Phoenix Grows and Grows

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

For the next three days, we're going to examine a laboratory for the American Dream: Phoenix, Arizona. That city is now the nation's fifth largest, most recently passing Philadelphia. It's a place where families, immigrants, and retirees go to reinvent themselves, unencumbered by history or tradition.

NPR's Ted Robbins starts with how Phoenix created the ideal middle class lifestyle, and what could ruin it.

TED ROBBINS reporting:

Few people know more about the roots of Phoenix than Marshall Trimble. After all, he's the Arizona state historian, and he's lived here all his life. And few spots give a better sense of the place than where we are, a rocky outcropping, halfway up Hiawesta(ph) Peak, overlooking the city. We asked him to find some history in this vast urban landscape, maybe the ranch where he grew up.

Mr. MARSHALL TRIMBLE (Arizona State Historian): I tried to find it one time, and I had a hard time.

ROBBINS: He can't even see the spot where the ranch once stood; it's lost in a sea of homes, malls, and offices below. Ninety percent of Phoenix has been built since 1950. Its foundation, says Marshall Trimble, was laid less than a century ago when the federal government built Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River, northeast of here.

Mr. TRIMBLE: And without it, there can be no lifestyle as we know it here today.

ROBBINS: The dam delivered a reliable water supply for farms, but agriculture faded as Phoenix business leaders decided it was more profitable to use the water and sunshine to grow a city.

Mr. TRIMBLE: See, what we did here, from the '50's on, is we just leap-frogged out and out and out, into all that agricultural land. It was cheap to buy and so developers kept moving people further and further out.

ROBBINS: Developers sold an affordable, outdoor lifestyle for folks moving here, especially from the cold upper Midwest. Here's a promotional film from the '50s.

Unidentified Announcer: The sun-filled patio brings Arizona outdoor living into the home. This is where the family is likely to congregate for rest, recreation and relaxation. The patio serves as a symbol, too, a symbol of a way of life.

ROBBINS: To overcome the harsh side of the desert, Phoenicians deployed a new technology: home air-conditioning. That made the place livable in the summer, when temperatures stay well above 100 degrees for months on end. According to developers, it was practically the perfect place to settle down.

Unidentified Woman: (in Radio Ad) Behind the tree, in a yard big enough to hold the promise of bird chirps, laughter, and happily ever after.

(Soundbite of music)

Unidentified Woman: (in Radio Ad) This is your next home.

ROBBINS: That's a current homebuilders' radio ad, selling exactly what Phoenix homebuilders sold in the '50's, and those two ads, a half-century apart, capture the force that built this city.

Author and attorney Grady Gammage, Jr. defines that force and Phoenix's identity, as growth.

Mr. GRADY GAMMAGE, JR. (Author and Attorney): It's not about anything else; it's about how can we get as many people as possible to move here? That has been the kind of social consensus of what we are about, is attracting people, and getting them to move here.

ROBBINS: The marketing worked. The Phoenix metro area, almost four million people, is made up of about two dozen separate cities. Phoenix itself now boasts the same population as San Diego, and an area larger than Los Angeles. Neighboring Mesa has the population of Pittsburgh, Tempe is as big as Kansas City.

Mr. GAMMAGE: I think what's happening in Phoenix now is, we're sort of looking around going, huh, well that worked, now what?

ROBBINS: In other words, if you were comparing Phoenix to a person, it would be an adolescent: gangly, energetic, and unsure of its future. And many people believe its future is in the balance, because now that Phoenix has what it wants, people, it also has what it doesn't want.

Unidentified Man #2: The heavy slowing continues on the 202 eastbound.

ROBBINS: Crowded freeways, air pollution in the winter, and so much asphalt and concrete that temperatures in summer barely drop at night. It has become a heat island.

Mr. GAMMAGE: I've lived in Phoenix for 54 years, and in my lifetime the average night time low temperature has gone up by 11 degrees Fahrenheit, because of the urban mass of the community retaining heat at night. And there will be in the next decade a day in the history of Phoenix where it doesn't go below 100 degrees.

ROBBINS: Add more concrete, more commuting time, and more pollution, and a number of experts, including Grady Gammage, think people might not only stop coming to Phoenix, they might leave long before the water dries up. So some people think Phoenix has to start growing in a different direction: inward.

Ms. NAN ELLEN (Urban Design Professor, Arizona State University): Well, I believe that downtown is critical for the revitalization of the whole area.

ROBBINS: Nan Ellen is an urban design professor at Arizona State University. We sit in a downtown bookstore, art gallery, and cafe. Nan Ellen wants more of this, more of a built up downtown, as an older city. She argues that more people in the urban center won't just reduce sprawl and traffic, it will help create a world class city.

Ms. ELLEN: Right now we're a conglomeration of suburbs. And when people think of the Phoenix metro area, they often think of Scottsville and Tempe and all of these suburbs, but we're missing a core, and I think we need to have a core, a lively core, in order to thrive. Right now we're like a donut; we have a whole in the center.

ROBBINS: Joel Kotkin calls that nonsense. Kotkin is the author of a book called The City: A Global History, and he's a close observer of life in modern suburbs. He says people who come to Phoenix like the fact that homes, jobs, and attractions are spread around the valley.

Mr. JOEL KOTKIN (Author, The City: A Global History): You have to sit down with your own population and say, why did you move to Phoenix? Did you really move to Phoenix so you could live in an apartment and not have a yard? I know there are some who are going to feel that way, but I think more people are going to say, I want a house, I want to be able to catch some rays in the backyard.

Ms. LAURA SALTER (Phoenix Resident): This is our backyard to be. We're putting a playground back here for the kids, a whole lot of grass.

ROBBINS: Laura Salter and her family, her two children, Isaiah and Isaac, and her husband, Fad(ph), had a small home in San Jose, California. They've just moved to the new suburb of Maricopa, 30 miles southwest of downtown Phoenix.

Ms. SALTER: If we stayed in California and tried to get the four bedroom house that we wanted with a larger yard, we would've had to purchase a house that was at a million dollars.

ROBBINS: Here it cost a quarter of that. The family considered Atlanta and Portland, but Fad Salter said they found the most value for their money in this new subdivision.

Mr. FAD SALTER: Right now we're standing in actually in the family room. This room here would probably encompass in my old home, the living room, the dining room, and a guest bedroom. So that would pretty much take up three rooms in my old home.

Mr. ISAIAH SALTER: And look, I have my own window, Mama.

Ms. SALTER: Yeah, you do.

ROBBINS: By the time young Isaiah Salter turns 40, experts predict Phoenix could nearly double in size, to more than seven million people. That will take even more land, land that was once desert, then farms, and now subdivisions, fed for now by the waves of people looking for more space to call home.

Ted Robbins, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.