Imagine a place where the climate is so hostile that only the most desperate travel on foot–what few sidewalks that exist are as dusty as the hallways of a haunted house. Nowhere is there a place not designed strictly for access by car; because of the traffic, tempers run so high the radio advises drivers not to make eye contact with one another lest they get shot.
In the last decade, the September monsoons that once watered the desert in which this city was built now come at irregular times, or not at all. In summer, children who fall on the pavement are hospitalized with third-degree burns from the asphalt. In this land of indignity, the county jail is an outdoor tent city in 120-degree heat, where prisoners wear pink jumpsuits (also sold as souvenirs), their every move broadcast by webcam over the Internet. Every New Year’s Eve, several people die from the return of bullets fired at random into the air.
This is what it means to say, Phoenix, Arizona. And this is why, even after the death of grunge, the dot-com bust, and the Boeing bail, Phoenix residents are fleeing to Seattle.
Seattle’s domestic immigrants have arrived in sequential, overlapping waves since the 1940s, when the city’s tiny black community swelled with wartime factory workers from Oklahoma, East Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas. They in turn were followed by veterans of all races who came home from wars in Korea and Vietnam through Fort Lewis and Bremerton, and stuck around. Californians fleeing their state’s increasing unlivability arrived in the ’70s and ’80s, and they were followed in the last decade by technology workers from all over the country.
These days, unhappy white Angelenos are no longer moving north but east, into the desert cities of the Southwest. In an attempt to accommodate new residents used to slightly cooler climates, Phoenix’s sprawl now clusters around artificial lakes (from which water evaporates in huge volumes), to create the illusion that Arizona is not a desert.
Phoenicians who are sick of the heat, the waste, the violence, and the Californians are moving to Seattle in huge numbers. The size of the Phoenix refugee community in Seattle is unknown, but there is one highly reliable indicator of Phoenix-to-Seattle migration: Suddenly a considerable number of baristas (that mezzanine of the local economy) hail from Phoenix. Twenty-one-year-old Yann’s story is illustrative. Like many Phoenix residents, he blew into the desert town on a whim and quickly found himself mired in a swamp of dissolution, fear, and decay. Upon his arrival in Phoenix, co-workers told Yann never to walk west of 35th Avenue, where a quarter of the city lives, largely without streetlights or paved roads, where even buses (which ordinary citizens are afraid to ride) don’t run. Soon afterward, Yann’s roommate was kidnapped at gunpoint by a drug dealer, and Yann’s $1,500 worth of professional musical equipment was stolen, replaced, and stolen again.
If Yann sat on the front step of the 600-unit apartment complex where he lived (in a not particularly bad part of town), he would be offered crystal meth every 10 minutes. If he left the lights on after 10:00 p.m., meth buyers would ring his bell. Apparently, this is ordinary life in Phoenix, which stands at the forefront of America’s fastest-growing drug habit. Every day a meth lab is busted or burns in the metropolitan area, so often that the TV news doesn’t report such incidents unless a child is trapped in the blaze or suffocates from the toxic fumes of the speed-making process (which itself happens every few days).
Tara, a 25-year-old bookseller, lived in “The Valley of the Sun” until moving to Seattle two years ago. She says Yann’s experience is typical. Most of her middle-class peers got into hard drugs in junior high, and she quit her first job canvassing for the Sierra Club, after two clients answered the door with guns.
Beyond the city’s social problems lies Phoenix’s eternal (and eternally damned) struggle with nature. In Tara’s home suburb of Tempe, the city passed a bond in 1997 to put inflatable dams across the Salt River and create Tempe Town Lake, in hopes of spawning a multimillion-dollar beachside shopping and hotel development. However, the mosquitoes attracted by the reservoir became so intense that the city was forced to dump ominous quantities of pesticide into the dead lake. Phoenix’s dry climate once drew retirees and people with respiratory problems; now the air is so polluted it tops the national lists for rates of asthma.
Like Tara, Michael Serpe left family and friends to get the hell out of Phoenix, and now runs a tiny record label, Homerecorded, from his basement in Madrona. Serpe moved here 10 years ago, after a long stint in Phoenix’s punk scene; he says there was no place in that city for an organic local culture to take root. When the 29-year-old moved to Phoenix as a child, his former fifth-grade class back in Queens wrote to ask if he carried a canteen and went to school on a horse. “Phoenix used to be the desert,” he says. “Now it’s L.A.”
Hardly. Los Angeles is the hub for numerous native and immigrant subcultures, as well as the flawed yet awesome machine of Hollywood, and sandwiched as it is between mountains and ocean, relief from its crush of cars is close by. Between the rootlessness of Phoenix’s residents (voter registration is among the lowest nationwide) and the ruthlessness of its developers, Phoenix occupies a level of Inferno all its own. Most of the land between Phoenix and funkier Tucson, a two-hour drive through what used to be desert, is covered with mindless sprawl.
“There are no mom-and-pops anymore, just chains, restaurants owned by PepsiCo,” says Serpe. “It’s like a Dr. Seuss cartoon where a guy rolls out a little box and it unfolds into a strip mall, the same everywhere.” To Serpe, the city is an agglomeration of private, air-conditioned environments–“car to work, to store, to home”–that do not mix. Thus culture is entirely received from the electronic media, and attempts at a local identity, Serpe says, extend no further than the borrowed Indian motifs decorating Phoenix’s freeway underpasses and living rooms.
So community-seeking Phoenicians, if not held in place by poverty, children, or mortgages, are fleeing to the Northwest. Like the Central District’s Somali and Ethiopian residents (refugees from wars and starvation), these refugees from heat, malls, and sprawl huddle in the U-District and Capitol Hill, close to Seattle’s core, near the pedestrian enclaves and non-commercial cultural outlets they craved for so long. Like true Seattleites, most of them try not to cross Lake Washington. Because how far is the now strip-malled and highway-girded Eastside from becoming Phoenix, but with rain and trees?
Wow, all very true. I don’t see real estate prices recovering in Phoenix for at least 5-6 years.
As a phoenix expatriot, It’s pretty dang true. I left there in ’97 because it was hot, dry, and brown. I came to Seattle because it was cold, wet, and green.
I just came back from there after visiting my Parents in Scottsdale – that place is all the bad of LA, with none of the good. Imagine a Republican LA – stubborn refusal to believe that their lifestyle is unsustainable, and a resistance to admitting that the economy is hitting the shitter. I’ve never seen a more deluded city.
What a bunch of elitest bulls**t. I live in the suburbs of Phoenix. This article sounds like it was written by someone who has never been to Phoenix or Tucson, there is no “mindless sprawl” between the two. There’s desert. It’s beautiful. Probably some of the best unspoiled desert lies south of Tucson on the way to Mexico. If you want trees and greenery you only have to drive an hour north to the Tonto National Forest (fifth largest in America). I just got back from snowboarding today in the White Mountains, about 3 to 4 hours drive from Phoenix. I went there because the closer ski resort (2 hours away) would have been too crowded during the holiday. Right now Sunrise has more snow and a bigger base (83 in.) than they do in most resorts in Colorado. The ignorance of the people you interviewed for your article sounds typical of the young and dumb. “I’ve never left Phoenix ’cause the bus don’t go past 35th Ave.” Another LIE! Along with unpaved roads and no street lights in the middle of the 6th largest city in America. Grant Cogswell don’t you or your editor know how to check a fact, or are you too busy pumping up your over-inflated little ego by blowing sunshine up Seattle’s ass. Enjoy the rain moron. It’s sunny here 355 days out of the year. I have lived in Arizona since 1984 and I love it when people leave Phoenix, there’s too many here already. We don’t want to be like L.A. and thank god we can’t accomodate the temperature preference of people who like California’s climate. Unlike L.A. we can actually drive on our freeways, instead of sitting in gridlock. That 115 degrees in July is great, it burns all the trash out of town. And one last thing, the meth problem is everywhere. California is a source NATION. The midwest has a huge problem with meth labs. So does Oregon. You might not have noticed yet because you have all that awesome herion up there, don’t worry you’ll soon hate the tweakers almost as much as you hate the junkies. Get real, every big city has drug problems. Go throw stones at your glass outhouse. Your bowl is over flowing with sh*t just like your story (article). Oh yeah, and thanks for all the Starbucks, they’re great, sitting there in our mindless sprawl of strip malls, it almost makes me almost feel like we got some too-cool urban core going on right here. Please send back our baristas though, we’re tired of training chimps to pour our soy-mocha-chai-lattes.
I’m a lifelong resident of the northwest and I’ve heard the hate stories about Phoenix, but I’ve enjoyed myself there greatly. Go down in March, and you can watch pro baseballers close-up for ten bucks in the sunny 75 degree weather. The clubs in Scottsdale are about as fake as Bellevue or First ave, but you can hang out outdoors at night in top-flight interior design. Dont drive drunk though, there are loads of unamused police down there. Yeah there’s sprawl and you have to drive everywhere or take a cab – this is America remember? Within hours there is incredible desert scenery in all directions, especially north and east and into Flagstaff, a great place, as well as the ole Grand canyon and Monument Valley. Its a polar opposite from Seattle, so comparisons are dumb. YOu can dissapear in the desert, just like you can here in the forest. But sure, you’re closer to mexican drug lord hell down there. Hard to believe what a cesspool this country has become, but thank you ignorant republicans for that. Greed isn’t good, assclowns.
But sure, in the summer its the anvil of hell there. My cousin was just house robbed, and there was a sniper the year before last. Seattle has gotten its mass-shooters too now. Plenty of yokel nutjobs in the surrounding areas around here. You talk about bleak suburbs. Leave your legacy Capitol HIll home and see the dreary suburbs go on for miles in all directions.
Phoenix is nowhere near as scary as LA and its one million gangbangers. You want sun and safety, then go to Monte Carlo, if you can afford it. The sunny places on planet earth are in demand. If you like to get over 80 degrees five days a year, then Seattle is your place.
I’d rather live here than there, but I definitely could not stand to never hit the desert, but then Utah is pretty much the place to see it. Oh yeah, the women in AZ actually give a crap how they look, however, if you want a woman who actually uses birth control, go to Vancouver BC. The honeys are in force in Canada, and they’re educated. People smile up there, too. If anyplace is truly done, its all of America.
I’ve been to, and lived in, a lot of places in my time. I have never met more ignorant people than in my three years of living in the Phoenix metro area. “Haterade” is quite typical of them, I found: extremely defensive rubes quick to snipe at anyone who points out their precious Emperor has no clothes, because deep down they know it’s true. The average Valley resident is someone who thinks Olive Garden is the height of cuisine, revels in their tacky mall chic and wears ignorance of the outside world like a badge of pride. There is nothing to do in town except get drunk and high, and there aren’t even any decent places to do that. Tempe, of course, is the exception to the rule, because it’s a college town, but it’s like a shining oasis in a sea of shit. Phoenix is just a giant, sprawling suburb trying desperately to be a big, relevant city and it fails by pretty much every measure. Conspicious consumption is the rule du jour, the tackier the better, no matter how laughably unsustainable it is. Just look at the number of golf courses.
Don’t even let me get started on Scottsfail, home to more douches per capita than any other city in America and quite possibly the world.
I GTFO and moved back East last year and it was the most sensible thing I’ve ever done.
The only point I made about this article was that every so called fact was fabricated. Read my first comment again if you didn’t get what I was saying. If you’re too ignorant to comprehend simple English nothing can help you “Escaped from PHX”. Not living in a city with culture, or moving back east or pulling your head out of your ass.
I find it laughable that you refer to me as a rube. Maybe it’s you that has not traveled enough to have even the vaugest idea what you’re comparing, apples to oranges to your elbow to the place you’ve been storing that head of yours. Maybe you’ve never visited rural states. States like Montana or Wyoming that have virtually nothing to do or places to go eat that’s not a least an hours drive away. These are beautful places and they have excellent restaurants and activities (other than drinking) but nothing is right around the corner. But I’m sure that if you went there, everyone you met would be a hick or country bumpkin. Or maybe you’re the asshole. They got plently of them on the east coast. I know.
I’m from the east coast, I grew up there. I go back and visit every couple of years and you couldn’t pay me to live there. If I wanted to use your line of thinking I would go on about how much of joke Seattle is compared to N.Y.C. but what would be the point. If you want to sound simple and small minded go on making comparisons to two things that are nothing alike. I have family and friends on boths coasts, the Midwest, and plenty of other places including Seattle and I have visited them and enjoyed spending time in these various cities.
I don’t give a flying f*ck what you or anyone else thinks of me. I don’t care what you think of Phoenix. Read my first comment again, I wrote about the factual inaccuracies in this p.o.s. article. I gave examples of the truth about the Phoenix metro area and the rest of the state of Arizona. I made a point of writing how the people who have lived here for years and years love it when someone moves to the desert than complains about it, and runs their mouth about how great it is “back home” and then finally leaves. It’s great because there’s too many people here already, we don’t need you or want you here if you hate it. And next month there will be thousands of more f*cktards to take your place.
It wouldn’t surprise me if you were the assclown who wrote this article in the first place. Your comment was just more of the same bullsh#t: “Nothing to do but drink and get high” – Escaped from PHX. That’s rich coming from a city with one the worst heroin problems in the country. Who’s got you beat there Los Angeles, Boston, or Baltimore?
As for my name “haterade” it refers to what I drink every morning to get through the day without punching people in the face. It aint booze or dope buddy, it’s pure hate and it’s in the water I drink and the air I breathe. Call it my sh*t filter for people like you. Assholes are everywhere, and an inordinate amount are online. Talking out their necks, hiding behind their computer screens, and becoming the next generation of telephone tough guys. People who are all talk and no action. What’s really sad is they don’t even know what the hell they’re talking about.
If you’re going to use my name in your comment don’t get pissed when I call you on your bullsh*t “Escaped from PHX”. I’m sure you’ll be flagging this comment, on this months old article, as you sit in your authenic trattoria in some Rhode Island strip mall sipping merlot, eating by yourself and feeling superior. Abuse isn’t illuminating another person’s mental deficiencies when they are regurgitating the same elitest pap as their like minded fellows.
Phoenix sucks. There’s not much more too it. I was born in Phoenix and still live there. I plan on moving out in a year or two when the economy rebounds. But for the time being Phoenix has and will never make something out of itself.
It’s over reliance on boom-and-busts sectors such as tourism and housing make it’s economy woefully unsustainable. It’s lack of high-sector high-tech careers ruin it’s house hold income rate.
The state consistently ranks in the low-40s as far as eduction goes. It’s crime and drug problems are on the rise. It’s urban heat island crisis as not even been discussed on the state legislative level.
It has not figured out how to properly construct and implement a flourishing downtown. Instead it shifts that responsibility to its suburbs such as Mesa. Yes those, “cities”. Mesa that has a population even to or exceeding Pittsburgh and Cinicinnati. Mesa, like every other suburb of Phoenix, doesn’t offer any sort of sustainable living or economy and so, in fact; these cities act as a net-drag on the region. What they’ll do is fancy themselves as a “bedroom” community and continual cut taxes worsening an already deadly plummet that will end up with Phoenix being the 21st Centuries version of Detroit.
While Phoenix and Arizona whored themselves to the real estate market in the late 80s and 90s you had cities such as Seattle and San Francisco building sustainable economies around a booming technology sector, now both cities are able to sustain a consistent population growth, while offering decent living conditions and pleasurable weather (Phoenix in the last 20 years has seen a 20 degree rise, half a degree a year corresponding along with the housing boom; asphalt + concrete sidewalks + homes = more heat).
It’s wasn’t that long ago when Phoenix would see summer highs of 106 to 110. Now it has summer highs exceeding 112 because of the city and the state’s reluctance to deal with it’s mounting urban heat island index that worsened during the housing boom.
What Phoenix needs to do to turn things around are so elementary that it so transparently obvious that the state legislature simply just doesn’t give two flying fucks.
If screwballs like haterade populate Phoenix then it’s no surprise that desert shithole has the reputation it has. Any psychiatrist would certify haterade a near-candidate for the local laughing academy. I hope he gets help soon. He gives a really BAD name to Phoenix, if that were even possible. Maybe that’s his intention all along. Maybe he hates Phoenix so much he wants to make Americans think Phoenix is full of nutjobs. If that’s the case, he’s wasting his time. Americans already know Phoenix is populated with nutjobs.
Well, I think Phoenix is a nice place to live. Especially if you are talking about Phoenix (not Glendale, not Levine, not Buckeye, not Chandler, but PHOENIX). If you never take the time to go out and look for something to do, then of course you won’t find it. It’s not like you can just wander through Seattle and suddenly, magically become a coffee-drinking, teriyaki-loving, rain-soaked socialite! You have to go out. Have ANY of you Phoenix-haters been downtown lately? Probably not. I moved here from Portland 6 years ago and I love Phoenix. Get over it or get out.
Story…
There once was a man who sold trinkets by the side of a highway and he would occasionally meet people moving to a new region. The people that he met would ask him what the people are like in the new region into which they were moving. To this the man would ask them what people were like where they came from. Then the man would tell the person asking the question that the people where they were going were a lot like where they came from. However it was the people who didn’t like the people where they came from who were always upset when they heard that people were the same all over.
Moral…
Pessimism and optimism usually determine how a person’s views are shaped not the people or the place.
I live in Mesa, AZ which is on the border with Tempe and I can say from experience when I go out into my city I encounter as many people willing to say hi and talk as I did in the city I used to live in St. Paul. So all laws and national rankings aside it is about the same.
This article has a hint of reality but is full of generalizations (that apply to most cities in the country) and half-truths or lies (i.e. the buses don’t go west of 35th avenue). I live in central Phoenix, know all my neighbors and regularly frequent several coffee shops/restaurants that are locally owned (i.e. Delux, Postinos, LGO, The Lux, Luci’s). But, I must admit, when I leave my liberal enclave things can get a bit scary. For example, at a birthday party in a far north exurb this weekend, one guy said he makes his wife drive to San Diego with a loaded gun in case she runs into trouble and another “friend” couldn’t believe that I support Obama since he wasn’t even born in this country. I was very relieved to get home and felt like I had been VERY far away even though it was only 20 miles away.
Phoenix is the absolute definition of Boring. And Tempe is no better than Scottsdale, Especially downtown Tempe. Do yourself a favor and avoid this place at all costs. I am moving out next spring to go back east and I’ve lived here for twenty six years and am forty three now. I’ve wasted my whole life here waiting for this city to get its act together, which they keep promising they will do, and each and every time (decades of time) they fail us. This is a retirement state, pure and simple. Unless you are retiring or are just as boring as this city is, then come on over. But if you are looking for ANY thing remotely resembling a real city, then look elsewhere. Phoenix BITES and will ALWAYS bite.
Here’s my biggest “beef” with Phoenix: Its the scale. Nothing here is built to human scale, everything is enormously large and far apart and not pedestrian friendly. The existing housing for the most part was built during an era which it was appropriate for, affordable single family homes. The population figures were much smaller then, and actually if you look at old pictures of downtown before 1958 or so, things were actually built to a smaller, more human scale. Since then, things have gotten out of hand and therefore has alienated the inhabitants. Big box stores were all the rage here as far back as the mid 1930’s. The advent of the “refrigerated” convenience store actually started as early as 1918 here and took off with Safeway’s Pay-n-Take stores, the predecessor to today’s Circle K. One still exists at 7th ave and Roosevelt. Many people talk the talk about how they want to “fix” Phoenix (I do it, too) but very few people have the inclination to start at the beginning. Everyone wants to just jump in the middle instead, like First Friday’s. I know the man who brought it here and many people associated with trying to make it happen. And still after fifteen years of trying, no one sees much progress at all. Its because no one wants to take on the big box stores and there is just no need to have the old brick and mortar store fronts and walkway shopping like we had in the 20’s, 30’s up through Phoenix’s heyday in the 1950s. I have a wonderful picture of downtown, circa 1951 on Central ave looking Northward from Washington. The streets were packed with shops, flashy neon lights, a real and well used downtown, a la Las Vegas style. Phoenix somehow adopted the attitude of “Make everything ENORMOUSLY LARGE” with no real reason to do so other than to make it appear as if we were a “growing” city with lots to offer. The aftermath of all of this smoke and mirror mentality is what we have before us today. A wasteland of useless, unfriendly, uninspiring and ill-designed buildings serving no one. A return to several smaller, self sustaining neighborhoods as opposed to one very large city is the only answer and that will never happen. Phoenix is the worst city in the country as far as I can see. It will never change and it will never be what many people wish it could be and once was. Very sad.
To: LovephxorleavePhx
Six years isn’t enough time to have any sort of opinion about Phoenix. You weren’t here in the early 1980’s when things weren’t quite so bad. And downtown is horrible, absolutely horrible. You know nothing of the history of downtown, what it was like or what it offered to compare it to from 1910 through 1970. So many precious and irreplaceable properties have been razed to the ground, entire neighborhoods have been demolished and pocket after pocket of dirt lots now replace what was once fully operational and supportive neighborhoods. What we have now is a mere skeletal reminder of what was. If you think Phoenix is “nice” then you are merely willing to be taken for the dope that Phoenix wants you to be. You can’t build six lane freeways up through the middle of town (7th st and 7th ave) with no on street parking and no cohesive structures and expect a city to survive. Enjoy.
The Seattle area is in the worst 5 percent of the country for air toxics, and the cancer risk from diesel emissions alone may be roughly 500 times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s acceptable level, according to state research that was a follow-up to an unreleased EPA study.
Most of this Is true unfortunately. Most the people are so nasty and rude(mainly due to the ridiculously 115-123 degree summers), I at one point, watched a pregnant women pushing a baby stroller on the side walk get forced on the street by a bicyclist who wouldn’t ride in the bike lane. This is a very common thing here. There are good people who live here in Phoenix, but it seems the bad far out-way the good. Our neighborhood seems to be in a state of decline. Last Friday night at 11:30, a drunk driver in a stolen car entered my front yard and T-Boned my vehicle in the drive-way, and then walked away carrying a cooler. I know this because my neighbors sat on their porches and watched the entire thing happen. Of course this could happen anywhere, but it seems Phoenix, or just Arizona in general is a bad luck place filled with over-population and too much crime. Well, what can you expect when the reported unemployment is almost 10%. I’ve lived here in the valley for about 10 years. Before that, I lived in Tucson, Az. If I had the means and the money to leave, I would, in a heart beat. Its just frustrating that once I start getting ahead, something always knocks me down.