Were released last weekend titled the Pearce report. The study dealt with
issues ranging from those pertaining to state and local government to
economics, education, social isolation, cultural development, and urban
growth. While the report has attracted positive attention, it has also
received some measure of negative reaction and joining me this evening to
discuss the findings of the four man research team and local reaction to
its criticisms and recommendations is Neil Pearce. Mr Pearce is the author
of several books on topics ranging from state and municipal governments.
Good evening. I'm Michael Graham. A few months back, the Arizona Republic
and Phoenix Gazette newspapers engaged the services of a team of four
Urban Affairs specialists. Their task according to the newspapers was to
use their knowledge of the nation's metropolitan areas to critically
examine metropolitan Phoenix and identify strengths and weaknesses. The
results of their research were released last weekend titled the Pearce
report. The study dealt with issues ranging from those pertaining to state
and local government to economics, education, social isolation, cultural
development, and urban growth. While the report has attracted positive
attention, it has also received some measure of negative reaction. And
joining me, this evening to discuss the findings of the four man research
team and local reaction to its criticisms and recommendations is Neil
Pearce. Mr Pearce is the author of several books on topics ranging from
state and municipal government to economic and urban and development. He
is also a specialist in Urban and Intergovernmental Affairs reporting and
since 1975 has written a nationally syndicated column focusing on issues
and trends in those and other areas of statewide and municipal public
policy. In addition to Neil Pearce, there were three other members of the
research team. Christopher Gates, a consultant for the National Civic
League, an urban advocacy group based in New York, John Hall, the Director
of the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University, and
contributor to the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution and Curtis
Johnson, the Executive Director of the Citizens League, a private urban
advocacy and research firm headquartered in Minneapolis, ST Paul. This
evening's program is going to be devoted to a discussion of the report.
But before we get to that, we have a brief review of the seven principal
findings and recommendations of the report. To no one's surprise. The
report found that growth drives the valley but in the future growth must
be planned by collective decision making to solve the problems created by
the area's rapid growth. Power in the metropolitan area rests in the hands
of developers, professional city bureaucrats and state legislators. The
solution is county home rule in a reorganized form of government. Even
with the incredible growth of the Valley, its future success is not
guaranteed since the area lacks corporate headquarters and is basically a
branch town, a stronger educational system is the guarantee of future
growth and business must provide the impetus for better schools. The
report wholeheartedly endorsed the proposed Rio Salado project comparing
its potential value to that of New York City's central park. Rio Salado
could be the single focus. The Valley lacks but should be largely financed
by those who will benefit the most from it. Valley residents tend to
isolate themselves and the area lacks stability due to its transient
nature. An emphasis on neighborhoods is the answer a genesis to develop
civic pride. Valley residents are selfish when it comes to supporting
culture and social services with quality of life. A necessary draw for
major corporations, philanthropic giving must be hurried along. Inner city
rivalries are harmful to the valley. A metropolitan area needs a city
center and a spirit of cooperation needs to be fostered between Phoenix
and the surrounding municipalities. Neil An interesting report, I enjoyed
reading about it behind my walls and my patio, Sunday, Sunday morning
after racketball before we talk about the report itself outline for us
briefly, the methodology that the four man team went through in terms of
gathering data on the report. Well, the four of us decided to go ahead
with the project like last fall and we met once in New York and one in
Kansas City where we could get together and decided on the methodology how
we want to go ahead. We were given a long list of proposed interviewees by
the newspapers and then we consulted with our own sources and contacts and
added quite a few of those decided on a final list of people we would like
to see they were invited. And then we spent two weekends in a full week, I
would say in Phoenix and the region in early December took a big
helicopter ride over the over the region to get a bird's eye view. And
then we interviewed about 65 people during the week wall to wall
interviews all day long. And sometimes through the evenings when that was
finished, we spent one or two days digesting our findings deciding what
type of articles we would like to write what the focus of each one would
be. Then it was my job to go write the articles and then I sent them out
for commentary and approval by my colleagues and they were printed. That's
it. Ok. All right. Got you. Do you see you're very familiar with the, the
urban environment?
Is this report on Phoenix a lot different than a report would be on
another western city that's fairly young, has had the kind of explosive
growth that Phoenix has had rests in the sun belt. I mean, all the, all
the criteria is Phoenix unique from that standpoint or are we suffering
through a lot of the same problems that you might find indigenous to the
West in the Sun Belt? I think there are some problems that are quite
similar when you have a lot of population moving in rapidly, some
population moving out. At the same time, you seem to be fairly high on
both moving in and moving out where you get what people call social
isolation or difficulty getting reestablished in the new place that you've
gone to and low voter turnout sprawl development and so on. I would say
offhand that Phoenix perhaps is the most extreme version of the western
fast growth city that you could find. Made it interesting. I caught a
little bit this morning. You were on the Pac Man Talk show on K R made an
interesting comment about it was about getting bold, the city of Phoenix,
getting bold and doing some bold, innovative things. And you said that you
didn't find that in talking to a lot of the people out here in contrast to
what you might have heard in other municipalities. That's true. Even as
opposed to other Western cities. If you talk to the movers and shakers
in Dallas or San Diego or a number of other cities, Austin, Texas, they'll
explain to you how they're making things happening and what they're doing
here. The movers and shakers tend to tell you why they can't get things
done and I think the reason for that is the very split political nature of
the valley, its large physical size and a culture is based so much on
physical growth, the development process that somehow no one ever slowed
down to say, hey, how do we pull together these pieces and make common
decisions? Now, one of the ways you suggested for pulling together the
pieces was home rule for Maricopa County. But given now the historical
fact of these competing municipalities inside Maricopa County, would that
really do it for us? And why if obviously you think it would? Well, first
of all, I think there should be home rule by definition for most people,
most places, that's American democracy. It means you can vote for people
who make decisions that are appropriate to the area you live in these 18
or 20 cities, depending on how you count them are just parts of a large
valley. If you look at it from the sky, it's all one. And the problems of
air quality land use transportation, they don't stop at one boundary. When
you leave Tempe and go to Phoenix and go to Chandler and go to Mesa, they
all continue. If those problems are then common. A lot of them, there's
now no way that they can be addressed by a government where there's a,
there, there, Gertrude Stein once wrote about Oakland a little cruelly. I
thought there's no, there, there, there's no, there,
I've been to Oakland. I don't think that was cruel. Oakland. Oakland has a
nice revival going on downtown with still a tough time. Right. If you want
to make a common decision in the valley, you have a county government
which is very weak, which is sort of on the model of territorial days,
which has all these roe officers. I mean, it's one of the most archaic
forms of government I've ever seen for a metropolitan area. It has a board
of supervisors that rotates the chairmanship every year, which assures
political neuter in a sense and sort of independent duchies of where the
individual districts go. And it does not, it's governed by the legislature
which holds every string and requires everything down to the rag content
of the paper they use for their official documents. So there's really no
power to do anything except what the legislature specifically says to do.
If there were an atomic explosion in the valley tomorrow, the county
government presumably will be powerless to do a damn thing about it. Your
assignment was analysis, not necessarily implementation, but you've got a
feel of this thing right now. Given the, that was another aspect of the
report, the rivalries between the cities. You really think those cities
would ever surrender. I think the kind of decision making power to a
larger governmental authority that I believe you're describing their
citizens would, it's the politicians who don't want to the poll done by
the Arizona Republican gazette show a solid majority in favor of home rule.
It is a simple question of popular democracy power is being wielded now,
as it was said in the introduction, by the development community, which is
accustomed to having its own way. It has been the name of growth in the
valley. Someone said today that the development community has been to the
valley, what General Motors was to Detroit, but that's been dominant and
it's been very hard to fight it as you know. And when they start to have
political battles against, it's been difficult. And then by the
professional bureaucrats, good city managers on the whole, hired by these
individual city governments and by state legislators. But there's no way
you can focus in as voters in the valley now and affect a government which
has some powers over the broad area, wide concerns that this area has on
this question of land planning and urban infill. And those aspects of the
report the report went to. Is there a is there a model around here? Is
there someone who has done it well, in your opinion that that Phoenix
could rip two or three or nine chapters out of the book? Well, maybe not
two or three but one or two. Uh San Diego, for example, uh when Pete
Wilson was the mayor during the 19 seventies, now us Senator Republican
Senator put in some real restraints on the degree of where you could put
physical growth, put some areas off limits, kept natural preserves and
things of that nature. And it tended to channel growth to where there was
a decision it was appropriate to have it. And at that point, a great deal
of attention and planning was put into the downtown, which had
deteriorated badly. And now that downtown is doing very well, you know, in
civic life, it takes a long while, you don't make a decision today and
implement it tomorrow. And so a city like that has made decisions about
the revival of its downtown with its Horton Plaza, which has three or four
major department stores in it. And a great piece of urban architecture,
the older area of the city revived and so on. I mean, there's ways to go,
but I think they've made splendid progress. Can have a great city within
the Sun belt context. It's not necessary to have just one or two or five
or six high rise buildings sticking up and say that's your city with vast
wasteland in between, which frankly is what a lot of downtown Phoenix is
today. Does the urban village concept work a little bit at odds though,
with what you're describing? Because I've heard it said that the urban
village concept as ideal as it may be given a present sprawl situation may
in and of itself encourage more urban sprawl. Well, to the degree that you
allow really heavy concentrations of high rise development out of the
cores of those villages, the villages in that sense become another
developer's dream because they're going to sap some of the growth that
might go into the core.
One of the things I think you were driving out in the report is that
perhaps Phoenix has run out its natural string on growth and that the
cheap land, the inexpensive labor, those kinds of things that may have
driven the growth up to this point may no longer be there. Have we
completely run out the string? You could continue. I mean, you go beyond
the West Tank mountains, you can go anywhere you want out across the
desert. I mean, until you reach the borders of California and New Mexico
and Mexico and the Grand Canyon, I suppose. But the point is that in the
modern economy that may not be as efficient, a form of growth as you used
to have, you get long, long, long automobile commutes, you get higher and
higher public expenses as you allow leapfrog development further and
further out because utility rate payers and taxpayers get to pay for all
of that. In the meantime, you have these huge empty gaps in downtown and
in the other cities. I mean, I just find it incredible to see how much is
, is unbuilt upon. Whereas if you look at one city like Scottsdale from
the air, it doesn't have nearly that amount of emptiness in because
they're doing more. I think real planning of how they develop their city.
Phoenix doomed Phoenix Metro, doomed to be a branch town as opposed to
the corporate headquarters. Well, for a while, you will not begin to get
major corporate headquarters here until you build a quality of life that
is going to make corporate executives want to be here. Even if you were to
develop, which is the natural way to get headquarters is not to recruit
them from outside as a rule, but to grow them inside, grow your own. Well
, that's fine and there's a chance to do it. It's going to take a period
of time. But unless you have quality of life that makes corporate
executives think that it's a great place to be in Phoenix, you're going to
be in trouble. There was an ass U study indicating that a number of
corporate types would think of moving again, who moved here in the last
few years because they don't find the education at the level that they
expect and don't find air quality where they want it, et cetera, et cetera.
Those are problems that are going to prevent it. Also, you have a very
strong competition within this region of the country. Los Angeles is an
incredible Mecca for sort of command and control center of the modern
urban world. The Texas cities are going to try for the same Denver to the
north and it would take a lot of effort to make Phoenix and major
headquarters city in the short term. I don't think that needs, you can
think that you'd like to, but the more and more you can develop as you're
doing ok with your in grown, your home, your home companies, home
development, the better you will do. But then you have to make sure that
those corporations begin to see that they are major corporate citizens and
that you can't just sit there and reap the benefits of the society. You
have to be there giving, taking part and also philanthropic efforts and
all sorts of strategic planning for the region, thinking about its
educational future, thinking about its environment. It's that culture that
is not developed very far here, which is way behind your competitors. I
think mostly around the sun belt. It seemed to me that that aspect of the
report really sort of neatly tied together a whole lot of these different
elements including quality of education. And unfortunately, as you
probably read on the front page of the newspaper this morning, Secretary
Bennett release some statistics which I'm sad to say, probably support the
conclusions which you drew about. I was sorry to see. I'm sorry to see for
your state's sake, but I must say the timing was fine coming to town. At
least it was clear that we weren't under the table.
What about though here's the basic debate. Perhaps you got a feel for this
, maybe, maybe not. But our problem isn't spending dollars on education.
It's whether or not we're getting good bang for the buck out of our
education dollar. And our problem is we're spending insufficient dollars
on education. Did you get a feel for which one of those two ends of the
spectrum is closer to the truth? I think both are absolutely true. You
cannot expect to spend at the 40 something th among the States of the
United States and get a good school system that just isn't going to happen.
On the other hand, spending is not everything. And one of the points we
made in one of the articles is that it's absolutely critical that there be
an intervention, active, friendly, proactive intervention in the school
and education system by non educators. Educators tend to be reluctant to
say here in the midst of a university setting, but they tend to be their
own world and they set up their own rules and regulations. And it is true
that some of the Republican conservative senators in this state say that
you get a large administrative mechanism and that tends to grow and
sometimes take some of the resources that might go into classrooms we need
in this country very much to have business groups, citizen groups active
in questioning how the schools are growing, how they're developing, which
schools are really doing so well. You can lift a lot of state constraints
over them, which schools are doing so poorly that you need to put them in
Receivership as the National Governors Association has suggested for the
really crappy schools. Well, you got a, that bad, you're cheating kids and
you're creating incredible problems for your own society in future years.
It's probable that one of the other areas of the report you talked about
the isolation phenomenon probably contributes to that. I mean, if a person
is indeed going to lock themselves in their backyard on a Sunday afternoon
and not know who their neighbors are, they probably are not as inclined
also to get involved in their local, local school district. I think that's
true. I'd like to now that you mentioned it. Pick up on that. Of course,
while on the one hand, we talked about county home rule, which seems to be
from above down in terms of what the structure would be. We said equally
as important is a strong neighborhood light coming from the bottom up.
These are the sines of a strong society where people know each other where
they're connected. It's not unimportant that people have block clubs and
block watches for crime. It's not unimportant. They get together for all
sorts of other social activities that is going to cut down not only in
isolation but on some degree, on mental illness, on suicide, on alcoholism.
All the other things when you have a lot of people who moved here,
support, they need support mechanisms, horizontal, right where they live,
an awful lot of them have abandoned those kinds of support structures
moving in here. That's right. But how do you do anything about that? Now,
you're just talking about it. We made a couple of suggestions in the
report, we suggested a civic welcome wagon, nothing commercial allowed.
But when you move into a neighborhood, it needs to be supported by the
city involved and by the civic groups, there someone comes and or two or
three people come and greet you and give you a full briefing on what all
the civic activities are and the clubs that exist. Also that that
neighborhood, if it has a neighborhood organization, it should have one as
soon as possible after it gets going, that that neighborhood have a way to
give feedback to the city hall and be consulted on growth policies on
investments, infrastructure that's going to be built on where new
developments are going to come. That gives the neighborhoods a sense that
they are factual. And if people know in the long run that their
neighborhood organization has a voice and is listened to, they're going to
be more interested in joining. I have heard the opinion expressed strongly
though that the reason why a whole lot of people moved out here from the
Midwest metropolis, the eastern metropolises and those kinds of things is
to get some space. And they don't only mean that in terms of physical
space, they also mean it in mental space and they're tired of being jammed
into the to the subway trains and that kind of thing. Do you sense that a
little bit? There's a lot of, a lot of, when you ask people what's
positive about the Valley, it's a negative what it is not being left alone.
I don't want to put it quite that extremely. Uh, but, you know, the, the,
the, the ideal is to be alone, have your privacy or else to sit beside on
a, on a winter day, some beautiful swimming pool and have some beautiful
girl walk towards you or a guy with a Coors beer or I mean, whatever it
might be this sort of romantic resort life, the ro romantic resort life
doesn't work out for everybody though. There's sort of a bitter backlash.
Plus you have a substantial Hispanic and some black population, a lot of
which is not enjoying all of that. So this is a society that has a lot of
homework to do. And I don't think these people because they don't want to
hang on subway straps in New York City necessarily want to have no
neighbors and not talk to them in the valley of the Sun. The polls that
the Republican gazette did show people are really interested in having
those contacts. And I think that a sort of a conscious policy out of the
cities, out of the neighborhoods to bring people into more activity would
find a lot of takers.
You liked Rio Salado, you liked the Rio Salado concept quite a bit is that
maybe one area that there's some boldness is a bold concept for, goodness
knows, a billion dollars or more over 25 years to implement the idea of
having a major public facility which everybody shares in, which is sort of
a symbol of the valley, which is a place people can go to for recreation
and so on. Taking an ugly, really ugly scar that goes through the middle
of this valley and turning it into a kind of an oasis and a place that
people like to come to. But I want to stress a couple of things we said
about Rio Salado. One was that if it looks like a developer's rip off, it
not only will fail, it probably deserves to, there's immense suspicion
about developers maybe right or wrong with the polls that the papers did.
And earlier public opinion polling shows that and too much Rio Salado has
been sold, I think over the last couple of years or three or four years as
a thing to create development value, people don't want to be taxed to help
developers earn more money. So I think there needs to be some real control
as to who benefits and whether those who benefit will pay a good fair
share of the cost of it that is developed by tax increment financing or by
special assessments or what have you. Secondly, the Rio Salado should not
be designed as its master plan is by a bunch of very bright city planners
but should be brought back to the people and made a people's project with
a lot of citizen participation. That's why we suggested a citizens
advisory committee that would be there sort of as a watchdog to blow the
whistle if it appears that a lot of money is being made privately off this
big public investment. And also to take part in the planning piece by
piece to decide how much it's going to be big, big lakes and greenery and
how much it will have more of a modest desert. Look to it, how it ties
into the nearby neighborhoods because as brilliant as the planners ideas
are, people don't buy into that and they're going to stay suspicious of it.
What you need in this valley is something where people buy in. And
ideally if Rio Salado is developed that way, then it becomes a way that
neighborhood leadership develops and on some of the bigger issues that
area wide leadership develops and it could be a terrific civic process is
the way it was evolved, which is what cities are all about. It's how
people work together and make things happen as well as just a pretty green
stripe like India and Ben was in this case, going through a much larger
stretch of the valley. Nice, nice to fly over there. If it looked that way
, speaking of not buying into concepts, a whole lot of people have not
bought into the concept of Phoenix downtown redevelopment that's been
discussed in the Valley ever since I came here. Why is Phoenix downtown
not a downtown? Well, we heard some of the reasons explained to us, one
which I thought was intriguing was that most downtowns were founded around
railways and got going early enough so that they became in effect the
metropolis, the downtown around a railway station and that Phoenix was so
young that it grew up really after World war II, except for very slight
growth during the truck era when things weren't centralized as much
anymore. So there never was as much of a downtown Phoenix as there was a
downtown Dallas or downtown Houston or what have you. But I think that's
only part of the explanation. The other part is that this valley was so
big. There were so many other communities, people could move out to the
development community, found it easier to go out further and further
without paying much attention to the downtown. Somehow what had been of a
downtown was so small that it blew away, the stores withdrew. I have to
tell you, you look at the downtowns across the sun belt. This is the most
pathetic in terms of really substantial representation. And I don't mean
just high rise buildings, I mean, a city that has everything. A city is
not just high rise buildings. A city is a place where you can walk and
have fun. A city should be a meeting place for all the people of a
metropolitan area. It should have great restaurants, it should have
culture, it should have some fun to it, some vitality and to it. Now,
Phoenix has a few things been trying, but boy, it's been a struggle and
until that is won somehow more, you're always going to have sort of a
faint shadow of what was a city and you need a full program of things to
help it become a really important center. Is the damage done though? Might
it be best? I mean, I certainly you never want to write off a whole area
of the city. And I'm not suggesting we do that, but, you know, are we
trying to force the rail, the pig into the square hole like it'd be better
to go looking to, I don't know, 24th street in came back. Well, uptown.
Well, of course, there was this immense error when the up central avenue
of that development began some years ago, you know, running away from the
downtown, it was sort of a suburb within the downtown. Now, the new
downtown alliance view is it's going to be downtown, plus the spine going
north up towards Camel back and so on. And then I heard that Terry Goddard
say it will be 75 years before we flush all this out. It's going to take a
long, long while Barry Goldwater himself. Wrote a letter to one of the
local magazines saying this might have to become one of the largest cities
in the world until all this space in between gets filled. But still, I
think the Goddard administration has a lot of very fine projects that is
trying to push forward. There's a billion dollars now planned in terms of
downtown development and to those cities around the valley that say we
don't need a downtown Phoenix. Let me assure you people are not going to
fly from Chicago or Seattle or San Francisco or Atlanta to the East Valley
or to downtown Chandler, you need to have every great city of the world,
has some center that becomes its representation to the world and also
becomes sort of its control and command center in its own mini way of what
is the center of that civilization. And as long as you don't have that, it
will always look like a little bit of a backward civilization here. And
one of the development oriented bankers we talked to said this is just
going to be like Orange County. But Orange County we got to remember is
really a satellite of Los Angeles and look how Los Angeles has been
growing recently, Neil Pierce. Interesting report and a very interesting
individual we appreciate you today. Thank you. The Pierce report is not
the first comprehensive analysis of what is right and what is wrong with
Metropolitan Phoenix in 1979. Dr Paul Bracken, professor of public policy
at Yale University authored the decidedly upbeat Arizona Tomorrow study
written in conjunction with futurist Herman Kahn. The Arizona Tomorrow
report focused on many of the same kinds of issues raised by Mr Pearce and
his associates and looked ahead to a in the year 2012. And on Monday and
Tuesday, March nine and 10, Dr Bracken will be my guest to continue our
discussion of the various public policy issues reviewed this evening. That
is March nine and 10. Coming up tomorrow, my guest will be Arizona,
Senator Dennis Desi. Thank you very much for being here this evening. I'm
Michael Grant. Have a terrific one good night.
If you have comments regarding this evening's Horizon program, send them
to Horizon Channel eight Television, Arizona State University. 10 P 85287.