Before I write the rest of this post, a disclaimer. I love my city. I moved to Arizona almost eight years ago, and the entire time, regardless of where my actual address was, I considered myself a Phoenician. When I finally left renting behind and bought a house, I would not hear of living in the 'burbs. It was Phoenix - and very specifically central Phoenix - or I wasn't doing it. I'm at 12th and Osborn now, smack middle of the block. I absolutely love living in a densely populated urban center where I can hear the birds in the back yard. There are world-class cultural venues on my doorstep. Every day I get the most spectacular view of Central Phoenix on my way to and back from work, courtesy of the HOV ramps from the 51 to I-10 East and back the other way, and every day it makes me smile.
That said, Phoenix is a screwed up place. There is too much undeveloped land. It is strangled by inadequate infrastructure. It labors under a "plan" that can barely be said to exist and badly needs to be reworked, if not tossed and rethought thanks to the great recession. In just one school district, my own, you get schools that get their As, and schools that rank meager Cs, and if you travel too far in any given direction those A-rated schools get farther and fewer between. We are awash in drug addicts. Homelessness remains a chronic problem, and you can't take an offramp anywhere in the city's core without seeing panhandlers or signs of them. Our historic buildings are forever at risk of the wrecking ball, victim of a city that has yet to make the pivot from reactive to proactive preservation policy. Perhaps, though, worst of it all, Phoenix feels like the diaspora of community. Where other communities would naturally take root and grow, where any other city this size would have its Chinatown, its Little Italy, its various immigrant enclaves and religious hubs, Phoenix has something that somewhat resembles a gayborhood, something else that somewhat resembles a barrio, a cluster of historic districts, and all those other communities have shattered against a ground so hard it can scarce be dug or tilled. It has crossed my mind, I must admit, to give up on any cultivation and leave.
But I can't leave here. Despite having stood at South Mountain and understood the depth of John 11:35, I cannot leave here. I see a city that is the test bed for liberalism. It is the argument built on desert sand that man is only bad due to bad structures and bad policy, and that if we abolish those he will naturally right himself and form new ones. We can point to example after example of completely bad policy. There is, of course, everyone's favorite hated Arizona policy - SB1070. We could decline to comply with it. It is an unfunded mandate, and we could very easily direct our police force that not one red cent of Phoenix's monies will pay for its enforcement. The city could refuse to pay for holding, transferring, or processing individuals under SB1070. We would in effect revert to our de facto status of sanctuary city. The reality, folks, is that "illegal aliens" have been living in Phoenix for as long as there has been a Phoenix to live in. The cleaning lady is not a threat to public safety - but the meth dealer you already have sufficient cause to hold very much is a threat, and he will be just fine in a jail in this country, rather than hurled across the border a free man.
It gets more obvious. Take the PHLOTE forms. These things serve one purpose and one purpose only - to take kids from Spanish-speaking homes, segregate them out of the classroom, impede their progress, and make them feel stupid and inferior for not speaking perfect flawless English like the white kids (who can't read, by the way). This shunts students into a program that makes them take English and only English, and nothing but English, until a test designed by English-speakers decides it is OK for them to study things other than English with students that speak English. Who decided this was a good idea? Why are we doing this? We've all seen Arizona's God-awful completion figures. If you take a chunk of students, and you make them not study content, for years, you are willfully causing that God-awful completion figure to exist. Further, you are ensuring that those children never get a chance to exchange ideas with peers that share their interests outside of their own linguistic block. Castaneda v. Pickard be damned, there is no legitimate educational need being served here - and the readily-available metrics quoted by the Governor herself should bolster our legal cover should such cover become necessary. Phoenix should inform the State that we intend to find a way to circumvent AZELLA, and then do so.
Though, city government could do more than nullify bad policy from the State. There is the matter of this foolish method of revenue collection the city uses - sales tax. We charge 2% on everything that is purchased within city limits. Land taxes, on the other hand, are peanuts. My fellow Phoenicians, I would like to take this moment to inform you that this is how you ensure your tax structure attempts to rob the poor for your revenues. It isn't effective. It isn't even efficient. It creates onerous bureaucratic burdens for business. It diminishes the purchasing power of every single consumer in city limits by 2%. That's an economic drag. At an assessed value of $12.3 billion (yes, billion), you could sneeze on the property tax rate and abolish the 2% sales tax. You wouldn't even have to do it in a revenue neutral way and you'd still cause virtually no economic pain. Let's say we wanted to raise twice the amount of tax through property taxes as we do now from sales tax - which would be about $1.2 million. We're talking a property tax rate increase in the pennies to get completely rid of the city sales tax. Gone Adios. Two percent more stuff being purchased in exchange for everyone pays one percent more property tax. Yes, this requires a referendum, but really, how do you make an argument against a fairer tax policy that raises more money and causes less pain? The neighboring cities might hate it, but then, they might copy it, too. In a city of 1.5 million people, making on average some thirty-six grand a year, this is an impact of somewhere in the $600-$700 per person ballpark that would not be spent on taxes, and could be spent on goods and services. Let's say my late-night napkin math is way off. Let's say this only restore $300 in purchasing power to every Phoenician on average. This is still $450M back into the local economy. In exchange for this huge boom in purchasing power, we are going to ask everyone that owns land - i.e. the business that will profit handsomely off all this new purchasing power - to pay a wee little sneeze more in property taxes. If you can find me the business leader who will not trade a $0.02 per $100 assessed value property tax increase for 2% more sales, I'll give you a quarter (and I'll probably slap him).
Now, property taxes are only valuable on property that is developed. Vacant lots are death to the tax base. They erode the value of the land around them. If only there were a way that the city could invest in itself! If only some provision of the charter allowed the city to engage in industry! Oh, but if only some legal framework existed whereby the city could snatch away a piece of land at these locked-in-by-law bottom of the bust land prices and fruitully employ it!
Oh wait, there totally is - and if we're smart we'll hijack money from Washington to do it. Follow the crazy idea.
Remember the drug problem I talked about up above? Addiction and mental disorders receive parity for treatment under the Affordable Care Act starting in 2014 - including under Medicaid. There simply aren't the facilities in existence to treat them all and deal with them all. The city charter explicitly authorizes the city to engage in industry by whatever means necessary. Under eminent domain, the city would only need to pay the appraised price, and 2012's Prop 117 ensures that those valuations will stay in bargain-basement territory for the next decade. The city could snap up derelict buildings and empty lots, create its own clinics of all manner - from urgent care to general practices to STD clinics to, yes, addiction treatment centers - and start scraping people up off the street and putting them back together again. If private practice can do this profitably, what on earth stops public practice from likewise doing it profitably? It's not like the market for health care is so small that behemoths like Banner will get crowded out any time soon. Hell, at customary rates, these facilities would pump money back into the city coffers at a brisk clip, and create scores of high-paying healthcare jobs in fields and communities that tend to be woefully under-served. We could pair this with existing drug interdiction programs and instead of just the incessant chain of incarceration that costs money and drains resources, maybe rehabilitate so much as a handful through a process that creates resources and maybe, just maybe, will let that person become a productive member of society instead of a felon. We would no longer need to let our fellow men die by the wayside.
The industry piece of it goes on, mind you. APS would hate it, but we could use the roof of absolutely every government building and every single parking lot that the city of Phoenix owns, lease it all out for solar panels, and save a fortune on electric costs. Considering the absurd amount of recyclables the city takes in every year, we could likely work a better deal than just handing it over to whomever - like a public-private partnership to bring an actual recycling plant to Phoenix, and create good, high-paying, blue-collar union jobs to take up some of the slack from construction as we transition from growth to sustainability. We could get into housing, into parking, into pharmacies - into whatever hole in the local economy city government chooses to plug up, just by exercising existing power under existing law, and we can get a quick cheap easy half million a year on a no-brainer of a tax change that I can't fathom the voters not going for, if we can just be brave enough to do it.
That, however, is why I love Phoenix. Phoenix is a brave city. It exists in one of the harshest climates in the nation, and yet it has matured into the nation's fifth-largest metropolis. It dares to think of places like airports as being friendly. There was a once upon a time, not too long ago, that it even dared innovate, and innovate successfully, on public policy. If this city is going to rise up again, if we are going to permanently establish our own prosperity, if it is going to make of itself the fertile soil in which communities can take root instead of barren waste where they whither, then it must be brave again. Personally, I do not believe Phoenix's best days are behind her. There will be no leaving Phoenix for me.
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