I’m putting down my cheerleader pom poms to take a serious and critical look at Downtown.
This is a Google Map of Downtown Phoenix. (I concede it’s not the most recent, but this photo still reflects the overall state and condition of Downtown.) Look at those empty, embarrassing dirt lots. And that surface parking! This looks and feels nothing like an urban city, but more like a rural farming community. East Mesa has more infill than this!
And that’s my problem.
With the explosion of growth in the past 40-50 years in the Valley, why has hardly any of it happened in the center? There is something fundamentally wrong with a city that can attract developers to build houses and amenities 40-plus miles removed from the Central Corridor but that is unable get anything built in that Central Corridor. Where are the laundromats? The drug stores? The grocery stores?! The residences? The gyms? The post offices? The restaurants? Where is the landscaping?
I’ve been told that land in Downtown Phoenix is expensive. What exactly makes this land so expensive? It’s not like it’s sitting next to an ocean, or Central Park.
Does the City of Phoenix own most of this land? Then let me make a suggestion: City of Phoenix, STOP land banking. You’re in a financial crisis, REZONE this empty land and sell it to the highest bidder and let them build whatever they want to build. What are you doing, Phoenix City Council, to make this land ripe for development? Phoenix, if you don’t own this land, raise the property tax on vacant lots. Create the incentive to build something, anything on this land. (A public garden perhaps.) Be more aggressive. Whatever it is you’ve been doing for the past 30 years is not working.
According to the Phoenix.gov Web site, “Projections show the region is expected to grow by nearly 60 percent by 2030, bringing the population to more than 6 million people.”
Imagine if merely 1 percent of that growth happened in Downtown. Just 1 percent and Downtown Phoenix would be unrecognizable.
I don’t buy the argument that “people in Phoenix don’t want to live in a city.” Bull! There are plenty of people who come to Phoenix or who are from Phoenix that would love a true urban life. I do. All my friends do. But many of my friends are tired of waiting and have left Phoenix for more urban pastures in other cities.
I appreciate the beauty and majesty of a skyscraper as much as anyone else, but a skyscraper does not a city make! A city must grow organically, from the ground up, to be healthy. There are too many vacant lots that must be filled to create the street scape and amenities necessary before we reach for the sky.
Tags: downtown development, downtown phoenix
Disclaimer:I live and work in this area.
The map picture you show, which is directly from google maps, is from 2006 or early 2007, based on the construction of the ABC1 building (not shown in your picture).
Since then, the following has been built on the vacant land shown in your picture:Alta Lofts, the BioScience High School, the power transfer station at Garfield and 7th Street (behind the Shell gas station), the Portland 38 and the other condo place at Roosevelt and 9th St., Portland 2 (which will never sell at their current prices), a bunch of small stuff on the Garfield block, 215 E McKinley condos (now rentals because they could not sell) including Moria, the Sinclair gas station, and some houses on there have actually been razed to prepare the blocks for development.
So, it’s not like nothing has happened, and if the above trend were to continue, this place would be completely built out in six to ten years, but that probably isn’t going to happen due to the economic situation.
Rumor has it that the bus station across from the Quiznos is moving away because they need more space due to good business.I have no idea what will happen to that lot afterward, but it’s prime land.
The big chunks of land south of the Garfield block, all the way down to the TGen block are a part of the Arizona Bioscience roadmap, and they are being held onto for educational institutions and commercial entities.There is some money in the AZ budget to assist with this kind of stuff, but I’ve not really heard much about plans.I have no idea what is going on, but would really like to see this get moving.An NIH research building would be pretty awesome.More ASU life sciences would be good (what ever happened to the school of nursing hospital that was supposed to go in on the TGen block?)
As for the other lots, yes, they need to get used.
I applaud criticism like this.It’s needed, and the pressure needs to be there to get this land used.Your complaints are legit and pretty much everyone knows it.
The question is, what do we do about it and how do we get development to happen here?Griefing alone won’t do it.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I truly appreciate it. You’re right that the picture from Google maps isn’t the most current (and I did point that out in the article) but it’s all I could get. I chose that picture because it is the place where things are happening and it is the place where great things can happen. Downtown Phoenix was booming and moving forward with an optimism in 2006 and 2007 that I haven’t seen in Downtown Phoenix ever in my life. Then the economy fell apart. Now it feels like we are back at square one, unless we figure out a new plan. (Which I suggest is no new sky scrapers until the city can fill in the emptiness that surrounds them.)
I agree that “griefing alone won’t do it” when it comes to change. But I don’t consider it just complaining, I’m trying to raise consciousness. Far too many people in the Valley think that Downtown Phoenix is a big dumpy wasteland, and it’s not! I love Downtown Phoenix. Downtown Phoenix has so much to offer (and so much potential) and only a fraction of the millions of people who live in the Valley know it. (I took my grandma on the light rail for her birthday last spring and I was pointing out the parks, bars, restaurants, hotels as the train was cruising through Downtown and up Central and she looked at me and said, “I’ve lived her for over 50 years and I had no idea any of this stuff was here. Why would we come to downtown Phoenix?”) It’s that mentality that I try to counter in my writing.
I want nothing more than for Downtown Phoenix to be an urban core. I wish I had a bazillion dollars so that I could buy all the land and develop it myself. But the reality is that we have a city council without much vision, a population who views Downtown Phoenix as a dangerous place to venture into to see a Suns game then leave as fast as possible, zoning laws that encourage demolition instead of preservation and development, and state lawmakers who have proposed eliminating the tax credit for historic properties. (I wrote about it here: http://jsethanderson.com/?p=997) It feels like such a daunting challenge to see any real, meaningful change. Phoenix is tough city to be an urbanist, but it’s what I’m fighting for.
I appreciate the comments…and I agree for the most part what was said. To go along with you all are saying…even you guys (Captain Cucumber) are sort of just as bad. Captain Cucumber: you mention the Bio Sciences area ( bio medical area) …You never mention the UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA med school. All that bio science district wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA medical school being built in downtown Phoenix! I talk to people in that downtown area – and I can’t believe how ignorant people are – and they are right there! They think that asu is building a med school. NOT! Stupid! The UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA is building a med school – and using the asu nurses from the asu nursing school down there. So, they call it: THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA medical school dowtown Phoenix in partnership with asu. That is stupid. Many schools partnership to a degree. The real partnership is next door at T-Gen. There, It is the UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA med school and the asu bio-design school working together. The city needs to build more parks with shade and trees and fountains. Build a development that includes housing/hotels/retails. Cityscape is a start – will have some of this …but, need more. In Century City (by Beverly Hills in the L.A. area) they have a shopping center that underground they have an upscale grocery store – Gelsens. You get out of your car in the underground garage – and can walk right in. Put in a Trader Joes downtown and an Albertsons.