Rogue Columnist

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 (left), 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

Motorola was once the backbone of technology industries recruited to Phoenix in the 1950s.

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

The lagoon at Encanto Park, one of my favorite hangouts as a child.

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.

Freeway to hell

What will be the final nail in the coffin of the city of Phoenix? I vote for the Loop 202 South Mountain Freeway.

If the freeway is built, it will be a gamble for everybody. A bet that the old sprawl model can work one last time to generate short-term profits for the Real Estate Industrial Complex by turning largely worthless land into sites for tilt-up commercial space, subdivisions, shopping strips, In-N-Out Burger boxes and the entire dreary aggregation of suburbia. Some stand to get very wealthy off the deal, including, apparently, Phoenix City Councilman Sal DiCiccio. Like so many "local leaders," he is not a high-tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist, stem-cell researcher, professor or clergyman -- he's a real-estate guy. But with so much leverage still weighing down the development game and higher energy prices just around the corner, one has to wonder if the ol' Growth Machine has one more go in it. Yet Arizona is like a dinosaur whose tiny reptilian brain hasn't yet processed that its tail is on fire -- so it will keep building out a 1965 transportation system.

It worked in LA in 1965 because Los Angeles actually had a real economy, not just a real-estate economy. And gasoline was still cheap; America itself had not yet hit its national oil peak. Now Southern California has destroyed so much of itself with freeways and, facing the damage, has embarked on rebuilding its once-great rail infrastructure. Thus, LA now has one of the nation's most extensive light-rail systems and commuter rail operations. In Phoenix (and this deserves its own Phoenix 101 post), freeways were mostly about maximizing profits for landholders and developers whose property was otherwise good only for agriculture or worthless desert. The real economy always lagged, and finally stopped trying to keep up entirely. But the biggest loser from the freeways was the city of Phoenix.

The Godot housing recovery

"Everybody" in the Arizona's limited cloud of good intentions believes the state needs to diversify its economy, particularly in suffering Phoenix. Unfortunately this doesn't include the two entities that could actually address this issue: the state government, which is controlled by the Kookocracy and can only cut services and taxes, and the Real Estate Industrial Complex. The latter is just waiting for the old reliable growth machine to wheeze to life once again. For both, rapid population growth alone has cloaked an array of dysfunctions and it's gone on for so many decades that few can imagine a future of discontinuity. In other words, nobody with real power has a Plan B.

As the Kookocracy has gone national, so, too, did much of Phoenix's delusional thinking during the years leading up to the crash. With so much of the economy hollowed out, more and more prosperity depended on house building and improvement, house selling and flipping, and mortgages — from generating and refinancing them to packaging them in elaborate swindles on Wall Street. No wonder that many days the national news sounds like the local land boosters giving a forecast at the Arizona Biltmore. Housing has hit bottom! A recovery is under way! Sales are up — ooops, today they're down, but tomorrow's another day.

None of these individual snapshots answer the fundamental question: Can the old housing market be restarted?

Valley downtowns 2.0?

The previous post on downtown Phoenix generated many comments about other downtowns in the metro area, so let's take a tour.

Some common denominators are found. None of these cites have a real urban downtown. Most also suffer to some degree from land banking, which produces blight and prevents the infill that would create critical mass. Many are far from the residences of better-off folks, so there's little incentive for them to patronize downtown. Most suffer from the dreadful sameness of development in the region, with "master-planned communities" separating themselves from their nominal cities while malls and office "parks" draw off retail and commercial businesses from a central business district. Most are located in what were little farm towns during the golden age of American architecture and civic design, so they lack good bones. A few are attempts at New Urbanist town centers -- but that doesn't make them real downtowns, from the lack of diversity to the lack of connectivity. All except for downtown Tempe lack convenient transit/light rail. Despite all the studies and consultants, few city leaders seem to understand urban or even get out much. Beating Fresno is taken as a great achievement. All suffer from lack of serious business-driven investment, depending instead on real estate-driven speculation. Almost all lack the public spaces, much less inviting and inspiring public spaces, essential to real downtowns.

Given its huge population, Mesa should have the region's second real downtown. Unfortunately the city's short-sighted, haphazard development grab in the '80s and '90s, combined with no significant, sustained focus on downtown, leaves it lacking. The arts center was a good start, and Mesa at least didn't tear down its Main Street core (it did allow its lovely Southern Pacific depot to rot, then burn down). Mayor Scott Smith wants a major Mesa Community College presence there -- another good start. But the lure of the Gateway land scheme will keep drawing away energy and investment -- the Cubs stadium being the latest example (Smith tells me the Cubs wouldn't go for a downtown ballpark near light rail -- enjoy $10-a-gallon gasoline). The lack of LDS power to enhance downtown and its connection to the Arizona Temple is bizarre. Meanwhile, Mesa courts dullness and conformity (hiding away its significant poor, Latino population). So its lack of coolness also keeps it from making the most of what it has.

Downtown Phoenix 2.0?

It's surprising that some appear so sanguine about the likely foreclosure of most units at the 44 Monroe condo tower. This, along with a similar fate for the Summit at Copper Square and 44's developer Grace Communities failing to rehab the historic Valley National Bank building because of the Mortgages Ltd. fiasco, represents a devastating setback for luring private investment into downtown Phoenix. Maybe people are too shell shocked to take it all in. Maybe they're willing to settle for things being better than they were 20 years ago, which is undeniably true. Neither option is wise for those who wish the central city well.

Make no mistake: the Phoenix depression is metro-wide. I saw rotting framing and miles of distressed subdivisions out in the exurbs. Tempe foolishly threw away its opportunity to build a mid-rise boutique downtown of national quality -- now it has an empty condo high-rise and Mill Avenue is swooning again. But my conviction remains that there is no healthy major city without a strong urban downtown, and center city problems left unchecked have a habit of spreading. (And don't be taken in by the propaganda: Phoenix did have a vibrant downtown -- it was killed by civic malpractice).

In Phoenix, the past few years have seen some notable triumphs: the beginnings of a downtown ASU campus, light rail, a convention center worthy of such a tourist-dependent city, a new convention hotel, and a blossoming of independently owned restaurants. The biosciences campus has been planted (although it has been allowed to stall and, I fear, its future is uncertain). Yet major private investment has not followed; 44 Monroe and the Summit represented the strongest chance for that within the existing local business model of "real estate first." The many towers proposed for the entire Central Corridor are now blighted empty lots. CityScape? I'll believe it when I see it. What I see is a homely suburban design, not the soaring "game changer" sold to the public on the front page of the newspaper.

Phoenix 101: Sun City

The curvilinear streets and golf courses of Sun City.

Fifty years ago, Del Webb began Sun City. It was just south of Grand Avenue and the Santa Fe railroad amid the flat farm fields of Maricopa County and near the tiny railroad sidings at Surprise and El Mirage. I first saw it from the train -- there was no Sun City station, for this was a development built for the automobile. For most Phoenicians, it was a curiosity -- or a joke. Pat McMahon's misanthropic, demented Aunt Maud character on Wallace & Ladmo was from Sun City. Photos of oldsters riding around in their golf carts provoked much mirth. When an older lady asked my grandmother if she was going to move out there, this daughter of the frontier was aghast. "Why would I want to be stuck out there with all those old people?" she asked. The older lady was shocked.

Yet Sun City would prove to be one of the most influential events in the history of modern Phoenix, setting in train a series of business, demographic and social changes that have proven to be very mixed blessings. Before Sun City, Phoenix was something like a real city. Tourism and snowbirds were part of the mix. But so was a huge agricultural economy, along with a large -- for its population larger than today -- and growing number of technology, aerospace and defense businesses. Resorts were limited. The artist colonies in Scottsdale and Carefree were more important than retirees. After Sun City all this would change.

Del Webb had been building in Phoenix for decades before Sun City. Go to the iconic Phoenix Towers at Cypress and Central and you'll see his name on the building, erected in 1956. Downtown sidewalks from years before had it etched in the concrete (although here Webb competed against "Frenchy" Vieux). He grew rich in World War II, building military facilities, as well as the concentration camp -- there's no polite way to put it -- at Poston to hold interned Japanese-American citizens and other Japanese living in America. By the time he envisioned Sun City, he was no longer "ole Del," but a very rich man, friend of celebrities, part-owner of the New York Yankees -- and, among Phoenicians in-the-know, trailed by the odor of associations with organized crime and war profiteering.

Dreading the Census

The 2010 Census is provoking much angst in the Salt River Valley. Arizona's 40-percent population increase of the 1990s will almost certainly not be replicated over the decade just past, and some worry that at least certain cities could actually see population declines. Such is the damage from the great recession. Such has been the preeminent importance of adding people to the economy and psyche of metro Phoenix. Not growing scientists, corporate headquarters, diverse industries, incomes, high-wage jobs, quality schools, venture capital, the arts, public transit, shade, etc. -- just adding people.

A few predictions can be made without much fear: Phoenix will not rise higher than America's No. 5 most populous city, barring a holocaust hurricane hitting Houston. Indeed, Phoenix's population may well be flat or even have fallen since mid-decade. Its poverty will rise. It will move closer to becoming a Hispanic majority city, if the Census count is thorough and honest. The metro area as a whole will have gained, but not nearly as much as it did in some of the preceding decades. De-facto segregation by ethnic group, and especially class, will grow more rigid. The demographic and social changes brought by this first crash of the Great Disruption will be felt in the 2010 Census and continue to reverberate into the new decade. Among them: Americans are moving less.

Taken together, the message of the 2010 Census to Phoenix and Arizona: You'd better find a new gig.

Phoenix 101: Union Station

When Jefferson Davis -- yes, that Jeff Davis -- led the pre-Civil War survey for a southern route of the transcontinental railroad, Phoenix didn't exist. The Salt River Valley still lay in its centuries of enchanted slumber surrounded by wilderness. So the line was set in an arc north and west out of Tucson toward California. This necessitated the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico -- otherwise, today's border would be at the Gila River. But it meant that what became the nation's fifth most populous city would end up without a mainline railroad. Even when the Southern Pacific was built across Arizona in the 1880s, Phoenix was a mere hamlet. It was served by a spur from Maricopa.

By 1910, Phoenix had more than 11,000 people and was fast overtaking Tucson as the territory's largest town -- and with the Salt River harnessed by Roosevelt Dam it would become the center of huge agricultural production. The SP remedied this by building a northern main line up from Picacho Junction through Phoenix and west to where it joined the southern main just east of Yuma. It was a matter of competitive urgency, because the rival Santa Fe railroad had built a line to Phoenix (the Peavine) from its northern Arizona main at Ash Fork. The SP's line was opened in 1926 and waiting for it was the grandest building in this city of 48,000: the lovely mission-revival style Union Station.

It's still there, at 4th Avenue and Harrison Street, the best human-made reminder I know of that Phoenix indeed has history and soul. Because of terrible short-sightedness of state leaders, it hasn't been served by Amtrak trains since the 1990s. It holds telecommunications equipment for Sprint, at once a horrid missed opportunity to create something great downtown yet it also probably the only reason it hasn't been torn down for something today's Phoenicians would consider majestic, such as a jail parking lot. I was fortunate enough to see it at the end of its glory days.

Phoenix and Seattle

It's been more than two years since I left Phoenix for Seattle and readers have repeatedly asked me to compare and contrast the two. I've hesitated because they are not merely different places but different planets.

As a columnist for the Arizona Republic, I used Seattle as a yardstick for Phoenix in a pair of articles. They were about the same size metro areas, and in 1960, same size cities. Both were weather challenged. Both had sat in the shadows of bigger cities (LA for Phoenix, San Francisco for Seattle). In 1960, Seattle was heavily dependent on Boeing and otherwise held a number of declining industries, as well as a history of labor problems. Phoenix was rich with newly recruited tech companies and a fresh slate. Which city would you have bet on? Of course, Seattle turned out to be a world city and Phoenix a massive real-estate scheme. The second column attempted to explain some of Seattle's strengths that could be nurtured to help Phoenix (yeah, I was the one who was always gloomy, never offering solutions). These columns went into the dustbin of all such writing about Arizona and, as teaching tools, they were also very naive.

In reality, Seattle had so many strengths Phoenix never had or developed. This is why a real compare-and-contrast may be of limited value, as well as being seen as more Phoenix bashing.

Greenscam

The Phoenix Convention Center is the site of the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, involving, the Info Center reports, "thousands of entrepreneurs, sales executives

and marketers in the fast-growing 'green' construction industry." I'm sure every attendee's welcome kit contained a laminated printout of the Rogue post, "Did you hear the one about sustainable Phoenix?" Or they should, as Phoenix is the capital of denial, pipe dreams of hydrogen cars and cooling sidewalks, and the green of sales, sales, sales. It is an international poster child of unsustainability. Put the conferees on buses, drive them around town, say "Don't do this!" and send them home.

In the same edition of the newspaper, oops, Information Center, was a story about shading the new Diamondbacks spring training structure out on the rez. I'm sure this can be spun as "green" construction, and this is one of the big problems with the entire green-built movement. A new stadium on what was rural land, surrounded by a giant heat-radiating parking lagoon and wholly dependent on long drives in automobiles is by its nature not green, not adding to sustainability. This is hardly a Phoenix problem. One sees all these new houses and buildings in new office "parks" trumpeting their LEED certification. Unless they are infill or rehabbing an existing (preferably historic) building, they are not really green. They are not green if they expand the urban footprint. Nor can they be divorced from their surroundings, such as walkable neighborhoods, transit, in-neighborhood shopping, etc. Otherwise, they are greenwash. Still, Phoenix takes the destructive absurdity to operatic levels. The idea that the already too-large Phoenix urban footprint can be enlarged by Superstition Vistas, and all those houses will be "green" (without a mandate, sure) is insanity.

The Info Center likely didn't have an article that came out of the European press, where whistleblowers claimed the International Energy Agency, under political pressure, has been inflating world petroleum reserves. It's a charge backed by academics and the reality of peaking production, the only reliable measure of oil. In other words, the world is running out of oil much faster than we're being told. The world is changing fast — don't forget climate change, too — and the biggest casualties will be cities such as Phoenix.

The vision thing

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

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

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

So much for imagining a great city.

The men who would be Frank

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

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

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

Cincinnati, USA

"Cincinnati USA" is the cloying marketing term one sees around the airport. It also recognizes not only that the Cincinnati metro area stretches into northern Kentucky and southeastern Indiana, but that sprawl has taken its toll on the famous city in Ohio. This is a slow-growing metro in slow-growing states, but the city gained 0.3 percent population from 2000 to 2006, while suburban Butler County grew 8.4 percent and northern Kentucky's Boone County added 34 percent (through 2008). In 1900, Cincinnati was the 10th largest city in America and it topped out at 502,000 in 1960, dropping to around 332,000 now. In so many ways it is sui generis, but in other critical areas it is indeed the USA. Unfortunately, those areas are gloomy.

Winston Churchill called Cincinnati America's most beautiful inland city, and it's an observation that's hard to argue with even now. The city sits on wooded hills along gentle, wide bends of the storied Ohio River. The skyline pops up like a jewel box when you come down "death hill" on the freeway from the airport. Cincinnati is an architectural feast, filled with enchanting neighborhoods, lovely parks and deep history. This was the Miami country before the arrival of the whites, the richest hunting ground of the Iroquois Confederacy. Cincinnati was settled by Revolutionary War veterans, many members of the Society of the Cincinnati, and named after the self-denying Roman general who Americans likened to George Washington. Founded in 1788, it was the Queen City of the West, the gateway for generations of migrants and the haven for Germans who fled the crushing of the liberal revolutions of 1848 in Europe.

This city was so good to me when I was business editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer in the 1990s. Armed with one of the best staffs of financial writers I was ever honored to lead, we shook up the old-guard companies that weren't used to the prying eyes of journalists or transparency. Now I am using it as the setting for a new mystery series, The Cincinnati Casebooks, of which The Pain Nurse is the first. Seeing it again this month, after being away for 13 years, I was reminded of Mark Twain's witticism about wanting to be in Cincinnati when the world ends, because it's always behind the times. On the surface, the city seemed little changed. And thank God, for that slow pace has preserved so much good architecture. But beneath that veneer, the story was, as is always the case here, much more complicated.

Phoenix 101: Mesa

The Southern Pacific depot in downtown Mesa, circa 1963, when six passenger trains a day still served the station.

I got a rare treat in the mid-'60s for a poor kid from the 'hood: Getting to see Willie Mays play in a game of the Giants vs. the Dodgers. It was spring training and we drove to the little ballpark in Mesa. The game was great. Unfortunately, we were in the family 1959 Ford Galaxie, a source of never ending trouble and built, as my mother never tired of saying, during Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's tenure as Ford president. That night the only gear that would work was reverse -- and we drove all the way home to Phoenix going backwards.

It's low-hanging fruit to grab this memory as a metaphor for what has happened to Arizona's third most populous city. A city so populous, indeed, that it is larger than St. Louis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis or Pittsburgh -- and has nothing to show for it. No major university (an iffy branch of ASU miles from downtown doesn't count); no major corporate headquarters; no great museums; no magical neighborhoods. City Hall looks like a low-end office building. Even the area around the Arizona Temple, Mesa's one majestic asset, has been allowed to crater. The miles of enchanting citrus groves have almost all been bulldozed (and when I asked in 2006 if there was any preservation effort for the remainder, a top city official looked at me blankly).

It's a sad, and in many way surprising outcome. But operating by Arizona's rule of "when in a hole, keep digging," Mesa shows every sign of continuing the practices that got it in what is a morass even by Phoenix standards. The Cubs are playing the city for fools, threatening to leave, shopping spring training sites around the area, including some on the rez. Mesa's response could be to plan an intimate ballpark downtown on the light-rail line. It would enhance critical mass for a walkable urban space that Mesa lacks. It would be much more pleasant that the newer spring-training parks with their endless parking lagoons amid dehumanizing sprawl. It would help prepare Mesa to prosper in the higher-cost energy future.

Not surprisingly, Mesa is scouting two sites in the middle of nowhere, but on the all mighty freeway. When in a hole, keep digging.

Job One for America

As America faces its worst run of job losses since the Great Depression with no end in sight, one thing should be clear. Our federal government is being run by a coalition of the financial sector, lobbyists for entrenched interests and a disciplined Republican opposition of dubious loyalty. Barack Obama is not only very close to being a failed president, he could be on track to be a one-termer if the GOP snags an opponent such as Gen. David Petraeus or even a rehabbed Mitt Romney. (The Nobel will only hurt Obama without substantive achievements for average Americans).

Perhaps the problem is centered on Obama and the cowardly Democrats in Congress (Memo to Blue Dogs: You'll lose anyway, so do the right thing and maybe you can pull a Harry Truman; oh, wait, Truman wasn't getting millions from the moneyed interests and hoping to get a job with them after politics). Could Hillary have done better? Or is this just the latest evidence of a quiet coup and no individual can change America's trajectory to self-immolation. Read Jeff Sharlet's The Family and David Wessel's In Fed We Trust (and throw in Maggie Mahar's Money Driven Medicine) and you begin to see the financialized theocracy we have become. One facing unsustainability on every front, including in a military whose quiet evangelization by the Christian right should raise alarms never before heard in America (were it covered by the media).

As for unemployment, the best Washington can do is become aroused over a tax credit for job creation. This won't work -- it's not tied to real demand. And it will lower tax revenues, adding to the deficit. It's a stunning sign of America's enervation and institutional corruption that President Obama is not rolling out a crash program to modernize our rail system. It could be done now. It would create huge numbers of jobs, not only for construction but also for operating and maintenance. Real jobs that would last. And an infrastructure whose benefits would repay the Treasury many times over.

Phoenix 101: 'Master planned communities'

Phoenix had perhaps the worst luck of any major American city from the standpoint of urban design and civic beauty. It came of age in a huge spurt of growth after World War II. The City Beautiful Movement was forgotten. Suburbia, automobiles and long single-occupancy car trips moved to the center of American life. An old city still exists -- what wasn't torn down by City Hall from the '70s through the '90s -- but it's not much and most Phoenicians don't even realize it exists. When I lived in Willo, it was always painfully entertaining to be picked up by the airport shuttle, already full of people from the suburbs. They were giddy over the front porches! The shade trees! The old houses and walkable neighborhood and closeness to the center of the city! I learned that their real-estate agents had never even showed them this part of the city.

Suburbia wasn't always, as Jim Kunstler would put it, a cartoon landscape not worth caring about. Willo was once a suburb on the streetcar from a compact Phoenix. In Cincinnati, there's the magical Mariemont, a leafy "planned town" from the 1920s, which accommodated the American longing to "get out of the awful city," while creating a real community and a real human space worth caring about. It was accessible by car but also -- especially -- by streetcar and interurban railway to downtown Cincinnati. Now the latter two are long gone as America has embraced a life with fewer choices.

A large number of people in metro Phoenix and a majority of the Anglo middle class  live in something altogether different -- a radical enterprise that has transformed civic life, urban form and even democracy: the "master planned community."

Valley of denial

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

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

Learning from the Lone Star State

If anyone thought the Sun Belt was in danger from the Great Disruption, they can find swaggering solace in The Economist's panting, sheet-clawing passion over Texas, in an article headlined Lone Star Rising. The teaser says, "Thanks to low taxes and light regulation, Texas is booming. But demography will bring profound changes."

The Economist's journalism is often some of the best around, and even its editorials can challenge the psychotic screamathon that has become American "conservatism." But it can't completely escape its Tory establishment roots, or its intellectual grounding in the conventional wisdom, BGD -- Before the Great Disruption. I don't doubt that America, and probably Britain, will exhaust themselves trying to resuscitate the old order. That will render it no less dead than the ubiquitous armadillos decorating the highways of Texas.

American right-wingers are no doubt sending the article to the faithful -- and using it to further cow the Democrats, if such a thing is possible. But a close reading of even this article -- and a better understanding of Texas -- shows that the Lone Star State's success has relatively little to do with "low taxes and light regulation." I speak as one who covered organized crime and the oil industry there, and whose family roots go back to the bloody pre-Civil War Texas frontier.

Phoenix 101: Vulnerabilities

The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, built upwind from the nation's sixth-largest city and plagued for years by regulator's safety concerns. It is the only nuclear plant in the world not near a large body of water.

People move to Phoenix bragging about the lack of blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. True enough. Yet they are moving into a place burdened by its own special hazards. They're the ones your real estate agent didn't mention; the ones that what is left of journalism rarely covers. That nobody talks about them besides -- I hope -- emergency planners, does not make them any less dangerous. Indeed, a case could be made that Phoenix is one of the highest-risk metro areas in the nation.

One of the most populous metropolitan areas in the nation has been built in a hostile desert. It's isolated, with limited highways, no passenger rail and surrounded by hundreds of miles of inhospitable, waterless badlands. Evacuation in an emergency would be impossible. The closest large cities -- Tucson and Las Vegas -- are as vulnerable as Phoenix. Gasoline must be brought in by pipelines from refineries hundreds of miles away. Water and the electricity for air conditioning depend on complex, vulnerable systems.

This harsh reality should have been brought home earlier in this decade, when, amidst brutal August heat, a gasoline pipeline broke; a year later, a mid-summer transformer fire threatened to shut down the power grid. The gas crisis was particularly frightening. Fights broke out at filling stations. People drove around in search of a tanker truck to follow. More inquisitive residents were surprised that such a large city has no refinery and is served by only two pipelines, one from the east, one from the west, built decades ago when Phoenix held a fraction of its current population.

Cities and 'markets'

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

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

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

The model modern city manager

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

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

Central Phoenix: Good, bad, ugly

Because I know the fragile self-esteem of Phoenicians is at stake, let me begin my observations about the state of the center city with the good stuff. I smelled the orange blossoms -- even stepping out into one of ugliest urban spaces anywhere, the pedestrian loading zone at Sky Harbor. Many of the Midwestern transplants dislike the scent, which makes me dislike some of them even more. But this small, fleeting thing reminds me of my often magical city that is gone forever.

Some of the projects begun under former Mayor Skip Rimsza and spearheaded by people like former Deputy City Manager Sheryl Sculley, retired Deputy City Manager Jack Tevlin and Ed Zuercher, now a deputy city manager, have turned out quite well. As I wrote before, the starter light-rail line is great. Now lots of places are clamoring for LRT; the trick will be to avoid using light rail when commuter rail would be more efficient. A metro area the size of Phoenix needs both. The Convention Center is such a startlingly attractive set of buildings that you wonder if the design was approved by mistake, given Phoenix's ability to erect such ugliness. The ASU downtown campus, Mayor Gordon's signature accomplishment, is more of a reality, and thus will be more difficult for the Legislature to destroy. The lovely oasis of Arizona Center remains, shady and cool.

Read on if you want to know "the rest of the story," as the late Paul Harvey would say.

Phoenix and Mesa dementia

As the Great Disruption rolls across the globe, changing everything, Arizona slips ever deeper into unreality. And that's saying something. Mesa's notoriously anti-everything voters approved -- by 84 percent -- using tax incentives to lure what the Republic calls "two massive upscale resort projects." Meanwhile, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon is due to "outline an ambitious strategy to make Phoenix the first carbon-neutral city - and the greenest - in the entire country." And what will the strategy, to be unveiled in today's State of the City speech, include? Providing bicycle rentals. Installing solar panels on city buildings. "Developing Phoenix's canal system for recreation and business use similar to the Tempe Town Lake area."

Where to begin? What's most remarkable is how Arizona is willfully ignoring three mortal perils: water, global warming and the rising possibility that it could have one of the world's failed states on its southern border. Oh, the relatively lesser perils remain as well: the growing underclass, the horrible schools, linear slums, income inequality, inadequate infrastructure, serious environmental damage and the health consequences that follow, etc. There's little realization that the props that held up the old growth machine are gone, done, over. I know: Let's build "two massive upscale resort projects!"

Say you want a revolution?

One of the greatest dangers to peace lies in the economic pressure to which people find themselves subjected.

--Calvin Coolidge

You can't handle the truth!

-- Jack Nicholson

The honorary Page One Editor of Rogue Columnist and I have been in a friendly argument of late over when, or whether, the riots will begin. He sees sooner than later, as people are faced with the worst economic crisis in 80 years -- perhaps in the history of the nation. Things will not turn around soon, and may well get much worse. And having worked around the world in some miserable and boiling hot-spots, he offers observations that should be discounted at one's peril. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski echoed this on MSNBC's Morning Joe, saying, "Hell, there could be even riots" as the unemployed take aim at the rich bastards that caused the calamity and are still doing fine.

I've tended to say later or never -- the nation is too narcoticized by American Idol, Grand Theft Auto, endless driving, limitless digital distractions, the deadening civic isolation of suburbia. Human nature is unchanging but Americans have changed. They have become easily led. Short-changed of an education in history, civics and the humanities, too many Americans are just plugged into the matrix, sucking Wal-Mart subsistence, waiting for their next cog assignment.

Now, I'm not so sure.

So much for the honeymoon

I keep telling myself that the woozy feeling that the Obama administration is already failing is mainly due to the 24-hour news cycle. We get to see the sausage-making in real time. And the sudden ubiquity of Republicans all over the corporate media, despite the public's rejection of their failed ideas. I keep telling myself all this.

Still, some worries. If Rahm Emmanuel is so incredibly effective as Obama's right-hand, he has yet to show it. The so-called stimulus is bogged down and deeply flawed. One cabinet nominee after another is tripped by tax or conflict-of-interest problems. It's nice that Obama admitted a mistake, but he has yet to focus, in simple, Reaganesque language what he wants and use it to go over the head of an obstructionist Congress.

Why am I not comforted that a group of "moderate" senators is trying to cut $100 billion of "fat" -- the media's term -- from the stimulus? In this supposed lard is mass transit funding desperately needed for systems that are already cutting back -- hurting the working poor the hardest. Transit and rail are my markers for real change, and given stable funding they would provide jobs paying family wages that couldn't be sent overseas. Fat? How about South Carolina's unremarked interstate to nowhere?

The real risks of the stimulus

Renegade -- the president's secret service code name -- is pushing hard for "his" stimulus bill as it reaches the House floor today. What's in is? That's difficult to tell as the horse-trading continues, and as Obama tries to rope in at least some Republican support. FDR and the Democratic Congress in 1933 simply steamrolled the Republicans who demanded balanced budgets and reactionary policies -- but never mind. In the end, this will be a package crafted not only by 535 lawmakers, but countless lobbyists and staff. My biggest fear is that it will not be a renegade stimulus -- transformative and focused on the future.

Let me count the ways:

1. Tax cuts in the current environment won't provide help. U.S. tax rates and dodges are already generally at lows not seen since the Coolidge years. Obama promised a working-class tax cut. Fine. He's bowed to Grassley to provide more alternative-minimum tax relief. OK. But these should be different bills. They're not stimulative. Individuals will squirrel away their checks or use them to pay down credit-card debt. Corporations are already paying nothing in many cases. As for "investors and risk-takers" -- the Bush years demonstrated that tax cuts on investments merely fuel speculation while encouraging job-killing mergers and offshoring. Not for nothing did wages stagnate during those halcyon years. Perhaps worst of all, it continues the destructive "tax cut" entitlement mindset that Americans can get something for nothing.

Screwed on mass transit

Talking Points Memo did more digging to find out why mass transit and Amtrak were getting so little of the proposed stimulus. It's bad enough that $30 billion will go for "roads and bridges," most of which will worsen global warming, increase our dependency on imported oil and increase the environmental and urban damage of sprawl. But apparently these critical transportation choices -- a given in most advanced nations, and critical to face a future of expensive energy and global warming -- were sold out for tax cuts. It's also galling that mass transit and rail go begging while we sink trillions into the hole of the "financial services industry" swindles.

Urbanites -- and suburbanites who want alternatives to endless driving -- put Obama over the top. It's time they reminded him of their issues. Next up for enterprising reporters: What sprawl industries are pushing this for their financial benefit?

Dead town walking

Do even the most sober-minded Phoenicians realize how deep a hole they're in? The depression caused by the housing collapse is undeniable. So the answer is merely to reinflate the housing bubble and happy days are here again, right? More "master planned communities." More paving over Pinal and Yavapai counties and rolling over Wickenburg with lookalike tract houses. More boobs from the Midwest who will put up with anything as long as they don't have to shovel snow.

Indeed, a major effort will be made to craft the Obama stimulus to do just this. Sustainability has no powerful political base. Sprawl does. Even the nominally progressive radio talker Ed Schultz is pushing for a bailout of the house builders -- and no wonder: he also owns a small construction company and drives 50 miles each way to work from his suburban home. With progressives like these, who can understand that the old sprawl model is hopelessly broken? Trying to revive it will only increase and lengthen the pain of transition -- or leave the country too bankrupt to even get there. Reviving it in Arizona will only hasten the inevitable water emergency.

But Phoenix faces crises beyond the housing depression. As one of America's least literate and most poorly educated big cities -- if it can even be called a city -- it's not surprising that no one is talking about them. And even the "smart people" assume the growth machine will revive, simply because it always has. Call them the road kill of the Great Disruption, the new era of discontinuity.

A stimulus mistake?

Much of the details of the new stimulus have yet to be known. What's emerging so far is cause for concern. For one thing, the $300 billion in tax cuts may be smart politics, but it's questionable economics and policy. Then there's the issue of how federal dollars might be used to prime the pump, with so much going to backfill basic programs being defunded by cash-strapped states, and lobbyists of the powerful highway-sprawl consortium lining up for the "roads and bridges" money.

George W. Bush and eight years of Republican misrule -- really more than a quarter century -- are leaving the new administration with the worst mess in nearly 80 years. And remember, all this was validated over and over by a majority of Americans at the polls (maybe not in 2000 and 2004). It's an open question whether any president can lead the changes really necessary to address the Great Disruption, of which the economic collapse is only part. We'll see. But the barriers to real change we can believe in are mammoth.

Phoenix's light-rail hope

I shed much blood professionally for the Valley Metro light-rail system, as the only columnist, or even journalist, to consistently stand up against the lies, myths and misconceptions that might well have killed this essential project if Phoenix is to have a future. This, as much as my outing of the Real Estate Industrial Complex and illuminating Arizona's looming water crisis, led to my demise at the Arizona Republic.

The opposition was powerful, ranging from suburban developers to right-wing thugs who didn't even live in the city. Some opponents were merely ignorant. Others were happy to see the central city die. They failed. So forgive me, as Metro prepares to open, for a moment of crowing.

We built it, you bastards.

Say goodnight to CityNorth

The Arizona Court of Appeals is doing Phoenix a favor by essentially killing its $97 million CityNorth project. Phoenix just doesn't know it. The Republic reports:

A major economic-development agreement between Phoenix and the CityNorth development has been ruled unconstitutional, meaning the project may not grow into the once-envisioned second downtown on the city's north side.

Part of the problem lies in the thinking encapsulated by that sentence. A real city has one downtown: the economic, cultural and retail heart of the city. By that definition Phoenix doesn't even have one downtown yet -- but it wants a "second downtown"? But the bigger problem with CityNorth has always been that it is based on a dead business model. The old land-speculation economy is not coming back. These are problems not unusual to American cities. But Phoenix's case is extreme and instructive.

The real hole Seattle is digging with the viaduct

The Phoenixes, Tulsas and Fresnos of American can take heart. Sometimes even the most progressive cities make really dumb decisions. Seattle has been agonizing for years about what to do about the earthquake-damaged Alaskan Way Viaduct, which runs through downtown along the waterfront. The decision: replace it with another viaduct, or two surface streets.

Somehow the obvious answer, putting the roadway into a tunnel, which would have opened up the waterfront of Elliott Bay to downtown, never made the cut. Whatever the excuse, it's a potent reminder that America has lost the ability to do great and visionary projects. This didn't happen even in the worst years of the Great Depression. The problem is not lack of funding, but lack of will and hope, another symptom of decadence.

For Seattle, the lost opportunity will be as monumental as another viaduct is ugly. The renderings always show fanciful outdoor dining tables under the spaghetti concrete spans of traffic. But we know what will really be underneath the new monstrosity. At least the old viaduct had a certain 1950s Naked City gritty beauty. The surface street option is bad in its own special way, adding to congestion and placing a barrier of traffic between the city and its waterfront. A people who have lost the ability to dream big are not capable of designing wide Parisian boulevards.