And so even as it sprawled, Phoenix began debating what could be done to move its center of gravity back closer to the center, at least keeping the inexorable blob under control. New ideas kept popping up every few years.
In the 1960s, there was a belief among city leaders that a conventional downtown might be impossible, but that a measure of urbanity could be constructed by turning Central Avenue, a major arterial highway running north from the middle of town, into a fashionable boulevard of midrise office buildings and high-rise apartment buildings. To a certain extent, this strategy succeeded. Central Avenue looks pretty nice even today. But the main consequence of developing it was to empty out downtown even further. Central Avenue didn’t bring many people into the city except to work at nine-to-five office jobs, and it all but eviscerated what was left of the old downtown.
In the 1970s, the city council decided that the way to at least make suburbanization more orderly was to promote a network of nine “urban villages,” each with more than fifty thousand residents, in which the neighborhoods and subdivisions ringing the city could have separate identities, concentrated business districts, and a general sense of community that many felt was slipping away all over the valley. It was an intriguing idea, but it was also a huge flop. Only one or two of the proposed nine villages ever acquired anything like the semiurban core that had been envisioned. In 1986, a full decade after the project was started, a survey revealed that only a quarter of the villagers knew which village they lived in, and that less than a third of the area’s residents even knew that the experiment had been attempted.
Finally, in the late 1980s, a consensus developed among civic leaders that something might actually be done for the downtown itself. And something was, on a large scale. It was Arizona Center, on the eastern edge of the ninety-square-block downtown district that came to be known as Copper Square. Arizona Center was a project of the Rouse Company, and it displayed one of the features that Rouse had been promoting successfully for years: notably, a courtyard planned to accommodate quirky and inviting craft shops and boutiques and restaurants, 150,000 square feet of retail in all, similar to the “festival mall” concept that had been successful in Boston, Baltimore, and a few other places.
Arizona Center generated considerable excitement among Phoenix’s growing cadre of urbanists when it opened in the early 1990s, but ultimately it too proved a failure. All the action was on the inside of the courtyard; walking past it on the street, what you saw was mostly a blank brick wall. This was done for a reason; some of the city’s more troubled neighborhoods were only a few blocks away, and it was felt that visitors needed a sense of protection. But security, if it was needed, came at a high price. Arizona Center wasn’t an appealing place for locals or tourists to visit. Over the years, fewer and fewer merchants inside the enclave proved able to make a profit; gradually retail space gave way to office space, so that by the early 2000s Arizona Center was a collection of mostly occupied office buildings with a scattering of shops on the ground floor that catered to the office workers, not to tourists or visiting suburbanites.
• • •
THE DIFFICULTY of creating a significant retail presence downtown is one that has plagued cities much further along in the downtown development process than Phoenix. In the past 20 years, Charlotte has done something no other American city has done: It has ripped out its historic city center, put up a brand-new one, and made the rebuilt downtown into a functional, generally appealing economic and cultural enclave. Even the recession that has badly damaged the city’s two big banks and economic drivers, Bank of America and Wachovia (and forced Wachovia to merge with Wells Fargo), has not diminished the entertainment vibrancy and affluent ambience of the downtown streets.
Many big cities, including a significant number in the South and West, tried wholesale urban renewal in the mid- to late twentieth century, nearly always with disastrous results. Charlotte, for now at least, seems to have beaten the odds.
It has done that for many reasons, but one above all: the presence of two of America’s four biggest banking institutions. Bank of America and Wachovia wanted to stay in downtown Charlotte, they wanted it to be a showplace, and they paid for what they wanted. In most respects, they have gotten their money’s worth. Even suffering from the ravages of a financial recession and plagued by more business failures than it would like to see, Charlotte has the most walkable big-city downtown in the Southeast.
There are some highly affluent stretches of downtown Charlotte—as you reach the corner of Fourth and Tryon close to the center of the new downtown, you’ll notice a string of fashionable locally owned cafés. You can now do all sorts of interesting things in downtown Charlotte: work in a gleaming postmodern office tower, live in a stylish condo a few blocks from the office, dine and drink at a pleasant sidewalk café. All the things that the Phoenix business elite have been trying to accomplish for the better part of a generation now.
Only one major problem clouds the picture: There’s almost nowhere to shop in downtown Charlotte. Thirty years ago, in a dilapidated central city that was plagued by poverty and petty crime, you could fight your way through the chaos and buy a good many of the necessities of life on Tryon Street, one of the two major downtown thoroughfares. Today, you basically can’t buy anything.
Skyscrapers and outdoor dining, generated by investment from Charlotte’s two giant banks, have given the city an urban ambience where scarcely any functional downtown existed thirty years ago. (photo credit 8.1)
Charlotte’s retail problem is striking because it contrasts so sharply with the ongoing revival, but it is a problem that afflicts most big cities in America, whether their downtowns are reviving, declining, or standing still. They all are having trouble attracting any significant retail presence to the traditional urban core. People move to the center of town, live in luxury apartments, wait in line at expensive restaurants, enjoy the late-night entertainment scene. But when they want to buy something—a screwdriver, a pair of socks, a tablecloth, a printer cartridge—they have to drive somewhere else in the city or to the suburbs, often to a mall several miles away.
Ironically, there’s a wonderful old shopping arcade in downtown Charlotte—the Latta Arcade, built in 1914 to house cotton brokers, with two parallel rows of one-story office and retail shop units, all beneath a glass skylight. The arcade was restored in the 1980s and is on the National Register of Historic Places, and its spaces are almost entirely rented. But it’s also another emblem of downtown Charlotte’s problem: Among its notable businesses are a taco shop, an Indian carryout, and a hot dog stand. Other than one tiny jewelry store, no one sells anything much besides food.
Is there a solution? In Charlotte, the civic establishment is convinced there is. At Charlotte Center City Partners, one of the most active and entrepreneurial downtown development organizations in the country, they talk endlessly about “the retail problem.” In 2007, the group completed a fourteen-month study of the issue, releasing a detailed statistical report citing possibilities for a retail revival. Among other things, the report pointed out that nearly seventy thousand people work in downtown Charlotte; that a majority of them make more than $50,000 a year; that four hundred thousand residents of the metropolitan area come downtown at least once a year, mostly to eat, watch sports, or go to a museum; and that six hundred thousand more come into town on business and stay in a downtown hotel. If that wasn’t a sufficient base for retail shopping, the report concluded, then nothing was. It was just a matter of showing retailers what was out there.
Michael Smith, the president of Center City Partners, conceded that this was not necessarily an easy task. And the ensuing climate of recession, which hit Charlotte’s big banks particularly hard, slowed down the pace of retail recruitment. But the desire on the city’s part to solve the problem has not gone away. “We must solve the riddle of urban retail,” Smith said in early 2010. “It’s the last great frontier.”
There is some shopping one flight above the street in downtow
n Charlotte, in a bizarrely laid-out string of second-floor retail corridors that go by the name of Overstreet Mall, but they don’t resemble a mall as much as they do a maze with no clear entrances or exits. Unless you have an obsessive curiosity, I wouldn’t suggest a visit to Overstreet Mall. It’s so poorly designed and marked that you may have a hard time getting out.
Scarcely anybody in Charlotte likes Overstreet Mall, and not too many people shop there anymore. The consensus is that retail has to move back to the street, now that downtown is a healthy place with plenty of affluent passersby. So far, though, the city has had little luck persuading any major retailer to open up. “Retailers are not pioneers,” says Michael Smith. I think you can call that an understatement. But without a significant retail presence on the downtown streets, downtown Charlotte, like all the other newly created Sun Belt downtowns, will continue to face questions about whether it’s a “real” downtown or just a clever imitation.
BY THE LATE 1990s, it was clear that walled-off retail wasn’t the answer to downtown Phoenix’s problem. But still another new idea came along: entertainment, and specifically sports. The city had a highly successful professional basketball team, the Phoenix Suns, and a brand-new major-league baseball team, the Arizona Diamondbacks, and huge new stadiums were built for them at the southern end of downtown. Big-time sports were seen as the magnet that would draw people into the center of the city, not only generating evening street life but complementing the two theaters and concert hall that had managed to survive near the city center during the two previous decades. Entertainment was the magic word for Phoenix planners in the closing years of the 1990s. Arizona Center added a multiplex cinema with twenty-four screens to try to cash in on the trend.
But visiting planners came to town and warned that entertainment alone couldn’t possibly create a downtown. The vast majority of people who came to Suns or Diamondbacks games simply parked their cars in the parking lots and went straight home when the game was over. In 1997, the urbanist critic William Fulton arrived and saw exactly what was happening. What needed to take place, he said, was for Phoenix and other cities like it “to use entertainment in the service of downtown revival—not simply to turn downtowns into theme parks. If downtowns succeed in the entertainment era, it will be because the drama of day-to-day life in the city remains just as compelling as the drama in the movie or the sports event.”
In Phoenix, after Arizona Center failed to become the retail magnet that some of its promoters hoped it would become, attention focused on a different project. Unfortunately, this one was an abject failure. Patriots Square Park, a 2.2-acre public space right in the middle of downtown, at Central and Washington streets, was an ever-worsening embarrassment. Opened in 1976, and redone under a huge white canopy in 1988, Patriots Square Park was supposed to be the catalyst for outdoor concerts, parades, rallies, and laser light shows. But it was awkwardly designed and poorly shaded, and after just a few years it went unused virtually all the time. By the 1990s, it was essentially a shelter for homeless people.
By then, after more than a billion dollars of public money had been spent on projects in the central city, some prominent Phoenicians were very angry, not just about the failures downtown but about all that had happened in the metropolitan area. “For thirty years,” the novelist Glendon Swarthout wrote, “we let the businessmen and politicians who ran the valley lead us down the path of unplanned growth. Crime, traffic, heat, air pollution, bankruptcies, unemployment, corruption—the quality of our lives is pathetically diminished, and what have we been given in compensation: professional sports.”
As the new century began, however, the local leadership had finally realized what might have been obvious to them years before: The real reason downtown was such a flop was that no one lived there.
WHEN OTHER CITIES complain about the absence of “downtown residential,” they usually mean that no more than a few thousand people out of at least half a million in the metropolitan area have chosen to make their homes in the center of the city. In Phoenix, at the turn of the new century, that would have been a large increase. The central area known as Copper Square housed perhaps 250 transients and a few dozen unusually intrepid urban pioneers. The downtown Phoenix strategic vision plan of 1994 declared that “housing is a vital part of downtown’s renaissance—nothing else works without it.” That plan set a goal of ten thousand residential units, a modest enough number in a metro area then approaching four million people, and vowed to realize it by 2014, two full decades in the future. As downtown planner Don Keuth was to put it later, “If you want to create a real downtown, you have to create a neighborhood.”
The 1994 strategic plan made a point that local planners have been making ever since: that Phoenix couldn’t have a “real” downtown until it developed some connectivity—some sense that the buildings and open spaces were linked together in a coherent way.
As things stood, most of the elements of a downtown existed, but they existed as freestanding entities, often connected by nothing more than a parcel of vacant land. Downtown Phoenix, the planner and critic Grady Gammage Jr. said, “looks like a truckful of buildings was dumped on the site.” The strategic plan envisioned “a series of oases that could be linked to achieve greater synergy and connectivity.” It saw shade, in the brutal summer climate of the Valley of the Sun, as perhaps the crucial unifying quality for the downtown area. “Use shade everywhere,” the plan urged, “especially in connected and civic spaces, so that shaded spaces become Phoenix’s signature.”
The potential was certainly there: As of 1994 there were 135 acres of vacant land and surface parking in the immediate downtown area. But at the halfway point of the strategic plan, in 2004, virtually no progress had been made. The vacant lots and parking lots remained as they had been.
One reason downtown residential was so hard to do was that Phoenix, unlike, say, San Diego and Denver, lacked any real reservoir of historic buildings from which downtown residential booms typically take off. Only a tiny number of buildings in the center of the city dated from any period before World War II. “Our historic building stock,” city planner Jason Harris lamented, “is dumpy old warehouses.”
Even that was putting it generously. There were a few old structures down by the railroad tracks, built originally to store fruit, but the idea of turning them into a “warehouse district,” with lofts as residential units, was simply ludicrous. “Phoenix had Quonset huts,” recalls Don Keuth. “We put them all over the place. We didn’t need a warehouse district.” If Phoenix was going to acquire a “real” downtown, one with people living there and life on the streets, it wasn’t going to do it by preservation or renovation.
And so Phoenix embarked on still another downtown revival, buoyed by Mayor Gordon’s urbanist enthusiasm, the hot housing market of the early 2000s, and the presence of some wealthy developers who saw the high-rise condos along the waterfront in San Diego and Seattle and felt they could work the same magic in the Arizona desert.
By 2007, there were some exciting and very tall condo towers close to the center of the city, including one of thirty-four stories at 44 East Monroe Street, directly across from City Hall, and another of twenty-two stories, literally in the shadow of the baseball stadium, known as the Summit at Copper Square. Others were close to construction.
It remains open to argument whether these projects might have succeeded in the absence of a recession, but most Phoenix planners and real estate brokers think not: Pitched almost entirely at luxury-end buyers, and selling for as much as $450 a square foot to cover the high building costs of glass and concrete, they weren’t the smartest way to introduce urban living to a metropolitan area that had almost no experience with it.
The only way the nearly four hundred units at 44 Monroe and at Summit could have made money for the developers would have been if many of them were sold to extremely wealthy part-timers: highly paid athletes, wintering Europeans eager to take advantage of the cheap American dollar, businesspeople
from affluent suburban Scottsdale or Paradise Valley who worked downtown and could afford a pied-à-terre close to the office. “There was a wildly optimistic view of what the market would accept,” admits Tom Franz, the head of Greater Phoenix Leadership, an influential consortium of corporate leaders. Susan Clark-Johnson, of the Morrison Institute at Arizona State, puts it more colorfully: “We’ve got all these edifices to the egos of developers who saw nothing but rich people and marble countertops.”
There is limited value, though, to guessing how the downtown high-rise condo projects would have fared had there been no recession. At the end of 2009, Summit was less than half occupied and moving toward foreclosure; 44 Monroe had thirteen occupants for its 165 condominium units. Perhaps most disappointingly, CityScape, an enormous project on the site of the old Patriots Square Park, designed as a complex of three high-rises—an office building, a hotel, and a residential tower—was going forward as offices and a hotel only. The residential tower had been postponed indefinitely.
Phoenix’s failure to realize its downtown residential dreams was all the more frustrating because, in other ways, its central-city revival project was succeeding remarkably well. In December 2008, Phoenix opened the light-rail transit system that Mayor Gordon and the business community had persuaded the voters to approve by referendum earlier in the decade: a twenty-mile, $1.4 billion Valley Metro train network. Ultimately, $402 million in spending by Phoenix and the other participating jurisdictions bought $647 million in federal funds for just the first phase of the project.
Light-rail in Phoenix was an unexpected hit from the start. On opening day, there was a two-and-a-half-hour wait to board the trains at the eastern terminus in Mesa. The local congressman, Harry Mitchell, emphasized to curious onlookers that “this is not a Disneyland ride. This is the first phase of a light-rail system that will help us realize a shared vision of an economically vibrant urban corridor.”
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 20