Wallethub - Thumbs Down Part 2
-
7/28/2017
To many real estate and financial experts, Tucson is unlike just about every other Southwestern city in that it is beginning to be doubtful that it ‘can’ recover from the real estate recession. It appears to be falling off the map. One has to wonder why when 10 years on, Tucson is largely stuck in place with real estate prices in many parts of the city still near bottom and empty store fronts all over town. Meanwhile, metro Phoenix is more-or-less completely recovering – again leaving Tucson in the proverbial dust. While Phoenix does have the airport and the central location ideal for travel within the state as well as the bulk of resorts and convention centers serving the tourist and business classes, it was also very badly overbuilt during the last real estate bubble. Tucson doesn’t have that excuse. Tucson’s problems have more to do with decades of poor planning, managerial and fiscal incompetence, and embedded inertia or ‘the lack of collective will’ to get out in front of itself and stop using the same failed and lackluster formulas it has used for decades. It can’t even retain talent it hires from outside, no doubt because the challenges facing the city and any sort of meaningful turnaround are so daunting and the cultural malaise infecting city government can’t be hidden for long. It is no joke that city department heads come in and then turn around and move back to their old cities within months of being initially hired. This has happened far too often over the past decade to be coincidence.
How does one change a culture that doesn’t want to change? How does one promote growth to a population that is risk averse, especially when the city couldn’t handle its own major redevelopment project and had to surrender control to the state? Obviously, you can’t. Tucson has spent most of its years attracting middle and lower income retirees, which is exactly what its housing stock and overall condition reflect and why change will be hard and slow. The city was essentially built with this demographic in mind and moves at a pace suited to this demographic; hardly exciting and hardly vibrant. Sure, there are exceptions but with the real estate collapse, this demographic has now moved into once nicer neighborhoods and is bringing property values down in areas that were previously less affected and should be improving. In a city like Tucson, where you are allowed to park cars all over your front yard and don’t have to keep up your home at all, and they can’t afford to pay code enforcement officers to enforce what little codes they do have on their books, there’s very little to keep neighborhood after neighborhood from continuing to deteriorate. Don’t confuse Tucson with the newer communities surrounding it like Oro Valley and Vail where they have learned from Tucson’s mistakes and have stricter codes and/or homeowner’s associations to keep neighborhoods in shape and protect property values. Tucson itself is one of the poorer and worst kept cities in the metro area.
Is it any wonder that young people can’t wait to move away? It’s not just about jobs. Is it any wonder that the only thing that city hall can now use to attract anyone to move here is the extremely low cost of housing and living? Each year that the city fails to see property values increase and natural growth occur, they have to raise taxes to simply stay afloat. And they are not staying afloat. What city hall won’t tell you is that they have already cut services through the bone, not just to the bone. We are talking about a city that is seeing a rise in poverty year over year as its property values and assets stagnate. The locals like to blame Phoenix for keeping all the money but the truth is that Tucson has been in the slow lane for so long that it wouldn’t know how to market itself or compete with Phoenix for its share of funding. Compared to Phoenix, every effort that Tucson makes to promote itself looks amateurish and unprofessional, again because it has no local talent or money. And the cycle just repeats itself.
As for who is to blame, I don’t think Phoenix set out to make Tucson fail. Tucson seems to have done an excellent job of that on its own. Unfortunately, while there have been improvements these past few years to its small downtown and around the university, it’s basically all window dressing and hype. The rest of Tucson is still a long way from any sort of meaningful recovery. And people now are just giving up and moving, regardless of what they can get out of their homes because it’s obvious that there’s no real recovery and it’s simply too depressing to continue to wait.
Sam | Catalina Foothills, AZ