Posted on 07/27/2007 11:22:10 PM PDT by Lorianne
PHOENIX A city that once won prizes is now a crime-ridden mess
MICHAEL ZISTATSIS, a restaurateur in downtown Phoenix, used to be excited by the prospects that only a gentrifying city, more foot traffic and wealthy new locals can bring. His business had been growing steadily for years. But now things have changed. City planners decreed that there should be a light railway linking Phoenix to neighbouring cities such as Scottsdale. The construction work, which is currently ripping up miles of downtown Phoenix, makes walking and parking almost impossible; so few feel motivated to shop or dine there. Proprietors like Mr Zistatsis, whose clientele has dropped by 30% since 2005, feel distinctly miffed. And they are not the only ones losing faith in Phoenix, a victim of ill-managed city planning.
Phoenix was once hailed as a model city. It grew fast. Its streets were new and shiny, and housing was cheap. Beginning in 1950, the National Civic League voted Phoenix an “All-American City” four times. In 1993 an international competition rated Phoenix, along with Christchurch, New Zealand, the world's best-governed city. Forbes recently ranked it as America's second-best job market, thanks to its buoyant property market and rapid urban growth. In the past five years metropolitan Phoenix's population has grown by almost a fifth, to over 4m.
But in the past few years the awards have mostly dried up and things have started to go wrong. Burglary, theft and car crime are among the highest in the country. Newcomers who left Los Angeles to avoid smog and commuter traffic find that both are little better in Phoenix, and the area scores embarrassingly low in national education ratings. In October the Morgan Quitno Press, a research group, credited Arizona with the worst public education in the country, thanks to overcrowded classrooms, poor test scores and low salaries for teachers. Why the decline?
Kristin Koptiuch, an associate professor of anthropology at Arizona State University (ASU), thinks one problem is that minorities are being locked out of government and city planning, which then saps the area of the ethnic neighbourhoods that give structure to Chicago, New York and San Francisco. Phoenix's Native-American art shops and taco restaurants offer pockets of variety, but generic food chains such as International House of Pancakes and Pizza Hut still dominate. The property market is white-dominated too, Ms Koptiuch says, with its suburbs policed by homeowners' associations which insist on a certain uniformity of style. Latinos make up one-third of Phoenix's population, but from the outside appearance of the place you wouldn't know it.
Scott Decker, director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at ASU, cites methamphetamines smuggled in from Mexico as a prime cause of rising crime. But the larger problem is that rapid urban growth has overwhelmed existing prisons, courts, defence lawyers and police. Phoenix's newcomers are largely “snowbirds” (people avoiding the cold weather up north), sports fans and Californians; their frequent absences and lack of knowledge of their own area make their properties easy prey. “Policing Phoenix has become very hard,” Mr Decker notes.
Locals also moan that Phoenicians are becoming more antisocial. Patricia Gober, the author of a book called “Metropolitan Phoenix: Place Making and Community Building in the Desert”, says this is because everyone has come from somewhere else. Without a shared history, she says, people feel no sense of place. Throw in scorching summers and a lack of public spaces, and the environment becomes antagonistic.
City planners are aware of all this and are trying to help. They promise the light-rail construction work will end soon (which should please Mr Zistatsis), are campaigning against meth, and are planning ten new schools for international study. But Phoenix's growing pains seem unlikely to end any time soon.
FTA:
“Scott Decker, director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at ASU, cites methamphetamines smuggled in from Mexico as a prime cause of rising crime.”
I think Scott Decker is right on the mark. Over 90% of the meth in this country is brought accross our open borders from Mexico.
Meth is destroying a vast number of our young. How do we educate our children and grandchildren about this addictive drug? They are even putting it into candy for grade school children.
One hit, and addiction is certain.
If our borders aren’t closed and closed soon, our country will be in very serious trouble with meth-heads committing crimes so horrendous we can’t even imagine them.
I've lived in Phoenix most my life and this writer obviously knows nothing about it. We must be doing something right since people keep flooding in from every other part of the country.
Maybe it has something to do with illegal alien invaders and the fact that Soros funded every nutty idea the liberals could dream up and now our nice libertarian state is a democrat paradise run by a liberal lesbian governor sent out here by Hillary Clinton.
Where did you get that figure?
I have lived in Phoenix for 30 years and I came to the conclusion that the author has not spent much time here. The whole piece rambles from topic to topic and could have been written by somebody who “phoned it in”.
The very notion that failure is caused by a “lack of minorities in government” is absurd.
After reading that gem, I realized why PHX has become the hellhole I remember from living there in the 80’s. Too many libs, no leaders.
no one at the economist bothered to put their name on it?
is that because it is such an embarrassing piece of cow pie?
That’s my hunch too
Not every story in The Economist has a “byline.” It’s part of the magazine’s style and has nothing to do with whether the journalist or magazine think the story is good or not.
Phoenix has always had astronomical property crime rates, especially car theft, thanks to its proximity to the Mexican border.
The summer heat has sucked since the dawn of time.
Since long before statehood, people here have come from somewhere else, and tend to keep to themselves.
The smog and traffic have been bad my whole life; in fact, the traffic used to be way worse when I-17 was the only freeway.
The growth rate that is "overwhelming" the infrastructure has been a given since territorial days; the population of the state has quintupled since I was a kid.
The schools have always been mediocre.
As far as downtown being unfriendly to visitors, well that is one big horse laugh for anyone who was here to see the urban decay of the 70's. The sidewalks rolled up behind the fleeing office drones at 5:00 pm, and the hookers and junkies and muggers came out to roam the trash-filled streets and boarded-up storefronts and seedy dive bars.
Downtown Phoenix will not be mistaken for Times Square anytime soon, but for the past ten years, with the new sports teams and stadiums, condos, restaurants, parks, museums, and university campus, it does hold a moderate night and weekend appeal for families and yuppies. Truly, it's miles ahead of where it was even in the 80's and early 90's.
The light rail boondoggle will soon be completed and even more quickly forgotten. The scourge of crystal methamphetamine is just about the only valid point in the entire article.
Someone (perhaps the sociology professor, or a tax-eating city bureaucrat) has an agenda and is using this dumb ass reporter to move it.
-ccm
Put the $$$ for the light rail into kicking out illegals and that would solve the vast majority of their problems.
If this article is to be believed, it appears that Koptiuch’s got a geranium in her cranium.
Locals also moan that Phoenicians are becoming more antisocial. Patricia Gober...says this is because everyone has come from somewhere else. Without a shared history, she says, people feel no sense of place.
Obviously no one is allowed to utter the real cause of the PROBLEM: CRIMINALIENS and their idiot enablers!
Typical crap from the Economist crapazine.
The figure is fairly consistent in most states.
“During the hearing, Coleman expressed the need to focus America’s efforts and resources on the Mexican border, as a majority of the meth entering the U.S. – close to 90 percent of the total amount consumed by Americans – comes from Mexican international drug trafficking organizations, made in superlabs along our southern border.”
http://coleman.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Images.Detail&Image_id=383&ImageGallery_id=35
“During the hearing, Coleman expressed the need to focus America’s efforts and resources on the Mexican border, as a majority of the meth entering the U.S. – close to 90 percent of the total amount consumed by Americans – comes from Mexican international drug trafficking organizations, made in superlabs along our southern border.””
Thanks, Mexico
Thanks, Jorge
” methamphetamines smuggled in from Mexico as a prime cause of rising crime.”
It’s hard to reconcile the notion that Phoenix is insufficiently minority when it’s the minorities consuming methampetamine that produce the increased crime. I’m thinking lack of diversity is not Phoenix’s problem.
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