No Light Rail in Vancouver!
Is Phoenix a “Real City”?
The notion that real cities have big downtowns is firmly ingrained in the minds of many urban planners and city officials. As Joel Garreau points out in Edge City, this ignores the fact that such downtowns were only built for about a century, from roughly 1820 to 1920.
Modern cities, which planners deride by calling them “sprawl,” have job centers spread
out all over the place. San Jose, Phoenix, and Los Angeles are all typical examples.
Planners and officials try to re-
Downtown Los Angeles, for example, has less than 4 percent of the jobs in the region and does not even have as many jobs as Long Beach. Downtown San Jose is pathetic as a downtown: it has a few restaurants and a heavily subsidized hotel or two, but most of the real jobs are scattered around other parts of Santa Clara County. If you want a real “lively streets” experience, go to Santana Row.
Now Phoenix has succumbed to the downtown mania. As the Arizona Republic reports,
this year the city will open a $1.4 billion light-
Just what this country needs: another failed convention center. And why does ASU need a downtown Phoenix campus anyway? Isn’t Tempe a prestigious enough address for it?
Of course, Phoenix doesn’t limit its subsidies to downtown. The city is providing
$100 milion in subsidies to a new, mixed-
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. These giveaways are nothing more than a way to satisfy political egos, transfer tax dollars to favored developers, and give urban planners a chance to try their insane theories.
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Reprinted from The Antiplanner