I live in one of the many cities in America where growth takes precedence over everything else. Phoenix has worked very hard to grow in both population and industry for the last 30 years. This city is a giant convection oven because of all the growth, covering natural soils with asphalt and concrete has trapped heat, and on summer evenings the city air will only cool down to 100 degrees. The funniest thing about this city is the mantra that they hold on to “but it’s a dry heat” to try to explain that it’s not really as hot here as people think it is. I grew up in the desert city of Albuquerque, NM and I will attest that Phoenix also has a terrible problem with humidity. Two very large industries here have contributed to the ever increasing humidity, golf courses and farming. This city canals water into it from all across the state and irrigates massive parcels of citrus, cotton, corn, and golf courses. Urban sprawl can’t even begin to explain Phoenix and its many suburbs. The suburb I live in Mesa is 110 sq miles and has industries and housing from end to end but is less than half developed. Private property rights has meant that long time owners of land have held onto them undeveloped for decades while growth goes on around them. The problem is only getting worse, since the big housing boom of 2004 middle income people who didn’t already own homes can no longer afford to buy within the cities and are moving farther and father away for affordable housing, new towns that were not even on the map 10 years ago are now housing boom towns. People moving 30 to 40 miles outside of town have to get into town every day and there is no mass transit so cars are being used by every one of them.
Smart growth encompasses many things including planning, zoning, taxes, protection and revitalization. The most important thing to me is planning; my city is planned around the use of the automobile, with almost no thought to any form of mass transit system until about 5 years ago when the cities decided to build a light rail system from east to west. The big problem with the light rail is that it will bring people into downtown Phoenix where there is a mass concentration of jobs, but that downtown concentration runs 10 miles or more north to south, so once people get into downtown no thought has been put into how they then get north and south economically. I think that while the cities may have had good intentions with this light rail it will never get used and the 300 million dollars could have been put to much better use. One of our fastest growing suburbs the Town of Gilbert recently used one of these tools to slow growth because the town could not keep up with the number of people moving in and schools were becoming overcrowded and law enforcement was way below par. The Town of Gilbert placed a heavy tax burden on every new home built. This was a very effective way to reduce growth and solve the need for tax dollars for infrastructure. The cities of this megalopolis do a good job of conserving some land in its natural state but that is the only area in which we do a good job. These cities all need to put more effort into promoting recycling, the use of solar energy of which we have an abundance with over 320 sunny days per year, and the promotion of green building designs.