population or area, but people in Bellevue, Federal Way, Shoreline, Kent, Burien, etc. are happy for the nation and world to know they live in "Seattle." Atlanta is one of the most sprawl-ridden metros in America, with a city of Atlanta that has less population than Mesa, and yet no one question's the metro's name. When NCR despicably betrayed Dayton to move its headquarters, it went to an exurban Georgia location, but the news reports said, "suburban Atlanta." People from Winnetka, Aurora, Naperville, etc — they always say they're from Chicago. I could go on, but you get the idea. The anti-Phoenix sentiment is very odd and pathological.

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,

Phoenix 101: Freeways

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 them, yet couldn't avoid the curse.

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 had slipped the bonds of real cityhood forever. Around this time, local government adopted an ambitious freeway plan prepared by Wilbur Smith & Associates, one of the nation's leading transportation planning firms. It envisioned much of the system eventually built. But most Phoenicians were horrified.

An urban legend persists that Eugene C. Pulliam single-handedly defeated the freeway plan in the early 1970s -- and thus delayed your charming commute to Gold Canyon. Although the Arizona Republic was 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 LA, 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. We didn't want smog. We didn't want to lose our views to concrete and citrus groves to suburbia. Of particular alarm was the 100-foot-high Papago Freeway planned across central Phoenix, with monstrous "helicoils" discharging traffic onto Third Avenue and Third Street.

Passages

If my editor and publisher allow it, the new David Mapstone Mystery, South Phoenix Rules, will come out in December. I've never written a novel in, essentially, three months, but I know Mapstone fans have been without a fix for some time. Thanks to blog readers for their patience.

In Arizona, two passings. Stu Udall, who served as one of the small state's two or three congressmen, and later became the distinguished Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy and Johnson, died at 90. The gift of years had its pain: Seeing his beloved West become overrun with people, independent old Arizona become a hotspot of white-right extremism and the conservation ethic he embodied undone in so many ways. Roy Elson also passed away. As the powerful top aide to Sen. Carl Hayden, Elson was one of the most important players in winning the Central Arizona Project. So lacking is the Information Center in institutional knowledge or curiosity -- or a desire to be relevant -- that it failed to note Elson's death for a week after it was being discussed in Phoenix. When what should be the state's newspaper of record thinks "there's no history here," why should we expect a different attitude from the Midwesterners and inland Californians who have swarmed the place like a biblical plague? Elson was a friend of my mothers, and after I returned to the state, I vowed to trek to southern Arizona and spend time hearing of the old water-war days. I regret that I never did it.

The Kookocracy has begun to attain its goals as Arizona becomes the first state to eliminate health care to children of the working poor. This underscores the cruelty, "devil take the hindmost" and sociopathic nature of the white-right (see "The Party of Cruelty" on The Front Page). Much more is being churned out of the Legislature, including the destruction of the state park system, draconian cuts to education and Medicaid, and hundreds of other measures. They will make Arizona's dire economic situation worse. But will voters reject the Kooks? Or will the state's large number of Anglos in low-wage jobs, who have seen their living standards drop and opportunities whither because of Republican policies, be led by talk radio to vote for more of the same? It's a national question, too. And, of course, the ruling elites want you to be stupid.