Quote:
Originally Posted by Vincent_Adultman
San Jose and Phoenix were about the same size (~100K) in 1950 and both are over a million now. But San Jose is twice as dense and has a significantly more walkable, cohesive downtown. Yes it sprawls a ton but anyone who has experienced San Jose sprawl vs. Phoenix Sprawl knows the difference. Phoenix sprawl is like San Jose sprawl if someone stretched it out and flattened it with a rolling pin.
1950 was actually a key point for Phoenix when it had multiple tech companies and a nice, relatively small but walkable downtown core. it could have focused on strengthening its core with some moderate outward expansion. Instead for decades it was all about real estate speculation and building on as much land as possible as far out as possible with major government subsidies. Phoenix was not alone in sprawling out during this time, but they took it to the next level.
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San Jose is a lot more restricted via water and other neighboring cities and geographic features than the Valley of the Sun is. In addition, San Francisco being the bigger place in the 1950s, was even then more left-leaning than here and that affected a lot of the Bay Area's development as well.
There was no reason, remember that now we know better, but in hindsight there was no real reason to develop like the Bay Area. There was no desire for that style of townhouse development that has characterized a lot of SF in most of the US, especially in Phoenix, and there was no geographic reason to do so. The suburbs of Phoenix that are not landlocked and cannot grow more land are finally building up, my city of Tempe and also Scottsdale as well.
Phoenix's (and it's suburbs) aggressive land annexation policies is the main reason why the metropolitan area has managed to stay affordable (very much unlike the Bay Area) despite being one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US. It is important to note that being in a non-active managed area (AMA) of the Arizona Department of Water Resources basically means getting water will be next to impossible on most land, unless your lot happens to get very lucky, and let's face it water is pretty important for a lot of things. Around 80-90% of all Arizonans are in one of the AMAs. As it is now unpopular by most people for cities to sprawl into Narnia and with much more concern for our water infrastructure, all of our suburbs will eventually limit themselves, and that in and of itself will limit Phoenix's growth. Especially as numbers and statistics prove that not nearly enough taxes come from single-family housing suburbs to fund the roads, water piping, electrical wires, fire, police, and education they need.
As a Phoenix born and raised I hate the historic annexation policies we took on, for example we (as in Phoenix and other nearby cities) would not recognize new towns unless they got recognized by ALL neighboring jurisdictions, which made it impossible for new towns to form. This is unique to the State of Arizona as far as I know. For example this prevented the towns of Sunnyslope, Cactus, and a few other places I'm sure. And if we had more towns like other states do (because they don't have some inane town recognizing policy like our state does) Phoenix would be way, way more dense than it is now, as cities love increasing their tax revenue and by not getting more land, the best way to do that is to build up.
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