Reviews & Comments
Tucson, AZ
Forbes - 24/7 Wall St. - Wallethub 2017 Ratings -
8/23/2017A 2017 survey published by Forbes Magazine finds that Tucson is the 8TH WORST CITY IN THE NATION FOR JOBS AND JOB CREATION. Scottsdale, Chandler and Gilbert in the Phoenix metro area conversely placed in the top 10 cities nationwide for job growth.
The good news doesn't stop there. According to 2017 article in the Arizona Star, which was following up on research posted on AZ Central, a website for investors has decided that Tucson is the 28th worst city in the United States. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, analysis and commentary website 24/7 Wall St. says that its identified America's 50 worst cities to live. The website made its determination based on crime rates, employment growth, access to restaurants and attractions, educational attainment and housing affordability. TUCSON, THE ARTICLE SAYS, IS ONE OF THE ONLY CITIES IN THE SOUTHWEST THAT RANKS AMONG THE WORST PLACES TO LIVE. "The city’s poverty rate of 25.2% is far higher than the national poverty rate of 14.7 percent," the article says, adding that Tucson's economy has also grown slower than most other cities' in recent years. Also factoring into the rankings is the fact that Tucson has one of the highest property crime rates in the country.
There there are the annual Wallethub comparisons of cities which in 2017 ranked Tucson 486 out of the top 500 cities in the US in terms of economic, political and social/cultural health and resiliency. In the same analysis, Tucson ranked in last place among America's largest cities, coming in at 62 out of 62. Tucson has ranked at or very near bottom since Wallethub started publishing their city comparison surveys.
There is a tremendous disconnect between these rating agencies (and all other published indices of health and well-being) and what Tucson City Hall and public officials are claiming about Tucson. Tucson is simply the worst performing city in the Southwest. The Tucson residential housing market is sputtering and is not expected to reach pre-crash levels until 2025 - 2030 according to Case-Schiller, placing it in last place among cities in the Southwest. The commercial real estate market is faring little better.
You have to wonder how problems can be addressed when city officials refuse to publicly announce that there are serious long-standing problems. There are no public discussions or invitations to outside talent to help Tucson really look at itself take steps forward. Everything is white-washed. It's the land of make-believe here. Tucson should be a destination city not a trap to avoid. The political and social culture here has not changed and kept up with the rest of the nation. If anything, Tucson is in the worst shape that it has ever been in - 1/4th of it's population living at or below the Federal poverty level. WHAT ARE THEY THINKING? They are thinking that if they stick their heads in the sand that their problems will go away. Denial rules the day in Tucson.
Tucson, AZ
Troubled Tucson and No It's Not Getting Better -
8/21/2017I cannot understand how people can give Tucson glowing reviews today, unless they are trying to provide what they think is needed balance to overwhelmingly negative reviews. This isn't a competition between Tucson devotees and Tucson detractors. How does that help anybody really judge a place?
As far as Tucson goes, the news has been and continues to be overwhelmingly negative. Is that so bad? It doesn't have to be forever. And I fail to understand how it helps anyone or helps to improve anything if we all pretend that that the problems aren't so bad or don't exist. You can't learn from something you don't acknowledge. The truth is that Tucson is not doing well. It's performance coming out of 'The Great Recession' lags behind just about every other American city. And it is not just a matter of attitude or opinion either. Objective data don't lie.
10 years after the crash and well into recovery from the Great Recession, Tucson still ranks comparatively at or near bottom of all US cities in terms of wages; employee rights and job security; household income; people living at or below the Federal poverty level; income disparity between rich and poor; economic growth; economic diversification and resiliency; short and midterm economic outlook; infrastructure management (especially roads); the quality of public education; the quality of social services and safety nets; services for the mentally ill, children and vulnerable populations; homelessness; public transportation, per capita crime; alcoholism and drug addiction; recovery of the housing market, and the health and well-being of Tucson city government and Pima County government. Ask for help and they'll pretty much all tell you that they can't fill department jobs and hire quality talent because there's no money in city and county coffers.
Yes, this is a lusher Sonoran desert than you will find in Phoenix. The mountain views if you can afford to live outside of the city can be spectacular. The weather is cooler than Phoenix in general. If you like to hike and bike, you'll find plenty of places to do that in and around Tucson.
If you don't need to work or earn an income locally or if you're one of those few people who can find secure employment here, there are bargains aplenty in Tucson. But for most of you, I would think long and hard about calling Tucson home until things change drastically in this here 'Ole Pueblo'. Any time that you hear that children who grow up here can't remain here because there aren't enough quality, decent paying jobs to support the population the city already has - you really need to look hard at the fundamentals of where you are considering moving. This has always been true of Tucson. Young adults leave as soon as they graduate. Tucson has never been self-sustaining. Let's hope the citizenry is learning that lesson now. But don't hope for a quick turnaround. Tucson is incredibly slow to plan and act. There is tremendous embedded inertia here.
Tucson, AZ
Wallethub - Thumbs Down Part 1 -
8/1/2017From someone who has lived in and around Tucson for the last 40 years and is intimately familiar with local politics and trends, please read this carefully. Look at the majority of these recent threads. Tucson is a trap.
In Wallethub’s 2017 Survey of America’s Least Resilient cities, Tucson again came in LAST PLACE among the nation’s largest cities. In a ranking of 500 American cities in that same 2017 Wallethub study, Tucson ranked 486, placing it THE BOTTOM 3% OF ALL US CITIES in terms of economic viability, growth, and resiliency. Unfortunately, what has already been brought up in many of these 2015 and 2016 Sperling’s posts about Tucson is still all too true for 2017. Tucson also RANKED LAST PLACE in Wallethub’s 2015 Survey of least resilient cities, so no change there. Tucson has been ranking at or near bottom for 10 years now as most of the US leaves it almost completely behind, including Detroit.
This is a city that has blown just about every opportunity for real economic and income growth for many decades. Like the Rustbelt cities, it can’t support the working population it currently has. But unlike the Rustbelt cities, Tucson never had a viable industrial or economic base to begin with so it didn’t take much beyond a turn down in construction to bring the city to its knees. Tucson has not recovered at all from the 2007/2008 recession. In short, Tucson doesn’t have jobs. And the jobs that it does have are typically very low paying, menial, and uninteresting. Arizona is a Right-To-Work / At Will state, meaning you can be fired for nothing and have no worker protections. As an employee, you have no rights in Arizona which makes work and life in Tucson, a town with few jobs, even more precarious. A prominent local labor attorney put it best: “Tucson is simply the worst employment jurisdiction in the country”. If you must work and live in Tucson, remember that you are easily expendable as a worker and they will treat you accordingly. Your fellow employees will avoid you like the plague if you are fired for any reason and climb all over themselves to get the job you vacated. Learn to keep your eyes down and to grovel if you can even find a job that pays well.
On top of all this, Tucson has one of the nation’s worst social service systems. Arizona doesn’t believe in government or government programs so there is no safety net. The homeless don’t need to move here; they are created here and given bus passes to other cities. Arizona also ranks last in public education. Talent needs to be imported if it is here at all and usually leaves at the first opportunity. They can’t retain a quality head city planner to save their lives. The city has no money so many city offices and positions go unfilled. There is no zoning or code enforcement because they can’t staff the department. The city is even currently seeking donations for new police cars and protective gear for its law enforcement. Tucson is just this side of insolvency unless it can continue to cut departments and programs and raise taxes again.
Tucson’s performance over the past decade has appalled even its major proponents. No one talks about recovery anymore, just a long and uneven slog forward at best. The city is at least 20 to 30 years out at best from turning itself around, if it can find the political will and support to do so, which is doubtful. By then, it will be so far behind its competitors that it is unlikely that it will ever amount to more than a 3rd class retirement town, with depressed wages and lifestyles that go with that demographic. I see Tucson not as a real city, with any energetic or creative core (regardless of what kind of spin City Hall wants to put on its little downtown), but as a spread out and out-of-the way retreat for retirees who could care less about anyone but themselves. Retirees are basically split into two categories – the well-healed who live in gated or far-flung communities in the foothills and desert around the city that don’t pay city taxes and contribute as little as possible – and the poor ones, most of whom barely get by on social security and watch every penny because they’re not earning interest. So, if you are looking for a vibrant, involved community with vision, or a community that cares, DO NOT BUY THE TUCSON COMPANY LINE AND STAY ABSOLUTELY CLEAR OF HERE. There are no movers and shakers here if indeed there ever were in Tucson’s 300+ year history. This is a place with tremendous embedded apathy, neglect, decay, and missed opportunity. YOU SHOULD REREAD THESE Sperling’s POSTS BECAUSE THEY ALL SAY THE SAME THING… One has to wonder how much of Tucson’s morbidity goes with the retirees and their control over politics and the economy here, the area’s rampant libertarianism and isolationism, and apathy by the general population. It goes without saying that this is also a very disempowered population, with the exception again of a few big names and corporations and wealthy second-home retirees. As for the university, it is a self-contained world. It doesn’t benefit anything beyond a few blocks either way. Unlike ASU which was also more of a commuter campus that now has large presence throughout metro Phoenix, the UA is self-contained in Tucson, except of course for its new branch in DOWNTOWN PHOENIX - another thing that doesn’t bode well for Tucson, as more of the UA relocates to Phoenix.
Tucson, AZ
Wallethub - Thumbs Down Part 2 -
7/28/2017To 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.
Tucson, AZ
Terrible Economy -
7/26/2017The Tucson economy is terrible. Do not move here for work or a career or you will be very sorry.