Made, Not in the Shade : Phoenix Has Become the Capital of the Southwest. Is Becoming the Next L.A. That Far Away

With a battered suitcase and three small children in tow, Karen Jones hitchhiked through a snowstorm to the Idaho Falls airport, leaving behind a failed marriage. Still bundled up against the cold that night in 1980, Jones stepped onto the Phoenix tarmac under a warm, clear sky feeling as though “I was walking into paradise because of the opportunities ahead and the stars, which seemed so close I could reach up and touch them.”

Nearly penniless and without marketable skills, Jones eventually parlayed odd jobs pumping gas, dispatching security guards and cleaning homes into her own bar-and-billiards joint, reinventing herself along the way like most of the strivers drawn to this burgeoning desert mecca.

“This city is like a tree full of ripe fruit for the picking,” says Jones, 39, pouring a beer for a patron in her Pack Saddle Saloon. “You can start fresh here. I’m living proof.”

The nation’s seventh-largest city, Phoenix is a 469-square-mile metropolis drenched in nearly year-round sunshine and surrounded by rolling greasewood-studded desert, with room to grow and grow as far as the eye can see. It is the U.S. boomtown of the late 20th century, a harbinger, say its boosters, of the cities of the future.

Phoenix is where employers come for cheap labor in a right-to-work state, and for generous tax breaks. The city and its environs--a broad plain carved by the Salt River known locally as the Valley of the Sun--is a magnet for the high-technology and service industries, and a relentless generator of jobs. Nearly 70,000 jobs were created last year, a 6.5% increase from 1993. At least 60,000 more are expected to be created this year in a place where the unemployment rate is 3.5%, down from 5% last year and well below the national average of 5.5%.

In many ways, Phoenix resembles post-World War II Los Angeles, when Southern California ran on the powerful economic engines of aerospace and real estate, movies, agriculture and banking. But since the end of the Cold War, Phoenix’s largest urban neighbor has lost more than 150,000 jobs and its underpinnings of security, sending a wave of emigres and businesses to Phoenix and other Sun Belt cities.

Fox Animation Studios arrived last year and transformed its senior vice president, Stephen Brain, into a local hero. The 41-year-old executive is lauded at civic fund-raisers for bringing 300 jobs to the Valley of the Sun.

“There’s a charge in the air here,” says Brain, who moved from Burbank to set up shop in an angular building with lemon yellow awnings that once served as headquarters for infamous land developer Charles Keating. “It’s like Los Angeles was years ago--it’s the place to get a job. And, I bought a 4,000-square-foot home with a one-acre lot in Phoenix’s equivalent of Bel-Air for $450,000. If I ever get transferred back to Los Angeles, I’ll live in Phoenix and commute.”

Not everyone, though, finds what they’re looking for in this, one of the country’s fastest-growing cities. In fact, two of every three new Phoenix residents leave within five years.

Amy Carr moved from Seattle in 1992 and is helping to launch the renovation of Phoenix’s art museum, as the city rushes headlong to add the culture and sophistication expected of a self-anointed Capital of the Southwest. Carr thought Phoenix would be the promised land; her husband, an electrician, could ride the housing boom that adds as many as 28,000 homes each year and claims pristine desert at a pace of one acre per hour. Now, she’s not so sure. Her beef isn’t so much the heat, which the couple escapes by making 12-hour round-trip treks most weekends to their sailboat slip in San Diego Harbor. It’s boredom.

When temperatures hover above 110 degrees, the Carrs, like many Phoenicians, hole up indoors, watching videos or reading books. Occasionally, they’ll play tennis in the early morning or evening. They assume that their neighbors, whom they’ve never met, do the same.

“What changed my mind about this place is when I went back to Detroit to attend my father’s 70th birthday party,” says Carr, 37. “It was a block party. I miss that. There isn’t a sense of community here. It may be time to move.”

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NO ONE MINDS IF PEOPLE PULL UP STAKES BECAUSE A PARADE OF 100,000 newcomers arrives in Phoenix each year, fleeing crime in Los Angeles, blizzards in Chicago and cyclical Rust Belt economies. What they find are work, mile after mile of affordable housing offering cocoon-like privacy, balmy winters and blast-furnace summers that require shuttling from air-conditioned offices to air-conditioned gyms to air-conditioned homes in air-conditioned cars.

Besides a robust economy, the prevailing political and philosophical climate is also a factor in Phoenix’s boom. Arizona is a brash champion of Republican-style federalism, a microcosm of the GOP’s “Contract with America,” where little regulation stands in the way of business expansion and the rugged desert terrain fosters romantic visions of a peaceful, productive life under Western skies.

But the state’s libertarian bent appears at times too permissive. Arizona in general, and Phoenix in particular, has become famous for breeding maverick politicos, shady business characters, wacko militiamen and eccentrics of every stripe. The state has attracted dubious renown for allowing citizens to wear holstered six-guns, appealing a federal ban on chlorofluorocarbons and fighting the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

In 1988, then-Gov. Evan Mecham was impeached for diverting inaugural ball donations into a loan for his ailing Pontiac dealership. In 1990, eight state legislators were captured on videotape accepting wads of cash from an undercover agent in a sting operation known as AzScam. In 1993, land developer Keating was sentenced to nearly 13 years years in prison for looting Lincoln Savings & Loan and defrauding investors in its parent company of more than $250 million. This year, Republican Gov. Fife Symington filed for bankruptcy after reneging on a promise to repay $10 million borrowed from union pensioners to build a failed commercial center in downtown Phoenix.

It was a Chandler, Ariz., man who clobbered champion ice skater Nancy Kerrigan and a Phoenix man who drove the getaway car. When saboteurs derailed an Amtrak train in the desert 60 miles west of Phoenix in October, killing one employee and injuring hundreds of other people, evidence at the scene included a manifesto railing against federal authorities signed “Sons of Gestapo.” And when Timothy McVeigh is brought to trial in the Oklahoma City bombing case next year, the testimony will lead back to the Arizona desert--McVeigh lived in Kingman, home of Army buddy and key prosecution witness Michael Fortier.

Then there is Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, whose crime-fighting tactics are drawn straight from the Wild West. Arpaio organized an armed citizen-posse to patrol Phoenix streets and recently ordered county inmates to wear pink undies to curb theft of government-issue underwear that have, improbably, become hot items on the black market. (Through a merchandising deal, Arpaio has sold almost $200,000 worth of the pink boxers, which sport a “Go Joe” logo, with the proceeds going to his posse.)

“It’s all comedy material, isn’t it?” says Doreen Acosta, a 51-year-old rock singer and British native who settled here 13 years ago with her husband, a gunsmith. “Phoenix is like a cartoon of modern America,” she adds, snipping a customer’s split ends at the Salon de Venus in central Phoenix. “With more cars than trees and concrete rectangles instead of curves, it’s like living on a Monopoly board with everything up for grabs. I mean, anything here more than 20 years old is historic.”

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PHOENIX IS A POLITICALLY CONSERVATIVE METROPOLIS that operates like a corporation, where real estate and business development are practically secular religions. No wonder. Phoenix Mayor Skip Rimsza is a former real estate broker who refers to voters as “my customers.” Gov. Symington is a former land developer.

It is also a city that is growing out of its skin. Greater Phoenix’s population of 2.5 million is expected to double within 20 years. Because it depends largely upon sales- and property taxes generated by residential development, the city recently annexed 12 square miles--which included a shopping center--becoming even larger than Los Angeles.

At least 50 Southern California businesses moved to Phoenix during the past four years, including the Daily Racing Form and Fender Musical Instruments. Another 50 California companies expanded here during the same period. The city recently outbid Newberg, Ore., to be the home of a $900-million Sumitomo Sitix Corp. silicon wafer manufacturing plant. According to the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, the plant will create 800 jobs for the Desert Ridge master-planned community on the north side of town--and presumably snare the attention of other overseas conglomerates. Just a few weeks ago, Microchip Technology announced a $1-billion expansion of facilities in Chandler, bringing 2,000 more jobs to the Phoenix area. Meanwhile, California funnels about 5,000 residents a year to Arizona, which from 1993 to 1994 recorded the second-largest population increase in the nation.

“We’re in the enviable position of being a young city managing growth, whereas Los Angeles is managing its decline,” says Phoenix Deputy City Manager David Garcia, former deputy administrator of the Los Angeles Redevelopment Agency. “In California, property values keep depreciating, which means less assessed value, which means less revenues for basic services, which means laying off cops and closing libraries at a time when they need such things most. A lot of the growth we’re experiencing now is the result of people wanting to get away from Southern California--but not too far.”

So it is that, on the outskirts of Phoenix, new housing tracts marked by huge, high-flying American flags are trammeling the desert to accommodate the tide of urban emigres from Southern California, New York and Texas. Downtown is home to a new science museum, performing arts center, public library and a baseball stadium now under construction. A third runway is under construction at Sky Harbor International Airport, where 950 commercial flights depart each day, which will help position the city as a gateway to Mexico, Central and South America and Europe. A recently secured British Airways nonstop flight to London could bolster the state’s economy by as much as $200 million annually.

All these changes are giving Phoenix a measure of cohesion after decades of shambling development that valued the automobile and the individual over the community. The stark fact is that there is no old downtown in Phoenix, no civic culture to lose in a city created out of whole cloth by developers. Belatedly, Phoenix is trying to replace a near-anarchic private market with bonds of community. “We’re a young city and it will take a few more years to develop community character. But give us time,” says Rimsza, who easily won a second term last October. “Most cities wait until they are 200 years old to renovate. But we are entrepreneurial risk-takers and aren’t about to wait.”

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SETTLED IN THE 1800S BY FARMERS on the ancient irrigation ditches of Hohokam Indians, Phoenix was transformed by the coming of the railroads into a commercial center dominated by the four C’s--cotton, copper, cattle and citrus. After World War II, political power-brokering by Arizona congressmen got U.S. taxpayers to pay for the freeways and water projects that made possible 45 years of dramatic growth. Now, flush with revenue from bond issues and taxes that feed its $1.5-billion budget, Phoenix is attempting to divest its image as a bland, overgrown bedroom community. Indeed, a sure-fire way to irritate a Phoenician is to tell the joke that goes: “What’s the difference between Phoenix and yogurt? Yogurt has culture.”

“Oh, yeah? Take a look out there and tell me whether or not we have culture,” says Bruce Sankey of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council. Sankey is standing on the 25th-floor balcony of the marble and brass downtown skyscraper called One Renaissance Square. The balcony is a 300-foot-high perch from which he extols the city to out-of-state corporate executives considering business expansions and relocations. The view is spectacular. To the north is Central Avenue, a major transportation artery lined with chrome and glass high-rises. To the east, commercial airliners roar into and out of Sky Harbor Airport. In every direction, the city rolls across the desert like an endless carpet of green.

“Over there is world headquarters for Dial Corp., and that there is the new public library,” Sankey says, pivoting with right arm extended. “There’s the Herberger Theater for Performing Arts and that’s the Civic Symphony Hall, where Jay Leno will broadcast during Super Bowl XXX week in January. And envision, if you will, our new baseball stadium next to the viaduct over there. It will have a retractable dome, so we can grow real grass on the field.”

Of course, this exponential growth has a downside. Valley of the Sun pollution monitors record ozone levels that routinely top federal health standards. Even moderately sized golf courses require a million gallons of water per day. The average distance of automobile travel, be it for a quart of milk or to pick up the kids at school, is 30 minutes.

“We should question how ethical it is for 2 million people to consume so many resources and pollute so much to achieve so little,” argues Ignacio San Martin, a professor of urban design at Arizona State University. “Yes, we have less density than any other city in the United States. But what are the implications of being the least dense? That’s my concern.”

To answer that question, San Martin leads a visitor on an automobile tour that begins in Phoenix’s sister city of Tempe, a bustling mix of offices, tourist shops and cafes surrounding sprawling Arizona State University.

“As we leave Tempe we cross the Salt River, where all the water is diverted to create a desert society dependent on irrigation, like Mesopotamia,” says San Martin, who has the profile of pop star Julio Iglesias but the bush of black hair and caterpillar mustache of a young Albert Einstein. “To the right is Papago Park, where we have turned a few pretty hills into a museum. It is a rare example of preserving what is beautiful and culturally significant around here.”

Heading west toward Phoenix, San Martin points out that Paris, San Francisco, Rome, Manhattan and Washington, D.C., all could fit within Phoenix’s city limits, with room to spare among the endless stretches of stop-and-go markets, single-story office buildings, fast-food stands, undeveloped parcels, mostly empty parking lots and pedestrian-unfriendly development.

Turning north on 44th Street, the corridor connecting the airport and the newer subdivisions and super-malls of north Phoenix and Scottsdale, is like journeying through time. On the south side of Phoenix’s landmark Camelback Mountain are 1950s-era homes with spacious front yards and porches facing streets lined with orange trees. On the north side are vast, gated communities of more recent vintage when, San Martin says, “we became greedy and forgot every good lesson in designing neighborhoods.”

In these homes, there are no front porches. Residents enter through doors in garages. Each home is surrounded by walls. There are no nearby commercial centers or markets and, for all the bike paths and sculptured parks with artificial lakes, there is no one out and about.

“We have been driving for 45 minutes and we have not seen one person walking outside,” San Martin says. “Where is the public self? What does this teach us about who we are? If this is the future, it worries me. We are condemned to isolation. There is a growing cry among people who say, ‘I have a home, but I am lonely here.’ ”

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LOITERING BEHIND PHOENIX’S UNRELENTING SUN BELT BOOSTERISM IS AN inconvenient fact of life: crime. Those fleeing crime-ridden cities for the apparent security of Phoenix are stunned to learn that the city has the second-highest burglary rate in the nation. In certain low-income southside neighborhoods--dubbed “The Twilight Zone” by northsiders--gangs terrorize police with ambush shootings. It was there that 23-year-old Rudy Buchanan Jr. was shot to death last year by 13 police officers who fired 89 rounds. Under the influence of PCP, Buchanan had fired at the officers with a shotgun and was hit by 30 bullets and pellets--some of which struck the soles of his feet. No officers were injured, but the shooting prompted demands for an independent civilian police review board to investigate police misconduct. It also sparked a continuing investigation by the U.S. Justice Department into whether police violated the civil rights of Buchanan, who was of Latino and African American heritage.

The probe follows a similar investigation into the death of 25-year-old Edward Mallet, a double-amputee who died last year after he was put in a neck hold during a skirmish with seven officers. A police department internal investigation concluded that the officers did nothing wrong. Downtown Tempe, the Phoenix area’s premier entertainment district, was the site of three shootings this summer.

Enter Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a 63-year-old refugee from Massachusetts and former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent. Elected in 1992, Arpaio’s vow to “get tough on crime” has made him a hero to residents eager for iron-fisted enforcement and an object of horrified fascination to civil-rights advocates.

Arpaio organized a 2,000-member citizen posse of lawyers, doctors, politicians, corporate executives and pot-bellied retirees who strap on side arms and don Stetsons to join deputies in crime-fighting blitzkriegs. His solution to jail crowding was to put 1,000 inmates in canvas tents in a field surrounded by concertina wire. Baking in the 120-degree heat, the inmates are forbidden to smoke or drink coffee and are allowed to watch a limited number of programs, including the Weather Channel, Maricopa County Board of Supervisors meetings and House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s 10-part video program on the history of American democracy. Arpaio crows that, at about 40 cents a serving, the meals offered in his jails are the cheapest in America--in part because he received 40,000 corn dogs free from an admiring donor in New York.

Arpaio claims there is a method to the strategies that have made him famous. “I’ve gotten more publicity around the world than President Clinton,” he says. “Why? Because I think jail time should be punishment.”

But in September, Arpaio’s administration came under federal investigation for violating the civil rights of county inmates by allegedly allowing jailers to physically abuse them. A month later, he was dressed down by FBI agents for possibly jeopardizing their investigation into the Amtrak train derailment by giving reporters sensitive information about evidence found at the scene.

Still, Arpaio’s shoot-from-the-lip style sends a potent and popular message at a time when crime is the No. 1 issue here. And he is celebrated inside the old red brick Madison Square Garden Boxing Gymnasium near gritty Van Buren Street, a highway known as a gathering place for gang members and crack-addicted prostitutes. Arpaio donated $1,000 to the 4-year-old nonprofit organization, where owner Richard Rodriguez and his son, Ricky Ricardo, try to straighten out the lives of wayward Phoenix teenagers by teaching them to box in a ring they built out of plywood, steel poles and reams of electric tape.

“There is a big crime rate in this neighborhood because kids don’t have enough to do,” says 55-year-old Richard Rodriguez, a burly, lifelong Phoenix resident who sports a graying spit curl over his forehead and handlebar mustache. “When a kid joins up here, we introduce him to the guys in the gym and make them understand that, hey, you don’t have to pick up knives and guns. Let’s pick up a pair of gloves and become a champion.”

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LUDO VANEIKELENBORG MOVED A YEAR AGO FROM CRIME-RIDDEN AMSTERDAM to tiny Cave Creek, about 30 miles north of Phoenix, where he operates a gift store. Late one afternoon, as thunderheads lumber over the boulder-strewn peaks surrounding the town, Vaneikelenborg, 46, excitedly explains in broken English how he has been transformed by the Arizona landscape and its history.

“When I was a little boy, I watched ‘Bonanza’ and ‘Rawhide’ on a little black and white TV. Now my wife and I live like that. Perfect!” he says, giving a hearty thumbs up.

Perhaps not for long. Cave Creek, once an isolated desert hamlet, is rapidly becoming a bedroom community for Phoenix commuters. Joining a growing number of area residents disenchanted with Phoenix’s uninhibited growth, Vaneikelenborg and others in Cave Creek are pushing back.

“We’ve been fighting its expansion for years,” Vaneikelenborg says. “How long we can keep it away is the question.”

It is grass-roots efforts such as this that are beginning to create a new balance of power in a state where pro-development forces have, until recently, been almost monolithic.

Elliott Pollack, an economic and real-estate consultant and chairman of the Phoenix Commission on the Economy, contends that sprawl is beautiful, even patriotic.

“We are giving people what they want,” he says, reclining in a plush chair in his Scottsdale office. “Phoenix sprawls because that is the lifestyle of the people who choose to come here.”

While acknowledging that “the old planners made a mistake in building mile after mile with no open spaces,” Pollack also points out that “contrary to what some people think, we are not turning into another Los Angeles.”

The statistics bear him out. Maricopa County’s population today is no greater than what Los Angeles County’s was around 1933. In terms of density, Maricopa County has the same density today that Los Angeles County had in 1918.

As for the area’s increasingly strident anti-development sentiment, Pollack shrugs. “That’s cyclical. When the economy is bad, it goes away.”

But Phoenix City Councilwoman Frances Emma Barwood, 51, blames sprawl for problems in providing basic services such as roads and water to Phoenix’s ever-expanding boundaries and for rending fragile desert environments with subdivisions of custom homes.

“Tell me this doesn’t make you sick--this desert will never come back,” Barwood fumes, driving past one of the newest residential developments in her 120-square-mile northside district. “This isn’t desolation, it’s desecration. This isn’t the American way, it’s greed.”

At a planned community called Tatum Ranch, saleswoman Pat Wells sees the recently landscaped desert as a definite improvement over the natural terrain. Tatum Ranch features “companion homes”--two homes connected by a common wall--which enable builders to tuck even more units into the development’s 1,400 acres. Each home has unobstructed views of the carefully replanted desert.

“People here are buying a lifestyle. Peace and quiet,” says Wells in the living room of a home decorated with white furniture and painted in what she calls “cool, calming, fresh coffee tones.” Gazing at the unnaturally neat foliage outside the bay window, she says, “we helped it along a bit. Aesthetically, I mean.”

A few miles away at Paradise Sunrise Homes, another saleswoman notes that “people who move here are fed up with community. They don’t want to be involved. They’ve had it with noise and congestion. They want a little place in the sun and not to be bothered.”

“It’s clean and white,” she adds with breathtaking frankness. “People coming here are fed up with crime, which they associate with blacks and Latinos.”

That perception is not news to Phoenix minorities who have for years voiced concerns about harassment and brutality at the hands of authorities. But some, like African American businessman Lenwood Coleman, see the potential for respect and an opportunity for building bridges with the blossoming business community. Coleman heads a business coalition of minorities and women called the Legacy Foundation, a group of entrepreneurs, chamber and city officials and corporate executives that lobbies for start-up capital and credit that can strengthen businesses owned by women and minorities.

Relaxing in Phoenix’s new Caribbean restaurant/watering hole, All That Jazz, Coleman says the city’s vaunted efficiency breaks down when it comes to black, Latino and American Indian residents, who account for nearly 30% of the population and mostly reside in neglected neighborhoods on the city’s south and southwest sides.

“The city is growing, but if a mechanism for channeling dollars toward black and Latino residents is not in place within 10 years, there will be big problems,” says Coleman, 40, who moved here in 1990 after 10 years in the Air Force.

“The thing that drives people in Phoenix is green,” says Cody Williams, the city’s only African American councilman. “We have to make sure that the generation of wealth and the creation of jobs here do not overlook minority business owners and those areas that are poor and underdeveloped.”

That could be a hefty order. The power structure in the region is so white and male dominated that it is still a challenge for minorities and women to influence its economic and political direction. As it stands, the most influential women in metropolitan Phoenix are the heads of two nonprofit organizations, each employing less than 20 people.

Nevertheless, Coleman is undaunted. “We believe that chambers of commerce are the pathways to revenue sources and products, just like black churches were in the South and larger urban centers in the past,” he says. “If the powers that be will only wake up, they’ll realize that there are plenty of credentialed, professional blacks and Latinos [in Phoenix] with the experience needed to make this city work better for everyone.”

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THERE ARE SIGNS PHOENIX finally recognizes that unfettered, unmanaged growth and prosperity may be costing the city its soul.

“People are starting to realize that sprawl is killing us,” says former mayor Terry Goddard, who heads Phoenix’s Housing and Urban Development office and is a longtime champion of controlled growth and inner-city revival, “that it’s a cancer destroying our sense of community and our physical environment, that it’s creating a city of strangers.”

A few weeks ago, Phoenix city managers and local corporate executives gathered to address the city’s quality of life and economic development. The meeting will be followed in February by an economic summit aimed at helping Phoenix embrace the concept of managed growth. It is notable that, in finally planning for the city’s future, officials almost reflexively invoke Los Angeles as the urban example they seek to avoid.

“If we can do that, we can allay concerns that the Greater Phoenix area is racing pell-mell to becoming another Los Angeles,” declares Bruce Sankey of the economic development council. “Phoenix will invent a city more livable, hospitable and sensitive to both its citizens and its environment.”

In the meantime, it’s business as usual in the Valley of the Sun. In the time it took to read this story, another chunk of undeveloped Arizona desert was swallowed by the city whose name is taken from the lone bird of the desert that consumed itself in flames in order to live forever.