Disposable cities create permanent problems
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/0805talton05.html THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC * JON TALTON
Aug. 5, 2003 12:00 AM
It's a familiar story, but like the Terminator it lives on in sequels: A mall that not long ago was just-unwrapped new is now old and in trouble.
My colleague Chris Fiscus reported Monday how the 1 million-square-foot Fiesta Mall in Mesa, built in 1979, is struggling because of the competition from nearby centers built in 1990 and 2002. Yet another pair of malls is being considered near the Loops 101 and 202. Fiesta's troubles risk feeding a decline of nearby areas. So the city of Mesa is spending $29,000 - chump change in the consulting world - for national retail specialists to study the problem.
Let me help save Mesa some money.
A central fact of Greater Phoenix is too much retail chasing too few shoppers with disposable income. The regional economy is very good at producing inexpensive housing, which is a powerful factor in drawing new residents. It excels in retail development. But it fails to produce enough higher-income jobs to support all new malls and shopping strips. Lately it has failed to produce enough jobs even to keep up with population growth.
Call it water-balloon economics: A new mall causes one part of the balloon to expand, but only if another part contracts. Hence the collapse of Park Central and Los Arcos. Or the regular e-mails I receive from readers asking why a busy store near their houses is closing, forcing them to drive farther out to a new store.
Sprawl is another cause of Fiesta's troubles. The irony is that once Fiesta was on the forefront of sprawl, killing the older Tri-City Mall. But the developers and builders long ago moved on to the next expanding fringe of the metro area. Government is not passive in this process, subsidizing it with freeways and other infrastructure, and refusing to regulate land uses.
The result is that market forces are distorted and exaggerated. City officials shouldn't be surprised by the painful consequences.
Nobody really knows how to fix it.
No other metropolis was built so fast and so extensively in the age of mass-produced development. Most of it is built for speed and low cost. But this achievement carries a downside: These disposable places resist reinvestment in a region with so much land. Yesterday's new suburban pods are tomorrow's linear slums.
Also, enough residents here are, apparently, happily mobile. They drive miles without complaint to visit stores that in some cities are nestled within walking distance. They move from house to house, trying to get the last bit of clean air and mountain views before these, too, are swallowed by the growth machine.
And most of the expertise, political muscle and force of habit in development here is focused on the fringe - what I call the Real Estate Industrial Complex. The election defeat in 2000 of a growth boundary would seem to mean that every parcel of private land in central Arizona will be developed, with a few sops to "open space" scolds. Until the water runs out and the heat island becomes unbearable. Until the low-wage ethic and the linear slums build an underclass that tips over the economy.
I write this not to blame but simply to explain how things work.
But that's not the end of the story.
The Phoenix model, of which Fiesta Mall is but one casualty, is not sustainable. Every responsible leader knows it.
We built this place. Now how do we make it a civilization that doesn't have to be thrown away?
The election defeat in 2000 of a growth boundary would seem to mean that every parcel of private land in central Arizona will be developed That would be Prop. 202, which went down to defeat for the very good reason that it was a subsidy for the lifestyles and property values of urban yuppies, at the expense of farmers and other rural land owners.
If there is going to be a growth boundary, and a sensible case can be made for doing so, the pain has to be shared. Prop. 202 placed the entire cost of conservation on the backs of rural landowners, and gave all benefits to suburbanites and city people who had already built.
Under 202, anyone who currently owned a home or other developed property, and had thereby already spoiled their particular patch of desert, would have been rewarded with rising property values. Farmers and ranchers outside the boundary, who had successfully resisted development when many of their neighbors had long since sold out, would be stuck on the land forever. (And then some: they might have loans called in and lose their land entirely when their bankers got wind of what had happened to their property values.)
Of course, the real estate industry fought it tooth and nail, but in the end it was an issue of basic fairness. Those who benefit from government policies ought to pay their costs. It is to Arizona's credit that their citizens saw through the green propaganda.
The only land conservation programs I can support would purchase open space at fair market value. The money should come from property taxes paid by urban and suburban homeowners, whose land grows ever more valuable as other lands are removed from development.
The whole affair reminded me of Dennis Miller's quip that a developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods, and an environmentalist is someone who already owns a house in the woods.
-ccm