A Word To The Wise . . .
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10/26/2019
. . . from someone who has lived for almost 20 years in Tucson, regarding reviews that enthusiastically endorse the city.
Note carefully where a reviewer who extols Tucson reports that he or she lives, and whether throughout the year there, or as a part-time resident. Often the writer lives outside – sometimes well outside – the limits of the city or only winters in its vicinity, in its most clement season. This invariably outfits that person with rose-colored glasses.
As examples, some positive reviewers give their opinion from Oro Valley, a town to the north of Tucson, with far more effective municipal administration and law enforcement. Others write from Casa Adobes, an unincorporated zone of affluent homeowners and upscale restaurants and boutiques to the northwest. For decades its residents have resisted annexation by Tucson, it not being to their taste to pay high taxes for low quality in the delivery of public services. And still others confess residence in Catalina Foothills, another unincorporated but prestigious area, just beyond the city's northern edge. Snowbirds and transplanted Californians favor it for its fine dining and luxury shopping options and its safe neighborhoods, some of which are private and gated. Villas in them cost up to $1.75 million and boast scenic vistas of Tucson below, where rates of property and violent crime are more than double the national average and by federal definition 25 percent of the inhabitants are impoverished.
Some favorable reviewers of Tucson live as far as 25 miles away, in Saddlebrooke, a northward-lying, master-planned community restricted to those over 55 and studded with high-end homes planted beside golf course fairways. It is chiefly peopled by well-to-do retirees, with no need to fight to work on the thickly congested and badly deteriorated streets of Tucson, or to rue that its underfunded schools are failing their children.
In common, these atypically cocooned reviewers celebrate the advantages of their seemingly Tucson-based lifestyle. And if you are unfamiliar with the geography of the region around Tucson, you could be forgiven for thinking that they are describing a happy existence bestowed on them entirely by the city, rather than expressing views strongly colored by the pleasing aspects of their own communities.
They likewise unreservedly praise the pleasant temperatures and cloudless skies of their surroundings. And through imprecise expression they sometimes convey the idea that this mildness is consistent and extends to Tucson at large, garbling the real story. In so doing, they may also overlook to mention that they annually flee north or to the cooler Pacific coast to escape the region’s peak torridness from May through September. Or, if they remain, that they live at elevations higher or in environs greener and wetter than found in Tucson, enjoying microclimates that the city does not have, and which temper the heat that brutalizes urban residents.
Fortunately, there is an antidote to the confusion that laudatory reviews of Tucson can sow when they lack vital context – information which, if you had it, would lead you to seriously question upbeat conclusions about the city's livability.
On this website are more than 260 posts about Tucson. Dating to as long ago as 2005 and written in the main by observers who actually live or have lived in the city and year around, in their vast majority they detail an extensive suite of major and perennial drawbacks that accompany life in Tucson.
I wrote one of them myself: "The Long and Short of Tucson," uploaded to Best Places on 2/16/2018 and updated through 8/28/2019. It runs to 21,000 words, sufficient to cover virtually everything of significance about the city and the quality of life there. Read it, as well as a broad sample of all the other reviews, across all the years in which they appeared. This is the surest way to inform yourself fully and accurately about the city, so as to decide judiciously whether to move there.
That some reviewers reside in great comfort amid refined amenities in attractive outlying areas or find these enclaves highly agreeable backdrops for their winter sojourns is well for them. But less fortunate is that they are prone to extrapolate from their privileged and particular circumstances and generalize unreliably that Tucson itself is a most desirable place, although conditions of life there are in many ways manifestly unappealing, causing even these advocates to live at arm’s length from the city. So be wary and apply a skeptical eye to their lopsidedly sunny evaluations, and do not mistake them for the last word on the subject.
A | Tucson, AZ