Wow.In the end, HP'ers, what happened to Phoenix these past six years is truly sad. They had a great canvas to work with, and it could have become a great American city. But the REIC, a corrupted REIC-led government, and its clueless undereducated population simply f*cked it up. I absolutely loved Phoenix in the mid-90s, but it's no longer that town. It changed for the worse - much much worse.
Phoenix, thanks to the housing bubble, quickly became a crime-ridden, fake-economy, uneducated, soulless, cheap, plastic, poser-filled, realtor-infested, illegal-immigration-run-amok hellhole. A perfect example of what happens when the REIC gets hold of a major metropolitan area and uses it for their short-term gain. And a perfect example of horrific urban planning, or lack thereof.
Phoenix may very well become the new Detroit of the Southwest. A town based on a single industry (real estate - 40% of the Phoenix economy) while run by a corrupted government, that slipped into the abyss when the industry blew up.
No matter what clueless Phoenix realtors on commission try to tell you, no one American city will be destroyed by the Housing Crash more than Phoenix, Arizona (and it's urban cancer of suburbs). New Orleans had a hurricane. Phoenix had mortgage brokers and a massive housing bubble and crash. Foreclosures will be everywhere, and the crash in home prices will shock and awe.
Into the ashes - PHOENIX
From The Economist print edition
Phoenix was once hailed as a model city. It grew fast. Its streets were new and shiny, and housing was cheap. Beginning in 1950, the National Civic League voted Phoenix an “All-American City” four times. In 1993 an international competition rated Phoenix, along with Christchurch, New Zealand, the world's best-governed city. Forbes recently ranked it as America's second-best job market, thanks to its buoyant property market and rapid urban growth. In the past five years metropolitan Phoenix's population has grown by almost a fifth, to over 4m.
But in the past few years the awards have mostly dried up and things have started to go wrong. Burglary, theft and car crime are among the highest in the country. Newcomers who left Los Angeles to avoid smog and commuter traffic find that both are little better in Phoenix, and the area scores embarrassingly low in national education ratings. In October the Morgan Quitno Press, a research group, credited Arizona with the worst public education in the country, thanks to overcrowded classrooms, poor test scores and low salaries for teachers.
But in the past few years the awards have mostly dried up and things have started to go wrong. Burglary, theft and car crime are among the highest in the country. Newcomers who left Los Angeles to avoid smog and commuter traffic find that both are little better in Phoenix, and the area scores embarrassingly low in national education ratings. In October the Morgan Quitno Press, a research group, credited Arizona with the worst public education in the country, thanks to overcrowded classrooms, poor test scores and low salaries for teachers.
Phoenix's Native-American art shops and taco restaurants offer pockets of variety, but generic food chains such as International House of Pancakes and Pizza Hut still dominate. The property market is white-dominated too, Ms Koptiuch says, with its suburbs policed by homeowners' associations which insist on a certain uniformity of style.
