By Gregory McNamee
IT'S BEEN MORE than two decades since Ed Abbey caught the dark urban worm at modern Arizona's heart in his now-famous essay "The BLOB Comes to Arizona," in which he likened the growth of Phoenix and Tucson to a pulsating pudding.You'll remember the quintessentially cheesy '50s film Abbey was thinking of: In The Blob a dollop of miscreant blancmange descends from the sky to swallow up everything in its path, becoming larger with every bite and stealing the show from Steve McQueen in the bargain. The image is nice enough, but altogether too tame for what urban growth has become today--more the acid-spitting beast of Alien than a comparatively benign marshmallow.
Signs of that growth surround Tucsonans every day. Throw a rock out a window and you're likely to smack a big yellow machine blading away the earth. We've got no room for smugness in the face of the Old Pueblo's unchecked sprawl. Still, for a real nightmare, a glimpse of what Tucson's growth is sure to yield a decade or two up the road, you'll need, for the time being to drive north of Phoenix.
By some estimates Phoenix is now the second-fastest growing metropolis in the country, just behind Las Vegas. The population of the conurbation has grown by 20 percent in the last four years, to about 2.4 million, making it the ninth-largest metropolitan area in the United States. An expanding computer-chip and light-manufacturing base (witness Chandler's huge new Intel plant, one of the largest in the world) and a demographic trend that sees aging baby boomers fleeing to Sunbelt retirement guarantee the Valley of the Sun won't stop filling up with people anytime soon.
The influx of workers and retirees means big business for developers. Last year marked a record in home resales, according to the Phoenix Housing Market Letter, to nearly 55,000 units. New housing starts are at unprecedented levels, with so much building in the works that Phoenix contractors are pulling in skilled workers from across the country at hyperinflated wages, with steelworkers and electricians the happy objects of bidding wars.
Those workers keep busy: According to widely quoted estimates from ASU's College of Architecture, metro Phoenix is growing at the astonishing rate of an acre an hour.
We're not talking urban infill, either. By the logic of developers, it's a newcomer's God-given right to live in a brand-new tract home on a cul-de-sac, grass lawn and date palm included. That's just what the developers are throwing up, too; never mind that at any given time about 10 percent of existing housing in the valley sits vacant.
That logic is yielding construction that would make Ed Abbey's teeth hurt. The Del Webb Corporation, blithe author of spectacular eyesores like Sun City and greater Lake Havasu, is now pushing a $2 billion project near the once-quiet town of New River that will plant nearly 17,000 homes on 5,700 acres of virgin desert. Opponents of urban growth have already written New River off. Thirty-five miles north of downtown Phoenix, it's already the site of what will be the largest shopping mall in Arizona, a behemoth due to open later this year. The bet is that the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will happily approve Del Webb's proposal when it comes up for a vote later this month.
Closer to downtown, the Phoenician Resort successfully lobbied to build a seven-hole golf course and 100 guest houses on the lower slopes of Camelback Mountain, the Valley's most obvious landmark.
By the logic of developers, it's a newcomer's God-given right to live in a brand-new tract home on a cul-de-sac, grass lawn and date palm included.
Other developers are pitching to gain rights to the higher slopes, protected as a regional park since 1963 thanks to a grassroots conservation movement spearheaded by then-U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater. The senator is now old and gray, however, and covenants are made to be broken. The smart money is on a Camelback swarming with luxury homes by the end of the decade.
Examples multiply, and the cities grow. Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Chandler, Mesa, Goodyear burst at the seams, annex property right and left, metastasize beyond recognition.
This rampant growth worries Phoenix City councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood. "As the movie (Field of Dreams) says, 'If you build it, they will come,' " she says. "We're building it and they're coming. We don't need more growth just now. Instead, we need to figure out what kind of future we want for Phoenix, and how we're going to get there. I don't think we're on the right track."
Barwood introduced a measure in council earlier this year to slow construction by putting a temporary moratorium on "upzoning"--changing, say, a one-house-per-acre restriction to allow several houses or apartments on the same property, a builder's dream. The proposal was soundly defeated. It barely got a hearing at all; Phoenix Mayor Skip Rimsza--a developer, as it happens--repeatedly but unsuccessfully tried to bar it from the agenda, saying Barwood's motion was illegally worded.
"I wasn't surprised," Barwood says. "The mayor and most of the council are involved in real estate, and so we have built-in problems whenever a development issue comes up. My colleagues don't seem to recognize that we're paying for all this development. We use the general fund to pay for infrastructure fees that we'll never recover--hooking up sewer lines, electricity, and so on. But growth is what the council wants. It's pretty frustrating."
"The city is undergoing a boom precisely because developers control this place," says ASU Prof. Bradford Luckingham, author of Phoenix: An Urban History, and a longtime student of the metropolis' growth. "They keep building and building, and they could care less what comes of it. As it is, everything now looks the same--the same red tile roofs, the same palm trees. In the end it's a losing battle to hope otherwise. We're turning into Los Angeles.
Welcome to The Blob II: The Sequel.
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