Delivering the Good

Why did I choose to end this book with the Gila River Indian Community’s effort to win back its water? Because it is a parable about how democracy and its courts can not only serve but also be served by the quest for sustainability. The GRIC water settlement brought a long struggle for environmental justice to a triumphant conclusion. Delivering justice meant that a large portion of the region’s available resources would be sequestered from the growth machine. Instead of supplying a new generation of low-density tract housing, the water could now be used to produce healthy, local food for the area population, and, if nonindustrial agriculture prevailed, the result would be a double win for carbon reduction. Surely, this is how a green polity ought to act, redressing the claims of those who have been aggrieved, and doing it in a way that extends long-term benefits for all. If all responses to environmental injustice were able to follow suit, it would be a welcome model for moving forward. Even if the Gila River example is unlikely to be replicated in other places, its guiding spirit is a sound one. What if the key to sustainability lies in innovating healthy pathways out of poverty for populations at risk, rather than marketing green gizmos to those who already have many options to choose from? These are not mutually exclusive options, of course, but the lessons I took away from my research convinced me of the pressing need for clear alternatives to the eco-apartheid syndrome that afflicts Phoenix and so many other cities. Building a low-carbon economy by targeting only the LOHAS demographic (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability, the upmarket segment of 40 million, or 20 percent of consumers, nationally) will end up doing little more than adding a green gloss to patterns of chronic inequality. Likewise, placing all of our faith in clean-tech fixes will cede too much decision making to a closed circle of experts who, regardless of their technical prowess, will have no power to prevent the uneven application of their solutions.

Viva Los Suns

In other Southwestern cities, like Tucson, El Paso, and Albuquerque, with Mexican urban cores that preexisted Anglo settlement, a cultural, if not political, condominium of power sharing had evolved over time. Phoenix was a more straightforward product of Anglo America. Notwithstanding that Trinidad Mejia Escalante, the wife of the founding father, Jack Swilling, was Mexican, the city’s origin myth was one of Anglos re-creating a city on top of Hohokam remnants, and it was reinforced by a strong presence of Mormon settlers in the East Valley, with their own version of white pioneerism. Anglo dominance was unquestioned for at least a century. As an early twentieth-century promoter put it, Phoenix was “a modern town of 40,000 people, and the best kind of people too. A very small percentage of Mexicans, negroes, or foreigners.” For sure, the public drama and energy of the civil rights era ushered some nonwhite politicians into high office—Raul Castro became governor and Alfredo Gutierrez senate majority leader in the late 1970s. But it was only in recent years that Anglo ascendancy had been challenged by the mercurial growth of the Latino population (according to the 2010 U.S. census, 30.8 percent of the state, 31.8 percent of Maricopa County, and 34.1 percent of Phoenix itself, all numbers that had more than doubled since 1990), spreading well beyond the traditional barrio districts where its political representatives had been contained. Anxiety about the decline of demographic and political dominance was a new wrinkle in the ongoing debate about population growth that Phoenix had long hosted. Historically, most of the anxiety about growth was founded, with good reason, on fears that water supplies would not be adequate for the rapidly expanding urban needs. Concerns about the deterioration of air quality, wilderness loss, and the overall environmental impact of urban sprawl had sharpened the anxiety over time. But the influx of Mexican immigrants from the south after the passage of NAFTA changed its tenor. Metro Phoenix had only 86,593 foreign-born residents in 1980, and by 2005, 612,850 were foreign-born, most of them from Mexico.

The Sun Always Rises

Nothing has driven the growth of metro Phoenix more than the sun’s rays. For most of its residents and visitors, the chief reason for coming to the region was its 334 days of annual sunshine, yet precious little of this radiation showed up in the energy supply. Indeed, Arizona has often been held up as an object of shame for the cause of solar power. Despite the bounty of its sun cover, by 2009 the state generated only 7 watts of photovoltaic power (PV) per capita, while New Jersey, with only half the available sunlight, managed 14.6 watts per capita, and Germany, with even less, delivered 100 watts to each person. If the solar industry was to have its long-deferred day in the United States, then the Valley of the Sun had to be at, or near the top, of the location list. Surely, it should be easier to generate “clean electrons” here than almost anywhere else. Yet the dismal historical record shows that the abundance of this natural resource mattered very little in the face of a political and economic environment that has prevented the sun’s energy from being enjoyed by its liberty-loving residents, let alone developed on an industrial scale. For a metropolis in the deepest trough of the Great Recession, the prospect of developing solar industry was just about the only source of boosterism I could find among the business community. Glenn Hamer, president of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, bragged that, with the help of federal and state incentives currently available, “the cocktail is in place for Arizona to truly be a national and international leader in solar. . . . with our incredible natural advantage, we have just about the world’s best solar resource.” Someone in his position could reasonably be expected to be gung ho about any new local market for investment, but Hamer also happened to be former national director of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Living Downstream

In neighborhoods well to the north of the Salt River channel, Phoenix’s artist communities and downtown advocates fought for mixed-use zoning that would allow places of residence to coexist with commercial storefronts. South of the river, where housing was placed in close proximity to dirty industrial facilities, mixed land use had an altogether different meaning. Residents in South Phoenix, long regarded as the city’s human and natural sacrifice zone, were fighting for the right to enjoy clean air and water, unencumbered by the toxic hazards that government permitting had allowed to fester in their neighborhoods. The disparity between these two battles with City Hall spoke volumes about the environmental challenges facing Phoenix, and almost every other city divided by race and class. Hydrologists talk about water “flow” in the West, but very few of the rivers flow naturally anymore, and many, like the mighty Colorado itself, rarely reach their destinations. Except for spasmodic floods, the Salt River has not really flowed through the Phoenix Basin since the early twentieth century, and it exists today primarily as an orderly system of canals. In its natural heyday, it was a wildly erratic river, and so its flood plain was several miles broad. Today’s riverbed is a vast moonscape of sand and cobbles, though it is far from deserted. Cheap land and laissez-faire regulation have drawn in the region’s worst polluters over the years. For decades, it was used as a dumping ground for all manner of waste, some of it exported from neighboring states, like California, with more oversight over disposal of hazardous materials than Arizona. From a commercial standpoint, the riverbed was the mother of all brownfield sites, zealously eyed by developers hoping to cut a deal with government agencies with fast-track access to federal cleanup funds. Dreams of converting the urban portions of the Salt River into a waterside attraction dated back to the 1960s when ASU design students conceived a restoration project under the alluring name of Rio Salado.

Gambling at the Water Table

Of all the livelihoods made possible by land development, Cory Breternitz’s job was one of the more peculiar. He was paid to do archaeological excavations by people who hoped he would find nothing of interest. His Phoenix-based firm was one of many private archaeology firms that sprang up in response to legislation (the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970) designed to protect cultural resources such as prehistoric artifacts or remains. These laws require government agencies and private developers to hire historians and archaeologists to survey sites and inventory the results before they start building. At the height of the Arizona housing boom, Breternitz, who had previously worked for the Navajo Nation for more than twenty years, spent much of his time on the urban fringe, sifting through desert soil, looking for evidence of Hohokam settlement before the bulldozers “scraped the desert clean” and the construction crews moved in with chipboard, two-by-fours, and stucco to throw up a brown-tiled subdivision. If Breternitz uncovered a prehistoric structure, even a hamlet, it was still the developer’s prerogative to plough it under. “The United States,” he explained, “is different than most countries in the world in that private property is sacred, and the government cannot tell you what to do with it. In places like England, historic properties on your land belong to the Crown, and whatever you find—like a hoard of medieval coins—belongs to the government. In the U.S. if you find a ruin on your land, it belongs to you and you can bulldoze it or sell the artifacts.” Some of the developers he worked for might decide to preserve his discoveries and have them curated on-site by the state so that they could be promoted as an attractive sales feature to add value to the development. But ultimately, he reported, most of them simply “want their clearance, or their permits, to move forward with their projects and make money.” Human remains are the exception to this rule, since private ownership of these is prohibited by federal and Arizona law.

Land for the Free

In November 2006, just as the real estate bubble was running out of hot air, Arizona voters approved a proposition with drastic consequences for land-use regulation. Proposition 207 was promoted as a property-rights initiative that barred municipalities from taking private property through eminent domain for some other private development. In this respect, it was a direct response to the Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo ruling, which had partially legalized such powers. But a more far-reaching, and less publicized, provision of the Arizona proposition required local governments to compensate property owners if a government action, such as a zoning change or enactment of an environmental or other land-use law, led to a drop in the property’s value. Bankrolled by Howard Rich, a libertarian developer tycoon from New York, the initiative was pushed onto the ballot in several states, but Arizona voters were the only ones to bite. Passage of the proposition put a large question mark over all plans to alter land use in the state. Fear of lawsuits that could drain their coffers prompted city officials to think twice about making any changes to zoning ordinances, the bread and butter of municipal planning. More comprehensive eff orts at regulating fringe growth or re-urbanizing downtown areas were beset by uncertainty about the newly hostile legal landscape. Prop 207 was the latest, and most urban, challenge to the exercise of government power over land use in the West. The Sagebrush rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s, which pushed for more local control over public land holdings, was a rural assault on federal regulatory efforts such as the protection of environmentally sensitive land as wilderness. The ensuing rise of the anti-takings movement, launched by Richard Epstein’s 1985 book, Takings : Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain was also directed against government support for environmentally minded initiatives like smart growth. Fallout from these backlashes turned the West into a prime zone of conflict over land use.

The Battle for Downtown

Before the financial crash froze the motion of money, the plan to repopulate thinned-out downtowns had become an article of faith among advocates of low-carbon urbanism. Where else could the blueprint for truly sustainable living be realized? The technical difficulty and cost of retrofitting suburbs for higher density was prohibitive, even in the postwar inner-ring subdivisions that were more compact in their land use than today’s sprawl counterparts on the urban fringe. It was in city centers that the biggest improvements in energy efficiencies and emissions could be achieved, and, since the carbon clock was ticking, there was a consensus that their repopulation by middle-class residents ought to be accomplished posthaste. Urbanists, guided unerringly by Jane Jacobs’s prescriptions for vibrant street life, had long argued that the kind of society fostered by mixed-use and mixed-income downtown neighborhoods was more open-minded and mutually gratifying than the atomized lifestyle of the master-planned exurban community. After all, Jacobs’s version of the city had been driven primarily by concerns about quality of life, or what could be called cultural health. In her view, those who had planned the urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s and hastened the population flight outwards had bequeathed a soulless, antiurban city—“a Great Blight of Dullness,” as she memorably put it. Hence, her full-throated praise for the daily festival of street life in mixed-use neighborhoods, even those condemned by the improvers as examples of urban blight. Compared to the presumed conformity of the suburbs, the humming, cosmopolitan milieu of her downtown sidewalks surely boasted a superior civilization. In the decades after Jacobs launched her downtown revolution, the argument for high-density core residence got a turbo boost from environmentalist quarters. Criticism of suburbia was no longer a matter of taste—how ugly and dull are these cookie-cutter houses and strip malls? Now it was backed up by estimates of the ecological costs of the unplanned, low-density tract development known as sprawl. In recent years, climate change had lent an extra sense of urgency to the case for downtown resettlement.

The Road Runner’s Appetite

Political and business leaders know that their defects and blunders will be excused if they turn in a respectable growth performance. The quarterly or annual gains in corporate revenue or GDP are really all that matters. But when and why did these raw metrics come to surpass all other indicators of well-being? Although growth is often seen as integral to any capitalist system of accumulation, its recognition as a society’s only relevant standard of worth is largely a postwar development. For example, four-fifths of U.S. growth has occurred in the last fifty years, some part of it driven by Cold War competition to prove the superiority of a market economy. The consensus mood that developed after 1945—which historians have called “growth liberalism”—presided over an expansionist boom in the industrialized world that did not contract until the 1970s. Subsequent doctrines—the supply-side gospel of the Reagan era, the high-tech evangelism of the 1990s, and the asset ownership creed of the 2000s—were all aimed at reviving and boosting the high growth rates that managers of a consumer society had come to expect. Growthmanship spread abroad, along with the internationalization of production, and soon growth in GDP became the most important yardstick for nations, whether in the advanced or the developing world. Slowing growth rates were a cause for concern, while falling numbers were a sign that something was awry, and that close scrutiny, even intervention, from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund was in the offing. Those who believed or behaved otherwise were not wrong; they were simply treated as dropouts from modernity. So entrenched was this orthodoxy that The Limits to Growth, the momentous 1972 Club of Rome report that concluded that current rates of industrial growth could not be sustained ecologically in the long term, was received among business and policy elites as a genuinely heretical document that had to be publicly pilloried. Subsequent surveys, drawing upon a wider range of experts and a more comprehensive collection of scientific data, amplified the 1972 warning about the ruinous impact of unrestrained growth.

Introduction: By the Time I Got to Phoenix

For those who prefer history chopped up into neat slices, John McCain’s modest concession speech on the lawn of the Arizona Biltmore on November 5, 2008, seemed like a clean cut of the knife. With the economy in a nosedive, it was not just the end of a presidential campaign. The neoliberal era seemed to be over—its reigning troika of deregulation, marketization, and privatization cast into disgrace, along with its most recent fiscal vehicles such as debt leveraging and speculation in finance and land. Nowhere was the devastation more visible than in McCain’s hometown. Phoenix had flown highest in the race to profit from the housing bubble, and it had fallen the furthest. Footage of the metro region’s outer-ring subdivisions reclaimed by sage grass, tumbleweed, and geckos was as evocative of the bubble’s savage aftermath as photographs of the Dust Bowl’s windblown soil had been of the Great Depression. Had Arizona’s senior senator not owned a condo nearby, he would have stayed in the hotel’s Goldwater presidential suite (every president since Hoover has slept at the Biltmore), stirring up associations with the Phoenix politician whose 1964 run for the White House pioneered the modern conservative temper of evangelizing against the power of government. Regarded locally as a carpetbagger when he first ran for Congress in 1982, McCain benefited from his wife Cindy’s family connections to take over Barry Goldwater’s senate seat four years later, but his people-pleasing style found little favor over the years among the Goldwater faithful. On that night, at least, there was no dearth of commentators willing to see McCain’s concession speech as heralding the end of the Sunbelt’s long hold on national politics, an arc that originated in the postwar eff ort of Goldwater’s circle at the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce to remake Arizona’s decrepit GOP into an instrument of growth for growth’s sake.