Quote:
Originally Posted by MMDelon
Hey everyone I am new to the group and have been reading your post for awhile and decided to join. I am born and raised here in the Valley and it's pretty cool to see the development during the last 5 years. I am still a little confused on why Phoenix has such a small downtown with such a big population. I know some of it has to do with the airport and some due to height restrictions. Things like urban sprawl plays a part to but it's still very surprising when I visit cities like Austin, Denver, and Seattle to see the difference in the skyline and downtown development. What do y'all feel needs to happen for our downtown to catch up?
|
Story time!
Phoenix was never a port city or anything like that, it was picked as the center of a fairly large agricultural area when it was founded--homesteads stretched very very far around the area the townsite in 1900. Thomas Rd was considered North Phoenix in 1950--the pre-war population in Phoenix was very small compared to other established cities which is why downtown is small but it was bustling in its day and on its death knell for many years after Park Central was built. Streetcars meandered around as far as 20th St, 19th Ave, an interurban to Glendale, lines like that. But they didn't survive the post war economy as the larger area suburbanized.
North Central Avenue was basically stately mansions that started to come down in the 1960s. Then, an urban renewal trend starting with county and city government buildings and later commercial buildings in the 1970s hit downtown, but it really wasn't sustained and the immediate area looked like a large nuclear bomb went off around 1980 as white flight and later the open air crack markets ravaged the central city. Phoenix wasn't that great a place to live, it was crime ridden and corrupt during this period.
Around then, and for a while, Downtown wasn't really looked at like a mixed use urban neighborhood but an anti-urban office and government district surrounded by a collection of single uses like parking garages, convention centers, arenas, stadiums, that sort of thing. It would serve a daytime population and a nighttime population but not both if that makes sense.
That was pretty much the case until 2004 or so and the urban renewal continued with ASU and the biomedical stuff landing downtown. Although there were a few signature developments like Post Roosevelt Square or whatever it it is today, what was a ghost town or gay/affordable housing ghetto had normies actually begin to want to live in the area, and although little was built during condomania preceding the Great Recession, downtown started to finally pick up.
To answer your question, opportunity zone tax credits are behind most of the dozen+ cranes in the sky today, an unexpected thing I've been waiting for for most of the last 20 years that has pretty much turned the place around within the last five years and will put a huge population downtown and further development.
Prev
Linear Mode
