Reviews & Comments
Tucson, AZ
A Word To The Wise . . . -
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.
Tucson, AZ
The Long And Short Of Tucson -
2/16/2018If you are pondering a visit to Tucson or a move here, this review can help you, with its concrete observations based on my nearly 18 years of residence and work in many parts of the city and its northwestern suburb of Marana. It includes recent verified statistics, superseding often outdated and mutually conflicting figures provided by Best Places, and since it was first posted, it has been updated continually through August 28, 2019.
I sketch Tucson's natural surroundings and climate, some of its cultural resources and celebrations, the affordability and quality of its housing and neighborhoods, and its transportation infrastructure and crime trends. I also cover Tucson's job market, its main employers, and how much you need at a minimum to live here, as well as the city's economy and business environment, its schools, governance, and media, and its people – how they drive, what they like to do and eat, their health, and how they view their hometown and each other.
There's much to read here, because this long review is not a simple and fact-free "I love it here, I hate it here" verdict. You may want to print it out, so that you can digest it in parts, rather than at one sitting in front of your computer. But stay the course either way, because the point of it is to give you the fullest picture possible from one long-time resident's admittedly limited perspective. I must say at the outset, however, that what I daily see and what I have experienced in my time here leads me to align with the overwhelming majority of reviewers on this website: my overall evaluation of Tucson is negative.
THE LONG:
Before you come to Tucson, it's important that you distinguish between the city and its weather and geographic setting. Positive reviewers frequently extol the welcome warmth of Tucson in winter and its sunshine – the city averages 310 sunny days a year – as well as the Sonoran Desert and the mountains that surround the city and which in many places are lovely. They are very right to do so. But scarcely anyone favorably reviews the city itself.
Putting that aside for the moment, let’s start with Tucson’s advantages.
The biggest is of course its natural landscape. The city lies in the unique Sonoran Desert, which extends into southern Arizona from the Mexican state of Sonora. Invasive and native mesquite and other native thorn trees – chiefly ironwood and various species of palo verde and acacia – are fairly abundant here, albeit few grow higher than 25 feet. Taller are the cottonwoods in the very few river and stream bottoms with flowing water, and palms which, with but one exception, are introduced species. There is also one naturally-occurring species of sycamore. Cacti are everywhere, in stunning variety and all sizes, from pin cushion scale to iconic multi-armed saguaros 40 or more feet tall. In spring this stony, spiny desert is brilliantly abloom with palo verde draped in veils of elfin lemon-yellow blossoms, and multitudes of cactus flowers in cream, yellow, hot pink, red, orange, and purple.
The flora shelters an amazing range of wildlife and insects. Bobcats and javelina (properly called collared peccaries – they are not wild pigs) are common in many suburban backyards. There are also coyotes and mountain lions, fox and deer, and black bears and coatis. (Google coatis; you will be surprised at what you see.) There are rattlesnakes, desert tortoises, Gila monsters, and collared lizards and geckos too, as well as scorpions, tarantulas, and desert millipedes . . . hummingbirds . . . roadrunners . . . quail . . . elf owls . . . multiple species of bats. If you love all God's creatures, you'll find Tucson's environs are your Eden.
Immediately north and northeast of Tucson are the Santa Catalina Mountains. Their highest point – Mt. Lemmon – rises 9,157 feet. Its height and desert location make the peak a "sky island," so called because it harbors many plants and animals that cannot survive in the hotter and more arid basin that surrounds it and which cuts them off from other mountain-bound populations elsewhere, as if on oceanic isles biologically and ecologically isolated by expanses of seawater.
Ascending to the top of Mt. Lemmon from Tucson’s general elevation of 2,400 to 2,600 feet is the equivalent of traveling from northern Mexico to southern British Columbia, Canada. As you climb and average year-around temperatures fall, you eventually reach a summit covered with aspen, fir, and spruce. There is even a ski lift, serving 22 runs and trails. It often snows on Mt. Lemmon, but the ski area usually accumulates only a thin base. If you want to schuss as if in the Alps, you need to go to northern Arizona, to Flagstaff.
At the foot of the Santa Catalinas is Sabino Canyon, a favorite of Tucsonans who like to walk in nature. A creek there runs for much of the year, and hiking trails leading from the canyon and farther into the mountains will take you to a series of refreshing small pools and waterfalls.
Also nearby, but west of the city, are the Tucson Mountains, conical remnants of volcanoes. To the east are the humpbacked Rincon Mountains, and to the southeast are the craggy Santa Rita Mountains. These ranges all have trails for hiking and horseback rides, and the Santa Ritas enfold Madera Canyon, a crease in the terrain filled with oak and juniper that hosts wild turkeys, 15 kinds of hummingbirds, and more than 250 other bird species, including colorful and sometimes rare migratory exotics from Central America. For good reason, Madera Canyon is renowned as the foremost bird watching site in the Southwest.
To educate yourself about the plants and animals of the Sonoran Desert, head to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, a hybrid zoo-preserve-garden about 12 miles west of Tucson. You can also visit Tohono Chul Park, a botanical garden just to the northwest of the city, where nearly all the native vegetation is helpfully labelled.
The region around Tucson draws not only nature lovers, but astronomy enthusiasts as well, with four major concentrations of observatories only a 60-minute to three-hour drive away. Westward is Kitt Peak, where is perched the National Optical Astronomy Observatory with 24 optical, radio, and solar telescopes, more such equipment on one mountaintop than anywhere else in the world. To the south, outside Green Valley, is Mt. Hopkins and the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, conducting solar system and galactic astronomy with unique instruments for gamma ray research. On Mt. Graham, near Safford to the northeast, is the second-largest joint optical telescope in the continental U.S., which uses two huge mirrors in an unusual binocular configuration. In the Santa Catalinas to the north is the Mt. Lemmon Sky Center, operational base of the Catalina Sky Survey, keeping watch for Earth-threatening asteroids and sponsored by the Lunar and Planetary Lab of the University of Arizona.
In Tucson itself, at the university, the Richard F. Caris Mirror Laboratory casts, grinds, and polishes the world’s largest telescope mirrors, 17-ton behemoths 27.5 feet in diameter. You can tour all of these space science installations during the day, and join nighttime stargazing programs as well at Kitt Peak and the Mt. Lemmon Sky Center.
Inscribed in the city's cultural ledger are the Tucson Museum of Art and a children's museum, as well as museums of Arizona's settlement and the culture of the state's Native Americans. Yet more showcase planes, advertising sign art, postal and pharmacy history, vintage cars, minerals, and miniatures of characters and scenes from folklore and fiction. In the oldest synagogue building in Arizona is a Jewish history and Holocaust center. And there is a Cold War-era missile silo, with a Titan II ICBM. A training missile, it never contained a warhead, but 17 others once ringing Tucson with its Davis-Monthan Air Force Base on continuous 24-hour alert did.
Perhaps the last thing you would expect in a desert is a Japanese garden, yet our city has an authentic one. In midtown is Yume Japanese Gardens and Museum of Tucson. On less than an acre, Yume traces 1,000 years of classical Japanese landscape design, from a koi pond garden to intimate courtyard gardens and a meditation garden as found in traditional residences and Zen Buddhist temples in Japan's ancient imperial capital of Kyoto. Seasonal Japanese festivals, tea ceremonies, and classes in the art of Japanese flower arranging (Ikebana) are held frequently at Yume. There too you can step into a replica traditional Japanese cottage, and view the only collection of Japanese art and folk crafts on permanent public display in the Southwest outside of the Denver Art Museum and the Crow Museum of Asian Art in Dallas.
There is also the Tucson Symphony, along with a chamber music group, girls’ and boys’ choruses, opera, theater, modern dance, and classical and Mexican folkloric ballet companies, and several art galleries of note. (I especially like the Etherton Gallery, specializing in contemporary fine-art photography.) At the University of Arizona is the Center for Creative Photography, co-founded by Ansel Adams, the leading 20th-century photographer of the American West. It holds an important archive of his work and one of the largest collections of modern photography in the U.S. You can learn more about these organizations and many others at the website of the Tucson Convention and Visitors Bureau (www.visittucson.org).
The Bureau website furthermore details the festivals and other events held in Tucson throughout the year. There is, for example, the Tucson Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Showcase in late January and early February, the largest exposition of its kind in the world. There is an annual rodeo, in late February, followed in early March by the Tucson Festival of Books at the University of Arizona; it is reputedly the third-largest annual literary event in the nation.
Likewise in March (and again in December) is the Fourth Avenue Street Fair, to which bands, street performers, and arts and crafts makers attract throngs for three days. October brings Tucson Meet Yourself, featuring folklife performing artists and vendors of food eaten by the city's different ethnic groups. And on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, El Tour de Tucson takes place. Last year this bicycle rally lured 9,000 participants from all over Arizona and states as far away as Washington and Florida onto Tucson's city streets and suburban roads in timed and staged rides from one to 100 miles long.
The gathering that draws me most often and always moves me is the quintessential Tucson celebration that is the Día de los Muertos. On this “Day of the Dead” in early November, people parade through downtown at twilight in an All Souls Procession in remembrance of loved ones passed on. Many marchers and spectators – more than 100,000 in recent years – reverently carry photos of their deceased relatives and wear makeup that transmutes their faces into spectral skulls, and costumes that transform them into ghoulish apparitions and netherworld demons. Taiko drummers, mariachis, and bagpipers mingle with other participants hoisting wraith-like puppets on poles and pulling small homemade floats with flower-bedecked altars and candle-lit shrines honoring the departed. Macabre? No. Rather call it humane: the crowd is fused in solidarity by shared loss and deathless, tender memory, lending this event an ineffable intimacy despite the massive turnout, and elevating it above all other civic occasions in Tucson as a window on the city's personality.
Give a thought now to Tucson's weather.
As you'd imagine, regional atmospheric circulation and the lay of the land around Tucson set the city’s thermostat. About this, I have to gainsay reviewers who laud our weather as paradisiacal. It can be so from mid-October to mid-April; for most of the rest of the year it is usually uncomfortably – even infernally – hot. Re-read what I have written above about notable outdoor events in Tucson. Notice any held between March and October?
If you like more than the barest hint of seasonality in your year, you would be wise to think twice before moving to Tucson. Not for nothing did a local wag dub the city "The Baked Apple" as long ago as 1988. And in the nearly two decades that I have been here, the weather has been overheating earlier and earlier from year to year, the high temperatures have been rising more and more, and the maximums have been plateauing for longer and longer.
In 2017, for example, we reached 90 degrees on a daily basis by the third week in March, regularly surpassed 100 in late May, and lingered above 105 almost daily in June (with a three-day stretch of 115, 116, and 115), before temperatures retreated somewhat during monsoon rains from mid-July to late August. (Although now in its 13th consecutive year of drought – recently declared by the National Weather Service to be "extreme" – Tucson still receives an annual average of 10 to 12 inches of rain, most of it in late summer thunderstorms and minor showers in late winter.)
We were still topping 100 on Halloween, and three days after Thanksgiving the high was 92. Last year was the 19th straight year of above-normal temperatures in Tucson and the hottest since record keeping began here in 1887. The previous hottest year was 2016.
January 2018 set another all-time record for warmth, and ornamental fruit trees began flowering at mid-month. The first 12 days of February saw maximums of 78 to 84 degrees. As I write, we have had an unusual two days of steady light rain, cooling things to the upper 50s, with a predicted return to the low 80s by the end of the first week in March. Thereafter we will be back on an inexorable climb to the insufferable: meteorologists expect that the average temperature this coming summer will exceed even the withering heat of last year.
(Update, October 31, 2018: The meteorologists were correct in their prediction of another summer of greater-than-usual heat. As of October 1, temperatures in every preceding month in 2018 were above average, and September was the hottest ever here. Quite unusually, however, much of October saw highs only in the 80s and was wet, the result of abnormal weather patterns set up by hurricanes and lesser tropical storms that battered Mexico's Pacific coast. But forecasters say not to count on extended coolness and that this winter will be warmer than normal, continuing the trend of recent years.)
Innocents new to Tucson can labor under the misapprehension that ours is a "dry heat," and therefore more bearable than, say, steamy summers in Houston, New Orleans, Miami, or Washington, D.C. This however is a jest on the part of the more mischievous of us locals, and the truth is that we do suffer frequently unpleasant levels of humidity during the annual monsoon season from June 15 to September 30. And the blast furnace intensity of our heat – be it dry or damp – is not to be taken lightly, because it can be deadly.
Heat-related deaths in Arizona peak in July but occur as early as May and can continue through September. Most often felled are outdoor laborers, the unsheltered homeless, hikers, and children left in cars with rolled-up windows. Elderly persons succumb too, when their electricity is shut off for missing utility payments and they cannot reach refuge in air-conditioned malls or restaurants. From 2007 to 2016, the Arizona Department of Health Services recorded 969 heat deaths statewide, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tallied 235 more in 2017. In contrast, that year there were 35 tornado fatalities in the entire U.S.
Also in 2017, heat exhaustion and stroke sent 3,689 Arizonans to emergency rooms or hospital wards; an unknown additional number self-treated. The hardest-hit areas were Phoenix and Tucson, partly because they are the state's first- and second-largest population centers, but as well because their maximum temperatures are among the highest anywhere in Arizona.
(Update, April 24, 2019: An analysis released today of weather data from the National Centers for Environmental Information shows that Tucson was the third-fastest warming city in the U.S. over the past 48 years, behind only Las Vegas and El Paso. Phoenix came in fourth.
Growing aridity and rising daily temperature highs are partly to blame, but so is a "heat island effect," in which buildings, asphalt streets, and concrete sidewalks absorb heat in the day and reradiate it at night. That mechanism has lifted our average nighttime low by nearly three degrees since 1970.)
I have lived in far northern climes and appreciate that no one likes to pass three, four, or even five months of the year confined to their house by winter snow and cold. But in Tucson – and of course depending upon your personal tolerance for perspiring and your access to a pool – you will live six to seven months shut in all day and well into the evening to escape the heat, and what you do not spend on propane, natural gas, or oil to warm a northern dwelling, you will spend and more on electricity to cool your home here.
(Update, July 28, 2019: In Tucson and surrounding Pima County, residential customers paid the main electricity supplier – Tucson Electric Power – an average of 12.2 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2018. They spent the tiniest fraction less for power from Trico Electric Cooperative, the area’s other provider. Both utilities charged less than the Arizona average of 12.8 cents, but up to 3.2 cents more per kilowatt-hour than statewide averages in Texas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.)
This is a good juncture at which to segue to housing in Tucson.
Although in 2016 the city could claim a cost of living 4.2 percent below the U.S. average it can no longer make that boast, mainly because of sharply rising housing costs. Until recently, single-family and apartment homes and rental units were priced within the budget of many. Those days are swiftly passing, however.
The National Association of Home Builders reckons that 208,000 carpenters, roofers, masons, plasterers, and other craftspeople either changed occupations or departed Arizona during the Great Recession and that few have resumed their trades in the interval. This so seriously retarded residential construction in Tucson and Pima County at the time and since that demand for new housing here now handily outstrips supply. Developments worth half a billion dollars are on the books, but a lingering deficit of skilled labor is slowing their construction, and until these communities come on line over the next 18 to 48 months and barring a rerun of recession, existing housing is set to fetch ever higher prices.
This has heartened homeowners who for years were underwater or nearly so on their investment. But it confronts newcomers with increasingly steep financial hurdles to buying a reasonably attractive dwelling anywhere but in the suburbs. The limited inventory of homes for sale has pushed up prices in some areas of the city by more than 20 percent in the last year. And first-time buyers must compete with investors paying cash who want to flip houses after making minor cosmetic improvements or turn them into rentals.
To give you an appreciation of what you might pay and where, I see listed today a tiny, two-bedroom adobe of tumble-down 1930s exterior in one of the seamier mid-town neighborhoods. The asking price? $213,000. Or perhaps you wish a bungalow short blocks from the Tucson Museum of Art in the center of downtown. It is no bigger than the adobe and is older, dating from 1901. But as any realtor will tell you, location is all, and it will set you back $475,000. These examples have contributed to elevating the average mid-February 2018 sales price for existing homes in the Tucson market to $249,095.
(Update, June 3, 2019: The median sales price of existing homes in Tucson is now $232,000. The median price of new housing in Pima County reached an all-time high in 2018, breaking the $300,000 barrier for the first time. Today it stands at $312,125, only fractionally less than the national median.)
With the cost of ownership at such levels, more and more Tucsonans (51.2 percent in 2017) must perforce rent a home or an apartment. This has put rental units under increasing price pressures too, and moderately priced desirable ones are in extremely short supply. The Tucson metro area is now at more than 94 percent occupancy for all rentals, an historic peak.
Out-of-state individual investors and massive private equity firms alike purchased a significant portion of Tucson's rental home and apartment stock during the recession. Their buying spree continues today, with the absentee institutional landlords now increasingly acquiring even manufactured housing communities, commonly called mobile home parks. House and apartment rents and trailer lot fees invariably rise substantially – by as much as $250 per month – when the new owners take over, with a consequent negative effect on housing affordability.
(Update, July 19, 2019: More rental properties sold in and around Tucson in 2018 than during any year in the last decade, and as investment plays by profit-hunters have created “churn” in the market, rental housing has become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Illustration is provided by a major apartment complex sale announced today. It advances the buyer – a real estate investment corporation based in Massachusetts – to ownership of 26 percent of the area’s entire multifamily inventory.)
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that, among metro areas of over one million people, Tucson was one of the five least affordable rental markets in the country in 2017. This was the product of very low median household income combined with fast-climbing median gross rents. More than half of Tucson renters were paying a third of their median family earnings to their landlords, comparable to the situation of renters in San Diego, and a quarter of them expended 50 percent of their income on housing. If you are relocating from New York City or Los Angeles, it's not likely that your coastal paycheck will migrate with you, and you will not see it even remotely approximated here. Earning wages or a salary typical of our area means that renting in Tucson can be as financially burdensome as anywhere else – or more so.
In regard to apartments, the shrinking number still affordable to the average Tucsonan are long in the tooth, most dating from the 1970s and 1980s. Examining rental complexes of 40 units or more – by far the most numerous in the region – the Pima County Real Estate Research Council finds that 24 percent were built in the 70s, and 50 percent were erected in the 80s. The oldest especially are frequently badly in need of upgrades to their appliances, bathroom fixtures, roofing, pools, and clubhouses.
Because the portfolio of prospective new rental complexes is far smaller than that of single-family homes and because most contemplate high-end "luxury" units, renters who are not well-heeled are over a barrel. For the foreseeable future, they must pay whatever is demanded of them, no matter how dilapidated the apartments they have to select from and how little value they receive for their money.
As 2018 opened, market observers pegged the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Tucson at approximately $800. But that value is skewed disproportionately low by the large fraction of units in such ramshackle condition or in neighborhoods so dangerous that only the lowest rent can be asked for them, shunned as they are by all people concerned for hygiene and their personal safety. I was myself downsizing and in the hunt for new quarters at the turn of the year, and in a month-long quest I found that safe and sanitary bare-bones studio units in the city's oldest buildings rent for $455 to $775.
At the bottom end of the rental scale, your Tucson apartment will not have a microwave or a refrigerator with an ice-maker, nor a dishwasher or a garbage disposal, nor a washer/dryer unit or a hook-up for one. Without ceiling fans, it may be air conditioned, or perhaps freshened only by a rooftop unit that chills the air through evaporative cooling. Such a “swamp cooler” functions best when air temperatures and humidity are low. They are decidedly not so in Tucson’s monsoon season, rendering a swamp cooler almost completely ineffective during the hottest and muggiest months of the year.
Incidentally, swamp coolers are found in many of the city's older rental homes, because landlords have deferred the expense of upgrading to modern but much costlier whole-house AC units. Rental rates for these homes are nonetheless set in part on the specious basis that they are “air-conditioned.”
Alternatively, you can opt for a brand-spanking new flat with every modern convenience. Currently, in midtown, such an apartment with one bedroom will cost you $1,300 a month.
Since 2012, private developers have built half a dozen mid- and high-rise student housing complexes on the edges of the University of Arizona campus, and more are under construction. To a degree, these have helped to hold the line on the general competition for rentals by diverting some students from the housing market at large. But the furnished apartments in them command rents per square foot that are from two to four times higher than those of similar market-rate units.
Rooms rent individually in multi-bedroom floorplans, starting at $640 per month in one of the least expensive towers, and a one-bedroom layout there escalates to as much as $1,730, depending upon chosen upgrades. Twelve rental payments are required, although the academic year lasts only nine months, and garage parking is another $115 monthly, per space. For the scholar with a minimalist bent and willing to pair up with one other, studios measuring 266 square feet are available in another tower for a combined rent of $2,720 per month.
(Update: August 26, 2019: The university's Fall 2019 semester opened today, and the student housing towers are nearly 100 percent leased. Rental rates in them have climbed again, to as much as $1,800 per month for one room in a five-bedroom apartment.)
Even at its most economical, such housing demands an outlay exceeding 60 percent of an Arizona undergraduate's current annual in-state tuition. These high tariffs only further encourage the rise in rental rates elsewhere in Tucson, as landlords see that people can be compelled to pay sums that not long ago would have been rejected as larcenous.
(Update, May 29, 2019: Rents for non-student housing continue to rise in Tucson, and with growing velocity. Increasing in each of the last 12 quarters, they climbed five percent annually in 2016 and 2017, six percent in 2018, and are expected to escalate another seven percent in 2019.)
Weighing where to live naturally entails consideration not only of the cost of housing, but of the environment at curbside as well, and at the extremes, Tucson has elite gated communities of scenic grandeur and neighborhoods of oppressively ruinous decay.
With sufficient wealth, you can homestead in what local realtors call the "Luxury Region" on the far north side of the city and just beyond. There you can soak in the infinity-edge pool of an architect-designed and expertly landscaped multimillion-dollar home with panoramic views in the foothills of the Santa Catalinas, situated among championship-grade golf courses, deluxe resorts, exclusive health spas, and celebrity rehab centers.
Should you however have more moths than money in your pocket, you may – at a lower physical and social elevation nearer the heart of the city – molder in a demolition-ready cottage of wood, brick, or adobe, your horizons restricted to an unkempt yard overgrown with weeds and untrimmed shrubbery. Extensive swaths of just such woeful homes blemish the western and central portions of mid-town Tucson and the city's southern half. If you are truly hard-pressed, you can in these forlorn areas rent a three-bedroom house contaminated throughout by mildew and with a rotting and leaky roof for as little as $800 per month.
Intermixed with Tucson's permanent dwellings are mobile home parks that I mentioned earlier, of which there are a staggering 170 within the city limits, housing nearly 65,000 people. (This further speaks to the relative scarcity of affordable housing here, critically tight in particular for fixed-income seniors, the disabled, and low-wage earners.) The trailers and manufactured homes in some parks are tidy; in most they are shabby; in a significant minority they are squalid. The oldest are those most often in disrepair, and 17,400 pre-1976 units alone are registered with the Pima County Assessor.
The reassuring news is that middling neighborhoods are of course in the majority in Tucson. Although more worn and weary than the finest, they are better maintained than the bleakest. In their bounds, housing styles such as Craftsman Bungalow, Mid-Century Modern, and Spanish Colonial, Mission, Mediterranean, and Pueblo Revival predominate. These districts are generally unassuming and not especially attractive, having their share of homes that are out at the elbows. But diligent exploration reveals occasional gems – houses and yards notable for the care their owners have lavished on them.
The Blenman-Elm, Sam Hughes, Miramonte, El Encanto Estates, and Colonia Solano neighborhoods near the University of Arizona just northeast of downtown are coveted for the reduced property taxes that they pay as historic districts and for their many well-preserved and handsome homes dating as far back as the 1920s. With their unique sense of place, these areas exude cachet, and residence there provides social climbers entrée to the city’s traditional upper crust, although to obtain their foothold they must pay some of the steepest prices in Tucson: $900,000 and up for the largest and most luxurious homes.
In the very center of the city, in a small but animated downtown arts and entertainment district, there is a recently multiplying sprinkling of trendy loft-type apartment buildings. And on the near south side of downtown there still stand a few blocks of picturesque original, thick-walled adobe row houses. This is the Barrio Histórico or Barrio Viejo, the old core of Hispanic Tucson that was almost entirely bulldozed during urban renewal campaigns in the 1960s, "progress" that is now widely lamented. The area numbered Chinese and African-American as well as Mexican-American residents, and the remnants of their neighborhood have been largely gentrified and reconstituted as costly professional offices and chic town houses with front doors often painted in pulsating colors. How chic? Actress Diane Keaton recently paid $1.5 million for two adjoining row houses built in the 1880s and remodeled into one residence. A serial house-flipper, she has said she will resell it, not live in it.
Many displaced former householders of the Barrio Histórico relocated to South Tucson, a 1.2-square-mile, independently incorporated municipality fully surrounded by Tucson proper. It is a federally designated "colonia," a community within 150 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border with such substandard, unsafe, and unsanitary housing that it qualifies for federal block grants. Of its approximately 5,700 inhabitants, 51 percent live below the federal poverty line. In testimony to South Tucson's unhappy blight, a three-bedroom, one-bath home built there in 1945 is today listed for $59,000.
Do you incline to communal living? Tucson has three self-managing cohousing communities. These combine town homes and condos with a collective garden, a play area, and other social spaces and amenities shared on a closely collaborative basis. I live a five-minute walk from one, and find it quiet, attractive, and environmentally sensitive, with a pleasingly multi-generational mix of residents.
Altogether, however, this trio of communes has only 112 living units, which seldom become available and only rarely are publicly posted for sale or rent; rather, they are usually advertised by whispered word to the friends of current residents. In effect, admission to these enclaves of tight-knit mutual association is by invitation only. And it is in the nature of things that when co-opting new neighbors, webs of the like-minded tacitly but watchfully condition the acceptance of recruits upon how closely they conform to the ethnic, social, economic, and political background of existing members.
Tucson's suburbs are of two types. The newer consist chiefly of generic, mass-produced tract homes of no distinctive design, arrayed hip to hip, domino-like. Wood-framed, with exteriors of stuccoed plywood, they are all in earth tones, their roofs flat, or pitched and clad in reddish shingles or (more often) clay tiles. This sea of sameness laps at older subdivisions with roomier lots, undisturbed original desert vegetation, and homes of brick, block, or adobe. Their architecture varies from Ranch to Post-war Mission, Territorial, and Pueblo. Faux log beams (“vigas”) project from the roof line of many, à la Mexican haciendas or Indian pueblo dwellings.
One element that unites these disparate residential sectors is the often abysmal state of their streets.
The Tucson Department of Transportation classifies 1,200 miles or fully 80 percent of our city’s residential streets and arterial and collector roadways as in “poor” or “failed” condition. Generally that means that they are badly cracked or crumbling, and not a few are pocked with potholes of bone-jarring depth and diameter. In others, grass grows to mowing height through the fractured asphalt.
To be just, some boulevards remain in fairly good shape, benefiting from timely crack sealing and recoating, and there are currently several major widening projects underway, as well as other transportation improvements, such as construction of sidewalks, bike lanes, and bus pullouts. Nonetheless, upkeep of Tucson’s streets and byways has fallen short for decades, and many are now so far gone that they cannot be repaired at reasonable expense, but must be replaced entirely.
In 2012 Tucson voters approved a city bond issue to raise $100 million over five years for remedial roadwork. Once those funds were exhausted, residents assented in 2017 to a five-year, half-cent sales tax increase to continue street repairs and maintenance, to the tune of a further $100 million. But transportation authorities estimate that $853 million is still needed to restore our streets. Add the roadways maintained by Pima County that officials say are likewise severely degraded (70 percent, or nearly 1,600 miles), and the cost of region-wide reconstruction ascends by one conservative estimate to an astronomical $1.8 billion. Thus for years to come stopgap patches that themselves quickly decompose will have to continue to suffice to keep traffic moving in and around Tucson, where the Federal Highway Administration calculates that poor road conditions cost drivers a yearly average of $1,700 in extra vehicle repair costs, wasted fuel and accidents, and lost time in travel.
Meanwhile, the city's back alleyways receive no attention whatsoever. Many have never been paved. In those that have, the asphalt has almost everywhere decayed nearly to dirt. These fissured, buckled, and fragmented rear lanes are vividly derelict and literally lay bare the underside of Tucson.
As to urban expressways, such as lace Phoenix, Tucson has none. They have always been resisted by a populace that in unseemly reverse snobbery almost reflexively snipes at anything to do with its more prosperous, sophisticated, and incontestably better-paved neighbor to the north. At its most parochial, this distemper is epitomized by a bumper sticker sometimes seen here: “I’d rather live in denial than in Phoenix.” Imitating Phoenix with freeways is in particular feared as something that would denature Tucson – exposing its healthy body to a malignant neoplasm, as it were.
At the root of this anxiety is a strong strain of local chauvinism, whose most ardent exponents romanticize the city as the "Old Pueblo,” tinted with the small-town charm and the ambling pace of yesteryear. But that horse bolted the barn long ago, leaving behind only the buggy whip of nostalgia and the carriage of incomprehension. Swelling Tucson is the 32nd-largest city in the U.S. by land area – slightly more extensive than Chicago – and anchors a metropolitan conglomeration of 1,034,201 people. And paralleling the city to the west is Interstate 10; eight lanes wide in places, it speeds traffic on Tucson's periphery, except in short stretches that briefly clog during workday rush hours.
There is no cross-town thoroughfare of equal dimensions. This means that traversing the full extent of the city's approximately 20-mile east-west span on surface streets can take as little as an hour and as much as 90 minutes.
Many traffic signals in Tucson and especially those downtown are pre-timed: they change at pre-set intervals scheduled to coincide with the morning, noon, and evening peak travel periods. Irrespective of whether traffic is light or even absent, they plod indifferently through their unhurried fixed sequences of red, green, and yellow. "Smart" signals actuated by sensors that monitor changing traffic flows and adapt their timing cycles in response will be installed this year in the town of Oro Valley, north of Tucson. But they will be the only such ones in Pima County, and still far off here is the latest technology, in which signals communicate with one another to find the most efficient timing sequence for each, so motorists are not hamstrung in congestion. And nowhere are our outdated, mistimed lights synchronized.
The net effect of our quaint system of traffic management is to prevent you for the most part from passing more than one light before being halted by the next, unnecessarily increasing drive times no matter your direction of travel. And because our transportation fleet steadily expands, but the street network does not, traffic thickens relentlessly. Average vehicle speeds grow slower with each passing year, and Tucson is now the 28th worst congested city in the U.S., well ahead of much larger Phoenix (51) and even the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex (37), with its 7.3 million people. This makes motoring through town an always irksome stop-and-go experience and an often excruciatingly tedious chore.
I must also mention Tucson drivers, and oh, what a breed they are!
Nearly all accelerate to sail through yellow lights, and many people deem red ones only cautionary. In 2015, participating voters balloted two-to-one to deactivate red light cameras, and I have seen as many as five drivers at a time run a scarlet signal. Colorblind? Hardly – they were simply impelled to become scofflaws by Tucson's maddeningly ill-coordinated traffic environment.
In contrast to such imprudence, uncommon numbers of Tucsonans travel well below the posted speed limit when between lights. Some drive so slowly that they appear to have nowhere in particular that they need to go and all day to get there. I'm tempted to say that a funeral cortege would outpace them.
Know too that left turn signals here have briefer clearance intervals than in neighboring jurisdictions, seldom glowing green for as long as 15 seconds and often for 10 or less. (The most fleeting I know of stays green for two seconds.) Because many Tucson drivers respond in a characteristically lethargic fashion when a signal goes green to clear them to advance, you often have no time to turn left if yours is the third (and sometimes even only the second) vehicle waiting in line to move. In peak traffic, two entire light cycles may pass before you can proceed, held up by the languorous reaction times of drivers ahead of you. This is the sole vestige of the fabled slower tempo of the Old Pueblo of years gone by.
The use of turn signals is, fittingly enough, intermittent. A minority of conscientious drivers resort to them, but even most of these good citizens activate their signals only once they have actually begun to change lanes or enter a turn. Other Tucsonans are seemingly firm in the belief that they would unduly alarm fellow motorists if they were to forecast their intention to veer abruptly from one lane to another or to slam on the brakes to turn a corner. And not infrequently, someone will indeed swerve across your path without signaling to turn left from the far right lane, as much as three lanes over.
Tailgating is widespread, as it is for drivers to pull in front of you from a parking lot or side street at the last second, rather than earlier, when there is a greater margin of safety. Disconcertingly, you will also come face to face with others who, to circumvent a median channeling cars into or out of a retail center, drive the wrong way against traffic as far as needed to spare themselves the inconvenience of a U-turn.
With traffic stops virtually unheard of here but for the most reckless speeding before the very eyes of the police, motorists flout the traffic code and an intelligent concern for safety so freely that it is the rare enforcement of the law and not the constant violation of it that leaves witnesses in wonderment. It is wisest to be unfailingly vigilant and to give Tucson drivers (many uninsured) as wide a berth as possible.
That warning goes double concerning pedestrians. Those in Tucson regularly flummox me with their traffic- and death-defying ways.
Hardly a week goes by but it brings the sad news that a pedestrian has been struck and injured or killed – or even three within 24 hours, as happened the day before I began this review. Tucsonans habitually cross against lights, some with babes in arms and when they are as little as 10 feet from the safety of a crosswalk and a push-button signal; when they do use a signalized crosswalk, they often ignore the "Do Not Walk" warning and step into the street prematurely. They likewise routinely scamper mid-block across dimly-lighted streets after nightfall while dressed in dark clothes, and without a flashlight. (As an aside, most residential streets in Tucson and its suburbs and many major boulevards are unilluminated.)
Tucson and Pima County register 250 to 300 collisions yearly between foot travelers and vehicles, and the city sees on the order of 35 pedestrian deaths annually. Police reports on these incidents almost universally mention that those struck were not in marked crosswalks or crossing at intersections, or that they were crossing against the light, and that the drivers involved were not speeding, nor using their cell phones, nor impaired by alcohol or drugs, nor otherwise infringing traffic regulations.
Moreover, pedestrians elsewhere in the state seem to value their lives no more highly than those in Tucson, as the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety reveals: 230 pedestrians died in Arizona in 2017, making it the state with the highest rate of pedestrian deaths in the country, relative to population size. Locally, crackdowns on jaywalking are announced from time to time. That these in fact occur is however unsubstantiated by the Tucson Police Department, which is never able to point to an actual increase in citations for the offense.
In relation to more serious lawbreaking . . . .
Year after year, state and federal statisticians rank Tucson as the most unsafe urban area in Arizona, and by a wide margin. This always scandalizes the chief of police du jour, as well as the city manager and the seven-member city council (on which the mayor serves ex officio), and they all rush to each other’s defense and profess that things are improving. But the results are just as dismal the following year, and there is a glaring disconnect between how municipal leaders assess lawlessness in the city and what residents experience on the street. As an instance, in 2017 the current mayor had his city-provided car hijacked from him at gunpoint in front of his home. His only public comment on the matter was to the effect that, because he wasn’t shot, crime in Tucson was not out of hand.
The mayor and the other sitting members of the city council save one are hardy perennials. The newcomer debuted last year, but there are no term limits, and one member has held office since 1995, another since 2007, two since 2009, one more since 2010, and the mayor since 2011.
During their lengthy tenures these officials have presided over remarkable stability in extremely high local rates of property and violent crime. Annually over the past decade these have exceeded the national average by more than 115 percent. On a narrower stage, Tucson has the second-highest rates of property and violent crime of any sizeable city in the Southwest, trailing only Albuquerque, New Mexico. In seeking future renewal in office, our community's governors have a ready-made platform on which to campaign: namely, that insofar as brisk criminal activity is concerned, their record in keeping a steady hand on the tiller is impeccable.
(Update, December 18, 2018: The mayor and the longest-serving city council member have announced that they will not run again in the next general election for their posts, in November 2019.)
Property crime (burglary, larceny, theft, motor vehicle theft, arson, shoplifting, and vandalism) has long and greatly plagued all parts of Tucson, including the toniest neighborhoods. Police logged 29,550 property crimes here in 2017, with 2,410 vehicle thefts among them. Theft of car parts and accessories, bikes, laptops, mobile phones, power tools, patio furniture, and office, gardening, and sports equipment is routine.
Rather more audacious was the dismantling last year at a business that I frequent of all of the establishment’s exterior security cameras. Ironically, the filched surveillance equipment had been installed because the business earlier had been victimized so often by – you guessed it – property crime.
No doubt the cameras made their way to a pawnshop, of which the city has large numbers. By law, Tucson pawnbrokers must electronically notify the police of all transactions, so that suspicious pawn activities and patterns can be detected. But because of reporting delays and because citizen declarations of theft are not cross-checked with pawn records in real time, "felony pawners" can elude arrest for a good while as they repeatedly convert stolen goods into legal property.
(Update, October 25, 2018: Property theft in Tucson can take the most outlandish forms. Lately midtown homeowners have been waking to discover that large agave gracing their front yards are vanishing overnight. Sizeable specimens of certain species of these sage green, dagger- or sword-leaved ornamental succulents – also called century plants and source of Mexican tequila, mezcal, and pulque – retail for as much as $180 at local nurseries. The rustlers are likely peddling the abducted agave cheaply to this area's legions of unlicensed landscape contractors, for resale to the unwary at full price.)
Police officials attribute much shoplifting and other opportunistic theft such as pilferage of mail and front-porch package deliveries to the homeless, and ascribe most premeditated burglary to drug addicts.
The homeless in Tucson wear many faces. Those of most concern to the police are destitute itinerants from elsewhere, most often seen in illegal encampments or cadging money at intersections. Many are long-term unhoused and unemployed and manifest physical and mental illness; some are alcoholic or addicted to or deal in hard drugs and have criminal records; a few rob and beat their companions.
Tucson draws these visitors in profusion with its warm weather, in which they can sleep out of doors for much of the year. Churches and private agencies provide them free meals, haircuts, flu shots, and dental care. In summer, they receive chilled bottled water, sun hats and light-colored clothing, sunglasses, lip balm, and sunscreen, and can spend the hottest daytime hours in air-conditioned "cooling rooms."
(Update, December 12, 2018: It is difficult to make a comprehensive count of the itinerant homeless. But the Tucson Police Department reports a puzzling surge in this floating population during the last eight months, and that its members are newly displaying unusual aggressiveness when soliciting handouts. Worrisomely, they increasingly react violently when challenged in the midst of shoplifting, dumpster diving, or trespassing. The public has been warned to approach them only with great caution.)
A different and less visible category of the homeless is homegrown: people left without a roof over their heads because they have been displaced in a silent epidemic of evictions.
As rental properties in Tucson have changed owners in recent years and monthly fees for them have shot up in tandem, these people have fallen behind, unable to make timely payments out of their low wages or minimal retirement income, or when struck by costly illness or laid off. In 2017, 13,312 eviction cases were tried in Pima County courts, and renters prevailed in only a handful. With low-income housing continuing to dwindle and 15,000 people already on waiting lists for limited utility allowances and for only 771 Section 8 subsidized apartments, the problem of the hometown homeless has assumed near-crisis proportions. City and private temporary shelters for them are swamped, and those turned away must move in with friends and relatives, live in their cars, squat in vacant buildings, and camp under tarps in desert washes.
Concerning violent crime in Tucson, some is spillover from largely (85 percent) Hispanic South Tucson, where gangs fueled by the transshipment of drugs smuggled from Mexico barely 65 miles away clash over trafficking profits. This leads to sporadic drive-by shootings and deaths. But violent criminality across the city is nurtured in greater degree by poverty, prostitution, drug dealing, and domestic violence. These burden Tucson as a whole with the highest per capita rate of murders, manslaughter, rapes, armed robberies, and aggravated assaults in Arizona. (The FBI reports that 4,628 such crimes were committed here in 2017, or 802 for every 100,000 residents.) Tucson maintains this unenviable leadership year in and year out, even as the number of certain kinds of violent crimes sometimes dips in absolute terms, depending upon the year examined.
In the last 12 months, murders in Tucson have been on the upswing. From a decade low of 31 in both 2015 and 2016, homicides climbed 34 percent in 2017, to 47 deaths. Worse, the rise occurred for reasons unknown, complicating efforts by the police department to craft a strategy to prevent another steep increase in its homicide caseload in 2018.
(Update, January 7, 2019: Slayings in Tucson continued to multiply in 2018, although rising at a lower rate – 22 percent – than in 2017. Detectives investigated 60 homicides – seven of them ruled killings in self-defense or in defense of another – which took place in the poorest and richest areas of the city alike. This was the highest annual toll of homicides since 2008. For comparison, San Francisco, with 350,000 more people than Tucson, saw 44 homicides in 2018.
As an instance of how a fall in some crime categories can nonetheless fail to improve Tucson’s safety standing among Arizona cities, consider that in 2018 there were fewer cases of aggravated assault here than the year before. This positive development helped lead to a three percent decrease in the general rate of violent crime. But because homicides escalated, the latest inter-year variation did nothing to dethrone Tucson as the most crime-ridden urban community in the state.)
The Tucson Police Department unceasingly urges residents to supply it the details of all non-violent crimes via an on-line reporting system. The purpose of citizen self-reporting is to unfetter officers from the time-consuming collection of information from crime victims and the paperwork associated with it, freeing them for actual policing. But reporting a crime online scarcely ever fetches the police, and only occasionally does one even receive a callback – days later – with the apology that no officer could be spared to meet the victim and survey the crime scene in person. In an illustration of the so-called “law of unintended consequences,” this well-meant attempt to increase the efficiency of law enforcement in fact leaves many people feeling less protected. This undercuts public confidence in the police and close cooperation with them, the keystone of successful crime prevention.
The data that victims file online are compiled into maps, on which crimes are plotted by type, location, time of occurrence, and frequency, so that “hot spots” can be monitored. A “crime analyst” position is open on the police force at this moment precisely to study such phenomena, research intended to facilitate the temporary flooding of high-crime zones by extra patrols.
(Update, April 30, 2018: Catching up to current best practices in law enforcement, the Tucson Police Department this month established a Crime Analysis Unit.)
Unfortunately, and as the police union points out, for years resignations and retirements have outpaced hiring in Tucson's police force. The number of sworn officers (that is, those with guns and badges) peaked at nearly 1,200 in 2005. The department has seen its headcount decline steadily since then. In 2016 there were 870 officers, and in third-quarter 2017 there were 813.
On average last year, nine officers a month left the force, and because some of the remaining officers were sick, on vacation or military deployment, or assigned to desk duty, by the end of 2017 only 314 were available at any one time to answer calls in a jurisdiction encompassing 240 square miles and 546,000 people. Thus far in 2018, commissioned personnel staffing has dropped further, to below 800.
Pay bumps of two to 15 percent will be given a minority of officers in the fiscal year that starts July 1, to help stem the departure of veterans to better-paying cities. In 2016, 142 members of the city’s force earned more than $100,000, receiving special pay for overtime, vehicle allowances, sick-leave buybacks, and other considerations. They were fortunate exceptions: in 2017 all Tucson officers together averaged an annual salary of $50,060, versus $64,450 nationally.
Poor salaries are not the only obstacle to maintaining the loyalty of Tucson’s police force. Young officers in particular question whether to make a career commitment to an employer that pays into a state fund to cover their pensions, but which has less than half the money needed to pay current and future retirement benefits of Arizona’s public safety personnel, judges, and correctional officers.
(Update, July 27, 2019: Tucson now has 793 officers, and 61 trainees. Even if all new recruits earn badges, the beefed-up force will still be at its smallest since 2015, because five to six officers continue to leave each month, recent pay raises notwithstanding.)
As things now stand, the shorthanded department is on the horns of a dilemma: when it deploys special task forces against concentrated outbreaks of car theft, convenience store holdups, or gang-related or other violence, there are that many fewer officers and detectives on hand to conduct day-to-day community policing and to investigate lesser but still grave crimes.
It is a common complaint among Tucsonans that because the police force is so understrength, officers are often tardy in their investigations. This allows a criminal's trail to grow cold and lowers the likelihood that a malefactor will be caught, and causes many people to feel that it is a waste of time to alert the police when they have been victimized. Thus there is good reason to believe that crimes in Tucson are underreported and that our actual rates of property and violent crime are even higher than reflected in official statistics.
Are my own crime encounters typical of Tucsonans at large? On that I cannot pass an opinion absent a citywide survey. But in my years here – and while living in some of the safest neighborhoods – I have experienced eight burglaries or thefts, seven acts of vandalism, and three aggravated assaults.
The most egregious assault occurred on a morning after New Year’s Eve celebrations, when two still-drunken teenagers pursued me along a sidewalk in a car and rode me down. I bounced first along the vehicle’s hood, next into the windshield, and then off the roof. For good measure, the aggressors hurled beer bottles at me as they raced off.
Mercifully, I was not so badly injured that I could not immediately phone the police. When two officers arrived and after I had described my assailants and their vehicle in detail, one officer said he and his partner could not arrest the miscreants because “we have bigger fish to fry than chasing after petty criminals we can't catch.” And indeed, I never heard more from the police about the terrifying incident.
I have always wondered if my attackers went on to hunt other people later that morning, while the police were telling me they were powerless to act. Most crimes in all cities go unpunished. But Tucsonans in particular may legitimately doubt whether, if they report any but the most heinous crime, a prompt and serious effort can be made to identify and arrest the offender.
Local law enforcement agencies in the U.S. voluntarily report crimes in their jurisdictions to the FBI and the type and number of offenses for which they make arrests, the so-called "clearance rate." These data are compiled in an annual national Uniform Crime Report, which however does not break out the clearance rate of individual agencies. But in 2013 the FBI disclosed these figures at the behest of National Public Radio. They showed that, in all crime categories except homicide, the Tucson Police Department made less than one half to as few as one third as many arrests as the national average.
(Update, January 10, 2019: With the increase in homicides in 2018, the police department’s clearance rate for this crime declined to 76 percent, from 82.5 percent in 2017.
It was with considerable fanfare that the department had announced the 2017 homicide clearance figure in August 2018, calling Tucsonans’ attention to the fact that it exceeded the 65 percent averaged by police agencies nationwide. The latest rate of 76 percent is still a creditable showing by any standard.
But the department continues a policy of not freely divulging arrest rates for other crimes. It may intuit the possibility of severe public criticism: internal records disclose that of 469 rape investigations opened in 2016, only 24 – or five percent – concluded with an arrest.)
Clearance rates depend greatly upon how quickly officers and detectives arrive at a crime scene, cordon it off, and gather physical evidence and witness statements, and whether there are enough personnel resources to allow detectives leeway to chase leads in the hours immediately after the crime has been committed. An understaffed police department is at a major disadvantage in these respects. A police force that is overstretched also labors under a constant extra workload, which can be demotivating.
Be all that as it may, what I can say for certain about crime clearance rates in Tucson is that only one of my 18 cases resulted in an arrest – because I caught and held the offender until the police arrived.
Bedeviled as they are by a surfeit of crime, the greater threat to the peace of mind of many Tucsonans is economic insecurity.
The city's residents are 52.6 percent non-Hispanic white and 36.6 percent Hispanic (mostly from Mexico and Central America), with the remainder distributed across African and Native Americans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders. In common, they live in a community where poverty is deep and endemic.
Today, nearly 25 percent of Tucson's people (and one third of its children under 18) live in need, in households with less than the federal poverty threshold of $24,858 in annual income for a family of four. The overall rate omits the 51 percent living in penury in South Tucson; even so, it is higher than in Phoenix and almost twice the current national rate of 13.4 percent. Slightly more than 21 percent of Tucson households have a net worth of zero or less.
Turning to Tucsonans who are not impoverished, their average yearly personal income trails the national mean by nearly 19 percent, an order of divergence stretching back to the mid-70s. As well, their median personal income perennially lags that of all other residents of the state except those in the chronically depressed Navajo (Diné) Nation in Arizona’s northeast and the Tohono O’odham Nation in southern Arizona.
Applying a different yardstick – that of annual median household income – discloses another serious mismatch. Every race and ethnicity in Tucson falls short of the national level, and taking all city residents together, their median household income of $39,617 is 30 percent below that for the state as a whole and 37 percent less than the median countrywide. Across the entire metro area – that is, including the ultra-affluent in the foothills – median household income is $51,425. That is still 10 percent below the Arizona median and 19 percent lower than nationwide.
Similar statistics are in an inventory compiled and kept current by University of Arizona researchers at mapazdashboard.arizona.edu. It is especially useful because it benchmarks Tucson against 11 peer western Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) across economic, education, health, housing, and other categories. Check this database to see how Tucson fares alongside Phoenix, Albuquerque, Denver, Colorado Springs, El Paso, Austin, San Antonio, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and Portland.
You will learn, for example, that in 2017 Tucson was seventh out of the 12 MSAs in local GDP expansion, in tenth place in job creation and growth of new businesses, next to last in median household income, and below average in median wages ($34,000 per year).
(Update, April 27, 2019: Tucson fell from 10th to 11th place in job growth among its peer MSAs in 2018, eking out a yearly increase of 1.2 percent with creation of only 4,300 positions, no more than in 2017. The median wage for all occupations here edged up in 2018, however, to $35,430. It was boosted primarily by a fifty-cent increase in the state's minimum wage, to $10.50 per hour; by continued strong competition for skilled labor in the building trades; and by a modest one-time bonus for city employees, most of whom also received a pay hike of 2.5 percent. The current U.S. annual median wage is $53,411.)
One conclusion to be drawn from Tucson's poor standing in so many respects vis-à-vis the other MSAs is that it has been much slower than them to rebound following the Great Recession that commenced in 2007–2008. Whereas Phoenix, for example, had by 2015 returned to its pre-recession pace of business expansion and had replaced all the jobs it lost in the downturn, job creation and employment in Tucson are only now on the cusp of returning to the levels of a decade ago, and its rate of business growth has not yet recovered to even that limited degree.
A review by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public policy organization, paints an even starker picture of the recession's legacy in Tucson. Private and public sector economists and urban development experts were convened to survey the 100 largest U.S. cities for their post-recession rates of poverty, job formation, business startups and closures, housing stock decline and renewal, arriving and departing college-educated residents and other metrics. This resulted in a "Distressed Communities Index" that scores Tucson as the ninth-most beleaguered of the 100 cities in 2016, in close company with Buffalo, Detroit, Newark, Cincinnati, and Cleveland.
Tucson's delay in rekindling its prosperity can be traced principally to two factors. First, the city is precariously undiversified in good-paying large employers. Second, it is markedly cyclical in its business rhythms, driven in the main by governmental activities, construction, and tourism, all sectors that are highly susceptible to frequent, episodic contraction.
Within Arizona, this has left Tucson to always play second fiddle economically to Phoenix and its adjoining satellites of Chandler, Gilbert, Goodyear, Mesa, Peoria, Scottsdale, and Tempe. Together with Phoenix, these cities are where nearly all of the 100 largest public companies and non-profit employers in Arizona have their state, regional, or national headquarters. Strikingly, only three (a medical center, a copper-mining company, and a tribal casino), are based in Tucson.
The state Office of Tourism reports that in 2017 visitors to southern Arizona spent $3.5 billion on recreation, shopping, lodging, and meals, much of it in Tucson. But our direct revenues from the trade, industry, transportation, commerce, healthcare, financial, and utilities sectors are much scantier, and there is only one major manufacturer in the area, Raytheon Missile Systems. According to Sun Corridor Inc., the economic promotion and development body that markets southern Arizona to site selection panels of corporations weighing establishment or expansion here, more people in Tucson and Pima County work in waste administration and collection and landfill operations than in manufacturing.
The leading Tucson employers at this writing are: state, county, and city government, with 19,500 employees; the University of Arizona (15,000); private, non-profit, and university hospitals and medical centers (12,800); Raytheon (12,700); school districts (10,500); Davis-Monthan Air Force Base (9,000); and Walmart (7,500). Only top university officers, coaches, and tenured professors obtain handsome incomes, as do some Raytheon executives, project managers, and engineers and a few public administrators and employees. Some smaller number yet of hospital executives, surgeons, and specialists such as anesthesiologists and critical care nurses also earn very well.
Together, these organizations employ 87,000 people. The largest proportion of the remaining 381,00 people occupied in the private sector in Tucson and Pima County in January 2018 work for the state's minimum wage ($10.50 per hour and going up to $11 in January 2019 and to $12 in 2020) or near it, and for meager or no employer benefits in bottom-rung hospitality, food service, retail, call center, custodial, construction, warehousing, and landscaping jobs, many of which are only part-time.
Other Tucsonans earn more, but in occupations that are still low paying, making their living as bank tellers, bookkeepers, hair stylists, personal care and nursing home health aides, house and pool cleaners, pet groomers, carpet, flooring, and cable TV installers, and pest control exterminators.
Among those at the top of the Tucson economic ladder is the city's small minority of independently practicing professionals, including lawyers, architects, engineering, mining, and environmental consultants, dentists, general physicians, psychiatrists, and veterinarians. Yet high earners though they are, these members of the 90th percentile in income take home $10,000 per year less on average than their counterparts in the U.S. at large.
Meanwhile, public school teachers in Tucson are notoriously underpaid. Adjusted for the local cost of living, federal figures show elementary teachers in Arizona rank 50th in earnings nationally. High school educators rank 49th, and in 2016 those in Tucson averaged $39,927 in annual wages.
Instructors at all levels in the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD), the largest in the city, in Pima County, and in southern Arizona, averaged $41,195 in 2017. In the Amphitheater Unified District – the city's third-largest – they averaged but $39,552. These teacher compensation rates leave Tucson last by far among the 11 other MSAs mentioned earlier.
(Update, July 28, 2019: To end a statewide teachers' strike, in May 2018 Arizona's legislature passed a funding bill to raise teacher pay 20 percent by 2020. Across all school districts, grades, and seniority levels, this has lifted current average teacher salaries in Pima County to between $38,600 and $46,800.)
Professors at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona State University in Phoenix, and Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff earn five to eight percent less than at peer universities in other states. Unlike K-12 teachers, however, they at least do not have to purchase some portion of classroom supplies using their own resources. Years of cutbacks in state support for school operating budgets oblige a typical Tucson elementary teacher to spend almost $500 annually on pencils, paper, paste, and even kiddie chairs, among other student necessities. Some dedicated teachers spend $2,000 or more.
With good cause, 46 percent of new teachers in Arizona quit the classroom in three years. This has left school districts in Tucson and other cities with an acute shortage of qualified and certified teachers. It is worth quoting from a recent newspaper examination of this issue, which you will want to consider if you are thinking of seeking a teaching job in Tucson or enrolling your children in this area’s public schools:
“In response [to the teacher shortage] for years lawmakers have been deregulating the teaching industry, making it easier to get a teaching certificate, and declaring anyone can be a teacher, so long as they have a bachelor’s degree and some relevant work experience . . . .
"The magnitude of the problem is hard to track. No state agency or department tallies how many classrooms lack qualified teachers. The best numbers come from a voluntary annual survey by the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association.
“The association found that four months into last school year, there were nearly 2,000 vacancies and an additional 3,400 teaching positions being held by educators who didn’t meet the standard requirements to be a teacher. In total, the survey found nearly 63 percent of teaching positions were vacant or filled by teachers not meeting standard requirements.
“In the meantime, Arizona’s physicists of tomorrow are learning from people who haven’t studied physics since they were in high school, if ever. Future chemists are learning from teachers who don’t know the periodic table. Students across Arizona are learning math from people with no math background. And students with physical, emotional and cognitive disabilities are left without qualified special education teachers to tend to their needs.”
The American School Counselor Association also reports that in the 2016-2017 academic year, Arizona's student-to-counselor ratio was the worst in the country. For every school counselor, there was an average of 905 students.
Schools contend with the educator shortage by increasing the students in the classes taught by the teachers that they do have, by relying on retired and long-term substitute teachers and teacher interns in training, and by recruiting teachers from overseas. Improvising remedies for the scarcity of counselors has proven harder, and the ratio of students to advisors is now nearly twice the national rate.
(Update, June 26, 2019: The raises granted striking teachers in 2018 bulked up the earnings base upon which their pensions were calculated, and hundreds capitalized on this to resign at the end of the 2018-2019 school year and receive enhanced retirement benefits while taking jobs in other fields. Thus hopes were scuppered that bigger paychecks alone would slow the educator exodus, and 25 percent of all teaching positions in Arizona are expected to be vacant at the beginning of the 2019-2020 session.)
Mindful of the parlous circumstances of our K-12 public schools and the teaching profession in Arizona, in the latest poll only 25 percent of Tucson parents rated our education system as “average,” while 57 percent ranked it “terrible” or “poor.” (One percent felt it was “excellent.”) Little wonder, then, that TUSD enrollment is 26 percent lower today than in 2001 and has been falling uninterruptedly year over year since 2004, as families more and more withdraw their children from its classrooms.
Whether you teach, style hair, install water heaters, or write computer code, the earnings you can expect if you take any particular employment here is something of an imponderable, depending as it does upon the availability of and the demand for qualified labor in your field, upon your professional, trade, or job skills, and upon your education and work experience. And yes, upon your age, gender, and ethnicity, although the latter factors are not legally permitted to weigh in the balance.
What can in some measure be determined beforehand, however, is how much income you will require to meet the basic needs of a working family in Tucson.
The latest data concerning this that I know to refer you to is in The Self-Sufficiency Standard for Arizona 2012, from the Women’s Foundation of Southern Arizona. While not now current, its figures for a range of family sizes in all Arizona counties can serve as a starting point for your own calculations in today’s circumstances. (Look for the report at www.womengiving.org and www.selfsufficiencystandard.org.)
Consulting the report for Tucson and Pima County in 2012, we see that two adults both employed 40 hours per week and with one preschooler and one school-age child needed $53,928 in annual income to cover the family's most elementary expenses.
These expenses were for: rent and utilities; full-time day care for the preschooler and before- and after-school minding for the older child; home-cooked meals; a car and its gas, upkeep, and insurance, or fare for public transportation (if available) to and from work and for one weekly shopping trip; employer-sponsored health insurance (if provided) and out-of-pocket medical costs; federal and state income tax, payroll taxes, and state and local sales taxes; and miscellaneous items such as clothing, shoes, diapers, paper and cleaning products, household and personal items, and a landline telephone.
Excluded were: after-school programs and extracurricular programs for teenagers; babysitting outside the parents’ hours of work; cable TV, Internet, and cell phone service; take-out, fast-food, and restaurant meals and drinks; non-essential travel, such as for vacation; savings for emergencies and discretionary purchases; health savings accounts, gym memberships, and individual health insurance; repayment of credit card, bank, and student loan debt; and spending on recreation, gifts, pets, and adult education or training for any purpose.
In 2012, if you and your spouse earned less than the $53,928 needed to support yourselves and your two children by working one job apiece, you either worked additional jobs or further culled your budget. Or you relied upon food banks, tax credits, and the generosity of friends and relatives or sought public assistance to cover the shortfall. In 2018, many dual-income Tucson families do all these things to make ends meet. Caught in the undertow of a local low-growth economy based on low-value, low-wage, and low-hour jobs, they are trapped in what is aptly called "in-work poverty."
At the end of January 2018, unemployment in Tucson stood at 4.7 percent. That is up 0.7 percent from October 2017, but down from much higher levels in the depths of the Great Recession.
(Update, July 18, 2019: Nationally, unemployment was 3.7 percent in June. In Tucson the seasonally adjusted rate was 4.6 percent, slightly higher than at the same time in 2018. Unemployment is so slow to decline here because people continue to move to Tucson, enlarging its labor force, and because those who had earlier dropped out of the job hunt have returned, lured back by a recent modest uptick in local hiring. Most of the newly hopeful are not finding work, however: metro Phoenix accounted for 88 percent of new jobs created in Arizona in 2018, leaving Tucson to scramble with all the rest of the state for the remainder. That disproportion has continued to prevail so far in 2019.)
As Arizona's other larger cities and towns belatedly began to recover from their recessionary swoon and gained jobs in 2016-2017, state economic researchers reported that Tucson lost 3,400 positions. They have latterly reversed themselves, however, saying that revised figures to be released in March 2018 will show that Tucson employment actually rose over the period, by 4,500 jobs.
The discrepancy between -3,400 and +4,500 should alert you to the murkiness about true levels of job loss and creation in Tucson. One is almost forced to fall back on anecdote for a sense of what may be really happening. So here are two items: It was recently front-page news that Home Depot, with five stores in the metro area, plans to hire 500 temporary, part-time employees to handle increased spring customer traffic in its garden department. On the other hand, one of the few manufacturers of any size apart from Raytheon – avionics systems maker Rockwell Collins – will close its Tucson plant on September 30, 2018 and eliminate 413 positions, which pay $38,000 to $53,000 annually.
As between the temporary gain of part-time positions at Home Depot and the permanent loss of full-time slots at Rockwell Collins, a local newspaper columnist’s opinion that job growth in Tucson is currently healthy may sway you. I am dubious, however, inasmuch as the Arizona Office of Economic Opportunity predicts that employment in Tucson and Pima County will rise at a pace less than two-thirds of the statewide average between now and the end of 2020, increasing by only 11,905 jobs, as compared to 138,457 in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix. The largest number of our new local jobs are expected to open in construction, and thus will be subject as always to disappearing overnight when the surge-and-sink cycle typical of the building industry here corkscrews into its next nosedive.
(Update, April 5, 2019: Call center jobs are also forecast to multiply here, but like those in construction, they too can suddenly dematerialize.
With its low-wage environment, Tucson exerts a strong pull on operators of customer-service contact centers, and nearly a dozen have opened in the city since 2000. It is to these centers that corporations outsource the handling of calls requesting information or technical support related to their products and services, as well as the processing of phone orders and payments.
In one more blow to the local economy, one of Tucson's largest call centers gave notice today to the Arizona Department of Economic Security that it will lay off 785 people on April 30. This follows the release of 227 staff at another center in March. Before these cutbacks, the Pima County Pima Association of Governments estimated that there were slightly more than 10,000 call center agents in Tucson; their numbers have now been whittled by 10 percent in less than six weeks. The abrupt employment decline in this one sector alone offsets nothing less than 23 percent of the city’s growth in new jobs during all of 2018.)
The city's narrow business base, paucity of top-drawer and recession-resistant jobs, and constrained levels of personal and household income are also attested to by two other mundane but nonetheless graphic anecdotal indicators. I am referring to pay-day loan companies and auto title lenders, numerous beyond counting in Tucson, and to used-tire shops faced with such financially straitened customers that they must offer to rent them tires and rims by the week, day, or even as little as by the hour.
The underlying limitations of Tucson's economy are further highlighted by the telling fact that few graduates of the University of Arizona (with 43,000 students this semester) remain here to pursue a livelihood. Avenues of well-remunerated advancement are simply far too scarce to accommodate more than the merest fraction of the 6,500 or so degree holders minted annually by the university. The outmigration each year of thousands of young, talented, and well-educated people is another brake on the city’s long-term economic growth that has never been satisfactorily addressed, and between 2012 and 2017, Tucson lost more than 13 percent of its residents aged 18 to 35.
The forfeiture of its best-educated young hinders Tucson in crystallizing into a cluster point for the "knowledge economy” workers sought by next-wave information and technology firms – enterprises of the kind that could upgrade the training and skills of the local workforce, position the city for greater economic stability, and confer on it more and broader prosperity. One need only look to metro Phoenix (to take an example) to see this positive dynamic in action.
(Update, July 24, 2019: Headline news today is that Tucson is "on the map" among small labor markets for its 90 percent growth in tech jobs from 2013 to 2018, suggesting at first glance rapid development of a "tech ecosystem” and burgeoning openings for "tech talent." Yet outside the public sector and the military, at the start of 2019 only 15,700 people held technology jobs here.)
Then there is the matter of Tucson's high number of shuttered businesses, large and small. Emblematic of this, the city has three indoor shopping malls, and at the northernmost (Foothills Mall, with nearly 600,000 square feet under roof), 60 percent of the stores stand empty. That is all the more surprising as this formerly upscale mall is in the most prosperous zip code of the three.
(Update, Nov. 19, 2018: Heading into this year's Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping whirlwind, the vacancy rate at malls nationally averages slightly more than eight percent. It is in the single digits as well in Arizona cities other than Tucson. Foothills Mall continues to fade, its vacancy rate now 70 percent.)
Undeniably, the weakening of indoor and open-air malls in Tucson is a sign in part of a basic shift in our shopping habits, as we increasingly buy goods online instead of at brick-and-mortar retailers. But that does not explain the generalized vanishing act rippling across the city, as many businesses are closing or remain closed post-recession although they are non-retail and have no on-line competitors.
Last week, on a nine-mile drive from my neighborhood to Tucson's airport, I spotted 92 empty storefronts. On a shorter, six-mile route that wended in part through downtown, I counted 68 more. Dishearteningly, it can take one, two, or even three years for new tenants to replace defunct businesses, wherever they expire. In the interval, the vacant premises all too often deteriorate into eyesores.
(Update, July 29, 2019: In 2018 there was no growth whatsoever in the rate of business formation in the Tucson metropolitan area, and retracing my steps today revealed soberingly little economic improvement along the corridors I drove 17 months ago. On the longer, vacant businesses had declined from 92 to 89; on the shorter, from 68 to 66.)
Sotto voce, owners of everyday small and medium-size enterprises that form the backbone of Tucson's economy frequently and strongly criticize elected and appointed officials, saying that they marginalize them by ignoring their concerns and scanting their interests, while trying to attract large out-of-state companies in bidding wars with other cities by offering tax relief and other preferment not accorded modest local firms. A more effective public policy than narrowly targeted incentives, they argue, would be to adopt measures that benefit business across the board.
The most notable recent example of this disparity in the treatment of local workaday businesses and high-profile national companies that the city wishes to lure to town was delivered by Tucson’s prime governmental mover in downtown redevelopment, a “Multipurpose Facilities District” called Rio Nuevo. In 2017 it extended generous incentives to heavy equipment maker Caterpillar Inc. In return for a $43-million loan package repayable over 25 years that calls for Rio Nuevo to build and lease to Caterpillar a regional hub for its Surface Mining & Technology Division, the corporation pledged to transfer to Tucson or to create over the next five years 600 engineering, product development, and support positions. The deal also includes an eight-year property tax abatement, more than $1 million in city building-fee exemptions, $6 million in state relocation aid, and upgraded temporary office space provided by Pima County. Combined, these benefits add up to one of the largest business incentive packages in recent Arizona history.
While the successful wooing of Caterpillar is a coup, it buttresses the conviction of some that outsiders can all too easily turn Tucson's head as the city fails to nurture its own.
A case in point is Tucson’s sole Spanish restaurant, Casa Vicente. Highly popular for its tapas, paella, and flamenco shows, it opened in 2005 and flourished until late May of 2017, when it shut to remodel and overhaul its ventilation, plumbing, and wiring systems to comply with tightened municipal codes. Its owners expected to finish the makeover in a summer’s time, but eight months later they are still struggling to secure design approvals and construction permits from the city. Their now deteriorated building stands locked and untended, its portico damaged and trashed by vandals and its dining areas empty but for litter.
(Update, March 25, 2019: As their endurance contest to obtain city approval to remodel Casa Vicente entered its 21st month in March, the owners demolished the restaurant last week. They now hope that officials will be more amenable to issuing construction permits for an entirely new building.)
Like any other, Tucson's municipal bureaucracy is zealous in upholding its procedural intricacies, even if to the detriment of encouraging or preserving small and middling local businesses as community assets. Oversight of building codes and inspections, commercial signage, historic preservation, zoning, and construction permits falls to the city's Planning and Development Services Department. Despite frequent reorganization, its efficiency never seems to improve, and its staff has been cut from 138 employees in 2008 to fewer than 60 today.
Another bellwether of community malfunction is the substantial number of lots in Tucson that are unbuilt or forsaken – neither for sale or lease – and which dot all areas of the city and depress the value of surrounding properties. Many are 50,000 square feet (a little over an acre) in size, and dozens are weedy or barren sandlots five to 10 acres in extent that have gone undeveloped for decades. Dispersed in location, different in dimension, and diverse in shape, they are uniform in one sense: everywhere their sterile blankness leaps immediately to the eye.
Infill residential construction seems ideal for these tracts and the current shortage of rental housing may spur interest in it. But inducements to promote such development – such as full or partial waivers of rezoning fees and performance guarantees and other planning and permitting prerequisites – are reserved almost exclusively to ventures in the downtown area. It must be added that Tucsonans vigorously oppose increasing residential density almost anywhere it is proposed, recalcitrance that stymies incremental, organic growth which can revitalize neighborhoods. It also reinforces the predisposition of city authorities to leapfrog over areas that have suffered disinvestment, pursuing instead the ceaseless extension of Tucson's boundaries to the north and east to annex adjacent and already-existing taxable businesses, residential properties, and semi-rural landholdings.
The main impulse for annexation is that a portion of state income and sales taxes and certain other state taxes paid by Arizona residents are given back to cities to pay for parks and recreation operations, fire and police protection, and other services. These payments are calculated based on population within each city. Hence the greater the population of Tucson, the more of these funds it captures.
Further enhancing the allure of annexation is that Arizona's constitution requires Tucson to maintain a "structurally balanced" budget, in which revenues match projected operating expenses. To painlessly meet unexpected outlays such as to settle lawsuits, to avoid unpopular hikes in municipal fees and tax rates, and to avert personnel and service cuts, what handier money-raising tool than expanding the city limits?
True as it is that the annexation of unincorporated areas means more sales and property taxes and state shared revenue flow to the city’s coffers, the funds to be gained must by law be weighed against the projected additional expense of providing services to the annexed tracts. Open hearings are stipulated to explain the impact on the residents in an area to be annexed, but if their approval is obtained, adoption of an annexation ordnance is at the sole discretion of the mayor and city council. No vote on it by Tucson’s citizens is required, depriving them of an effective way to lend weight to doubts they may have about an annexation before it occurs.
Official statements in advance of a pending annexation always assure that its costs and benefits will be in balance. But there is scarcely a public airing of these details, and strong emphasis is laid on the opportunity to effortlessly broaden the tax base and to receive more state funds in the short term. That this will come in exchange for taking on expensive long-term liabilities is obscured, such as that the city will be assuming more territory to police with its overstretched force, more decrepit roads to repair, more demand for public infrastructure with its associated need for upkeep and eventual replacement, more people requiring social welfare services, and more outlays for municipal administration.
In this way annexation both eases and magnifies the challenge of working within the city’s budgetary constraints. That is not lost on Tucsonans, but they may contest an annexation ordnance only once it is in force – in the courts or by laborious organization of a referendum – ensuring it will not be rescinded.
A consequence of the constant resort to annexation to sustain the city budget has been unmitigated sprawl. This has literally tilled the soil for numerous negatives for Tucson: increased dependency on cars – bringing with it more traffic jams and fatalities – greater energy use and air pollution, loss of natural habitats, and a decline in community distinctiveness and cohesiveness. Unintended, these and other ill effects have been no less foreseeable for all that, and are the yield as well of decades of acquiescence to a powerful local lobby of land developers, home builders, and commercial real estate investors. Although of no consolation to Tucson, such fumbled urban planning is on view in the disordered outskirts of all major Arizona cities and towns.
Since 1990, Tucson has expanded by nearly a third, and by 10 percent in the last decade alone. Combined with an approach to zoning that borders on laissez-faire, this metamorphosis has left the city marred by a pronounced pattern of crazy quilt property use. Representative of this is a district in which a golf course abuts a gravel pit and motel, a trailer park flanks half-million-dollar horse properties, and an elementary school neighbors a strip mall containing a storefront church, a dentist's office, a dog grooming parlor, a breakfast cafe, and an installation of baseball batting cages.
On a somewhat brighter note, consider the food scene here.
In 2015 UNESCO declared Tucson the first “World City of Gastronomy” in the U.S. This accolade set tourism boosters beaming, and was awarded in part because the city’s cookery is ostensibly extraordinarily wide-ranging in origin and breadth.
In actuality, and to the degree that food choices here are diverse at all, it is because of Tucson's proximity to northern Mexico, with its tacos, fajitas, enchiladas, quesadillas, burritos, chimichangas, and stuffed green chilies. And lest we forget, there is also the locally celebrated “Sonoran hot dog.” Served on a bun, this specialty is an ordinary hot dog, but heaped with pinto beans and chopped onions and tomatoes, topped by a lavish slathering of mayo and other condiments and with a tongue-tingling roasted chili on the side. It is messy, but fun to eat.
As tasty as the aforementioned food is, it can grow monotonous. With the conspicuous exceptions of stylish Seis Kitchen and Contigo in the foothills and Cafe Poca Cosa in the heart of downtown, you'll seek in vain for other and more flavorful Mexican regional fare, such as red snapper baked in a salsa of tomatoes, onions, and peppers as in Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, slow-roasted pork based on Yucatán's heritage of Mayan cookery, Tampico's spicy club-style steak, or mole sauces from Oaxaca.
There are numerous Japanese restaurants, and several hew close enough to authenticity that they refrain from adulterating their sushi rolls with jalapeño peppers. As far as French food goes, the city supports only one bistro and one haute cuisine restaurant with white linen. There is not a single German restaurant, and eastern European food is found at only one Bosnian cafe and another with a salmagundi of Hungarian goulash, Polish sausage, and Russian pierogi.
Pizza and pasta are available everywhere, but while there are several posh Italian establishments, the polenta soup, fondue, risottos, and other cucina typical of northern Italy are virtually unknown in Tucson. Of China’s eight major culinary traditions, Szechuan cuisine can be had at but three restaurants and a cafe. On the other hand, Cantonese dishes abound, in ubiquitous buffets at which quantity reigns over quality. A smattering of Vietnamese, Thai, and Indian eateries operate on the same principle.
There are three restaurants each that categorize themselves as Greek, Peruvian, and Korean, accurately so in several cases, but blithely misapplying those descriptors in others. Another restaurant stands in for Eritrea and two for Ethiopia. Levantine and other Middle Eastern food is limited to clichéd hummus, falafel, gyros, shawarma, feta burgers, and kebabs. Of North African fare, the genuine article is absent, as are West African staples such as peanut butter stew, steamed grated cassava, and etodiaye – beef and shellfish over broken rice.
Beyond Hawaiian barbeque, there is no Polynesian food to be had in the city limits, nor any Persian, Scandinavian, or Indonesian food. And a much-heralded restaurant proffering the fry bread of southern Arizona tribes and such re-imagined Native American dishes as spare ribs with a prickly pear cactus glaze opened and closed the very year that our city was singled out for distinction by the gourmands of UNESCO. In truth, culinary cosmopolitanism in Tucson is more apparent than real.
For steak, there are swank Fleming’s, Sullivan's, and Bob's Steak and Chop House, all in the gilded foothills and noted as much for their hauteur and lofty dinner tabs as for their premium filet mignon. Without high-falutin' airs are Tucson’s cowboy and Southwest steakhouses, including Charro Steak, the Silver Saddle, Cody's Beef 'n Beans, Li'l Abner’s, El Corral, and Pinnacle Peak. The last-named is at Trail Dust Town, an Old West attraction for tenderfoot tourists.
Also beckoning are the outposts of a locally founded restaurant empire that is spreading across Arizona, into neighboring states, and as distant as Georgia and Maryland, brainchild of restaurateur Sam Fox. His “concepts” include North Italia, Blanco Tacos + Tequila, Zinburger, Wildflower, and Culinary Dropout. The food ranges from southern Italian at North and "reinterpreted" Mexican at Blanco, to gourmet burgers at Zinburger and “new American" fare elsewhere.
Mexican seafood cookshacks sell indifferent fish tacos, ceviche, and shrimp dinners made from previously frozen product. Oddly, although Tucson is only a 90-minute flight from the Pacific coast and an eight- to 10-hour drive by refrigerated truck from San Diego and Los Angeles, the city has but a single restaurant that highlights fresh fin- and shellfish, prepared in a discriminating fashion: Kingfisher, which for 25 years has had wild salmon and trout, cod and crab cakes, calamari, prawns, scallops, clams, and mussels on its menu, and which operates an oyster bar.
(Update, February 4, 2019: Opening this week is El Charro del Rey, which will become Tucson's only upscale Mexican seafood spot. A sister of El Charro, one of the city’s best-known Mexican restaurants since 1922, the venture is promising dishes to rival the freshness and distinction of those at Kingfisher.)
Thus far a sampling of independent restaurants – hugely outnumbered, of course, by fast-food, casual, and “fast casual” chains. McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Panda Express, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Applebee's, IHOP, and every other mass-market canteen that you can name is here, catering to the vast majority of Tucsonans who prefer their rations served quickly, cheaply, and in portions often exceeding healthful.
And this leads me to address the physical well-being of my neighbors and their age distribution.
Many Tucsonans walk, run, hike, cycle, swim, golf, and work out on a regular basis, and the city is chock-a-block with gyms and health clubs. These activities and establishments keep a fair number of folk slim, trim, and fit – but most people here are not. Granted, in a 2017 survey 80 percent of respondents said they considered themselves to be of a healthy weight. Self-delusion to the contrary, however, one does not need a degree in public health to see immediately that the average resident, young or old and of whatever ethnicity, is unequivocally full-bellied and broad-bottomed. Few people stride – many more waddle – and the frequency of morbid obesity is visibly and alarmingly high.
One also soon notices a striking number of men of employable age wandering the streets of certain commercial sections of midtown at working hours. I say “wandering” and not “walking” because these unfortunates can only shuffle, limp, and shamble, stoop-shouldered and with heads bowed. They often appear doleful and distracted; the impression they give is that they are borne down by cares and defeated by pain or, conversely, disoriented by medication. Clearly they are suffering.
Moreover, it is not unusual to see in some areas of Tucson startling concentrations of people who are of an age to be in robust physical condition, but who hobble with canes, cling to walkers, or get about in scooters and wheelchairs. Diabetic amputees are likewise not rare, and 11 percent of all residents – more than 60,000 people – are on disability, sidelined from active life by chronic physical hindrances, diseases, and mental health disorders.
Since I arrived in Tucson in 2000, its citizenry has grayed noticeably. From 2010 to 2015 alone, adults over 65 in Pima County increased by 21 percent, and in 2017 they constituted slightly more than 19 percent of Tucson's year-around population. Now to be seen are large numbers of the “late elderly” – people older than 75. An even more aged demographic is also rapidly growing here, as part of a statewide trend: the Arizona Department of Health Services forecasts that by 2020, the number of Arizonans over age 85 (the "oldest old") will have increased by 102 percent in less than a decade. Tucson's share will have risen in part simply because people are living longer, but as well because more and more already quite senior retirees are moving here to stay.
Fitch Ratings Inc. and Moody’s Investor Service, national bond credit-rating agencies, scrutinize changes in the age profile of states and cities as a measure of their ability to service interest on the securities that they issue and to repay the principal. They especially track the size of the working-age population, whose tax contributions are a mainstay of public credit. With more than a little preoccupation, the agencies note that Arizona – already in the top ten states with the highest percentage of pensioners – will see a further increase of 59 percent in retired residents between 2015 and 2030. The greater number will be newcomers (Arizona is second only to Florida as a magnet for retiree migrants), who are expected to gravitate about equally to metro Phoenix and the Tucson region. This trend has put Tucson and its hinterland on a trajectory to become “super-aged” by late in the next decade.
I am 66 myself and have white hair, but I am fortunately in good health, hold myself erect, and still move about with purpose and a firm step. Yet when I attend a symphony concert, go to a movie not intended for children, browse a bookstore, shop at a supermarket, visit a museum, or sit in a restaurant, I am often surrounded by frail greybeards considerably older than I.
Particularly when Tucson is flooded with geriatric snowbirds, it can seem as if almost everyone is depressingly enfeebled and far advanced in physical decrepitude. Between New Year's and Easter it is well-nigh impossible to see doctors who specialize in elder medicine and treat such ailments as cataracts, skin cancers, and rheumatoid arthritis, their schedule books already long filled with appointments made months in advance by snowbirds anticipating their winter sojourn in Tucson.
I harbor no animus toward retirees or the elderly, should you wonder. That would be callous, and absurd in my case especially, as I am so much nearer my demise than my birth. My four closest friends are respectively aged 76, 78, 79, and 84. Nor do I think it a moral failing for anyone young or old to be disabled, debilitated, or ill; two of my friends battle cancer, and they are not beset with it because they are bad people. And as the days of our age mount, all of us wish for more youthful vigor in our city, as an indispensable element in promoting the common good.
Although most apparent when the influx of cold-weather refugees is at its winter peak, throughout the year there is little mixing of young and old in Tucson. Notwithstanding the intermingling at certain citywide celebrations and at the university's football and basketball games, there prevails a perturbing sense of a divided community, as self-segregation by age promotes an isolating and mutual remoteness. Young singles generally keep to the university precincts and a few downtown clubs, bars, and musical venues; outside of the poorest neighborhoods, young families are seen mostly in the suburbs. Retirees, too, overwhelmingly prefer their own company.
A closer look shows that retirees in the Tucson region are not a monolithic tribe, however. There are fracture lines among them.
The majority have moved to the area from out of state, and a large and growing share live in age-restricted golfing developments, master-planned communities with private, well-paved roads, and in luxury second homes in such locales as Catalina Foothills, Rancho Vistoso, Saddlebrooke, and Dove Mountain north of Tucson and Green Valley and Tubac to the south. They frequent Tucson for dining and entertainment, but forge no civic connection with the city, and few ever brush up against its harder edges.
They do not look favorably on helping to fund schools, sports fields, bikeways, and street repairs in Tucson, nor on supporting its public transit system, low-income housing and homeless prevention programs, or its emergency services for domestic violence victims and other special needs groups, because these capital investments and social goods do not benefit them first-hand. Those who live and vote in Pima County preponderantly veto bond issues and increases in sales and property taxes to raise monies to make the city more livable.
(Update, November 24, 2018: In county-wide elections on November 6, a proposition to issue short-term bonds to finance the reconstruction, repair, and preservation of streets and roads in Tucson and Pima County met a thumping defeat. The measure would have distributed $430 million across the region. But – and as precinct-level audits of voting returns now confirm – it hit the "retiree roadblock."
Two aspects in particular of the bond initiative doomed it. First, almost half the funds raised would have been allotted to Tucson. And second, although issuance of the bonds would have coincided with retirement of old debt and have thus forestalled a hike in property taxes, these would not have declined either, as they were originally scheduled to do in step with the payoff of earlier obligations.
In the vanguard of the naysayers were wealthier suburban retirees, reluctant as ever to shoulder costs or forego savings to benefit Tucson. Joining them were snowbirds, who feel that as part-time residents it is unjust to ask them to pay property taxes on a 12-month basis for road repairs, notwithstanding that many maintain second homes here year around.
Some opponents also feared that city and county authorities would mismanage the raised funds or divert them to other uses, as they often have been accused of doing in the past. After repeated levies to repair streets and roads – only to see most of them continue to go from bad to worse – more and more voters are growing chary of assigning area transportation officials fresh tranches of taxpayer dollars.)
Native-born retirees – generally in-city residents and poorer than their peers from other parts – complain of the newcomers and especially of the snowbirds among them that they are "resident tourists” and fault them for showing no solidarity with lifelong and year-around Tucsonans. Little wonder that they do not, for they feel themselves at a remove from the city’s pressing negative quality-of-life issues. And indeed, perhaps because they are free of the need to struggle in the local housing and job markets, are secured against urban maladies by wealth and distance, and can return north or to the West Coast at will to escape the region's most torrid months, suburban retirees and snowbirds are precisely the people most likely to declare that life in Tucson is congenial and the city is charming.
Given Tucson's many self-evident drawbacks, you would not be wrong to think there is fertile ground here for a crusading newspaper, magazine, or broadcaster to alertly hold public servants to account, to hammer away at the urgent need to revivify the city, and to rally citizens to remedy its shortcomings.
Alas, we lack a champion of civic uplift among our media.
In the print arena, Tucson had two daily newspapers until 2009. Closure that year of the Tucson Citizen left the field to the Arizona Daily Star. It has since been shrinking in content and staff at an accelerating rate, in line with the experience of legacy newspapers in many other U.S. cities.
It is not uncommon for the Star to run to as few as 22 pages on a weekday, even including advertising and the sports section. Shortly before Thanksgiving 2017, the paper's publisher directly addressed readers with the admonition not to miss the imminent appearance of the fattest issue of the year – not suddenly thick with bonus reportage, but with Black Friday ads. To be sure, when subscribers to the Star are asked why they still take the paper, the answer is most often "just for the ads and coupons."
The Star no longer prints a daily editorial and has ceased almost entirely to produce its own regular standing features, such as automotive, financial, gardening, health, and personal advice columns, syndicating them instead from other sources. Even page design, copyediting and proofing, and headline writing are increasingly outsourced – to two "design centers" in Indiana and Wisconsin operated by the Star's corporate parent, Lee Enterprises of Davenport, Iowa, one of the nation's largest newspaper holding companies. The dearth of original material extends to local news also: daily print editions not unusually carry only four (and often only two) staff-written stories not about sports.
As the Star has lost heft, Tucsonans have shown its waning relevance to their news diet by deserting the paper in droves, even though without a local alternative if they want to thumb through a broadsheet. In 2009, the last year the paper faced a crosstown competitor, it printed 93,770 daily copies. By 2017, the count had fallen 46 percent, to 49,915 – less than the seating capacity of the university’s football stadium. Over the same period, there was a decline of 25 percent in the press run of the Sunday edition, which was spared a steeper slide only by its delivery each weekend of a bonanza of advertising inserts.
(Update, May 19, 2019: Average daily circulation at the Star continues in freefall. In 2018, it declined to 44,815 copies. Today's edition totaled fewer than 37,000.)
Accompanying the circulation drop have been repeated layoffs in all the Star's departments, from production to advertising. The newsroom has not been exempt, and the ranks of copy editors, section editors, photographers, graphic designers, and reporters have all been thinned in turn. Most news staffers are not replaced as they age and retire; of those who are, their successors are interns and apprentices from the university’s school of journalism.
The cutbacks and attrition have sapped the Star of much of its reportorial expertise, analytical rigor, and investigative appetite. The result has been to render it a near-nullity as a source of deep-diving stories and unique news angles, thus giving people even less reason to buy or read it. And at the same time that the paper has become less informative, its home delivery and single-copy price has steadily escalated.
The Star mines the Associated Press for nearly all its world, U.S., and regional reporting and has shed its national and state editors. Also gone are its senior business editor, features editor, crime and court reporters, neighborhood reporters, high school sports reporters, and its book reviewer. There is still a print features writer and a breaking news reporter; a reporter also remains who is assigned exclusively to metro affairs, but the Star does not cover City Hall on a regular basis, and an observer with a press card is scarcely ever seen at school board meetings or sessions of the county supervisors.
Likewise lacking a statehouse correspondent of its own in Phoenix to apply an on-the-spot eye to governmental, legislative, and political affairs, the paper simply reprints a miscellany of articles from the AP state wire and a capitol news service. These stories are homogenized, to go out to newspapers all across Arizona. Because the Star does not rewrite them, they typically lack the local context that readers in Tucson need to interpret the significance for their community of proceedings at the state level.
Like its editorial layout and design, the Star’s website is also structured from afar by Lee Enterprises, which feeds a “one-size-fits-all” digital platform to its 50 daily newspapers for the addition of local items at their discretion. Symptomatic of the Star’s deepening lassitude, many of the stories in its on-line edition at tucson.com linger there for days, growing increasingly stale until finally succeeded by new entries. No category of information receives so many regular updates as the performance of the University of Arizona's sports teams. On its homepage, hard news competes for prominence with a welter of anodyne entertainment and lifestyle pieces, and “amusing but trivial” describes much other content on the website, which regularly devotes space to such oddities as “Here's how much bacon cost the year you were born” and “See the 30 best-looking beer cans in America.”
Still and all, generous acknowledgement is due the surviving journalists at the Star, who continue to individually notch first, second, and third place honors from the Arizona Press Club and in the annual contests of the Arizona Newspapers Association (ANA). Yet the paper itself has not won the ANA Newspaper of the Year award for well over a decade, against competitors that include small rural dailies and high school and college publications.
The student papers will compete separately from professional ones beginning this year. Their absence may boost the Star’s odds of future selection as best in class by ANA judges – so gibe partisans of the Arizona Republic, the larger Phoenix rival of the Star and the leading newspaper in the state.
The Republic has twice won a Pulitzer Prize, most recently this very year for explanatory reporting of the difficulties and unintended consequences of fulfilling President Trump’s pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The frontier is closer by nearly 115 miles to Tucson than to Phoenix, such that one would not unreasonably expect the Star to have been the more dynamic and thorough of the two papers in pursuing a major story unfolding virtually on its doorstep.
The Republic has also been a nine-time finalist for a Pulitzer in other categories of journalism, including for its treatment of the mass shooting in Tucson on January 8, 2011 that killed six people and wounded 13 more, among them then-U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. That the Star’s reporting about such a momentous event on its own turf did not give it a better or at least equal claim to journalism’s highest laurels points up how much more illuminating and incisive was the Republic’s coverage of the tragedy.
(Update, March 21, 2019: The publisher of the Star announced today that the screw of outsourcing and layoffs at the paper is taking yet another turn. Beginning May 21, the Star will no longer ink an edition in Tucson. Instead, the paper will be printed in Phoenix – on the presses of the Republic. Its already much-reduced pressroom and newspaper assembly crews will be disbanded, costing 59 employees their jobs.
The Star is also selling its 220,000-square-foot office and printing complex and plans to lease a space one-tenth as large for its remaining journalists, of whom there will likely soon be a dozen fewer. The editorial cartoonist, sports columnist, opinion writer, local news editor, arts, environmental, and border reporters, several photographers, and others have been offered a Hobson’s choice: accept a buyout by mid-April, or run the risk of being laid off. All are among the most experienced journalists at the paper.
Auguring a further crippling of the Star’s newsgathering ability, the threat of these cut-to-the-bone dismissals is prompting less-seasoned staffers to depart, seeing no future for themselves. In a city that calls itself “the capital of U.S. astronomy” and that is home to one of the nation’s top research universities, the paper has for example just lost the lone reporter it employed to juggle the science and technology beat and coverage of health issues and higher education. And leaving next month are two award-winning younger reporters who in 2018 helped produce a series on Arizona’s ailing child foster care system, one of the very few examples of public service journalism by the Star in recent years.
The intensifying hollowing out of its physical presence portends yet bigger changes at the Star.
Not long ago the publisher emailed me: “We have no plan to transition to an all-digital format at this time.” Not from one day to the next, to be sure, but this does not rule out a piecemeal transformation.
In conferences with investment analysts, Star owner Lee Enterprises describes its business plan as resting on twin pillars: increased centralization and outsourcing in the operation of its papers; and their reincarnation in digital form. As a prelude to this conversion, it is modeling the cost savings, effects on readership, and the impact on ad reach and revenues of instituting step-wise printing cutbacks. One scenario is elimination of the Saturday or Monday printed edition, or both. Another: going digital all week but for the Sunday paper and the Wednesday edition, with its weekly supermarket ads.
Strong pushback – and still more cancelled subscriptions – would come from those who take the word “Daily” in the Star’s masthead literally and who would be unhappy that they could no longer each day actually hold in hand letters to the editor or a crossword. Maintaining the goodwill of the paper's readers and its utility to them is, however, not a guiding consideration in the calculations of Lee Enterprises. In the endgame now unfolding, its focus is on slashing expenses to maintain the company's profit margin at the highest level for a few years more. Currently, it is an industry-leading 19 percent.
Reducing the print schedule and shifting to a largely or wholly on-line existence has led papers elsewhere to carry less original material, fewer community stories, and reduced news of local civic importance – the very tendencies that have so seriously eroded loyalty to the Star in print. The paper's by-now customary failure to present the most important news, with proper emphasis, and in a timely fashion cannot be cured by deepening these deficiencies in digital mode. Such a formula can only usher the paper, self-defeated, to irrevocable collapse.)
Whatever its future, the contrast could not be sharper between the flagging Star of today and its former self – it did after all win a Pulitzer in 1981 for a probe of fraud in the Athletic Department at the University of Arizona. But, understaffed and unable to put feet on the street, the paper no longer fields aggressive reporting teams set on developing stories that shed light on public servants and leading local institutions, and that hold them responsible for their words and actions.
With the Star now a somnolent watchdog, Tucsonans receive far less insight into what goes on in their city and county than they have a right to expect from a major daily newspaper. Citizen supervision of public authorities and agencies suffers accordingly, and local government operates less efficiently and effectively as a result, while voter turnout drops, along with the variety of candidates for public office and the range of voices in the public square. This effectively and increasingly leaves the average Tucsonan disenfranchised.
Meanwhile, anonymous but well-connected decision makers – unelected political insiders, economic heavyweights, and similar behind-the-scenes powerbrokers with outsize influence to call the shots in area affairs – escape searching inquiry altogether. To their secret satisfaction, one suspects.
An information vacuum has developed in Tucson, and made of it a city of unrevealed truths. And the three-legged stool essential to support participatory community governance and transparent public policy making – responsive officials and civic institutions, robust and vigilant media, and informed and engaged citizens – is distinctly wobbly here.
In addition to the Star, a baker’s dozen of weekly, biweekly, and monthly newsprint periodicals (some of them national franchises that provide a template for locally generated stories) cover dining, health and wellness, and entertainment and leisure activities around Tucson. Their publishers distribute them for free in libraries, coffee shops, and bookstores, and in grocery stores beside racks holding shopping fliers. Sad to say, the usefulness of some is surpassed by that of the supermarket throwaways.
Chief among the free print media is the Tucson Weekly. Professedly "alternative," it runs social and political commentary that is often self-consciously provocative, yet finds no echo among Tucsonans at large. The Weekly is valued by the LGBTIQA+ community however, as the only local medium giving sustained attention to the concerns of people who do not assign themselves to a traditional gender or to a binary sexual category.
Falling page count in the last two years has bitten deeply into the Weekly’s main stock-in-trade: reviews of restaurants, films, local theater, area and visiting bands and vocalists, musical album releases, and the painterly arts. It remains afloat on advertising revenue from marijuana dispensaries, live music venues, topless clubs, escort agencies, and providers of sexual services thinly disguised as massage therapy.
The owner of the Weekly is Thirteenth Street Media, of Boulder, Colorado. Another of its properties is Inside Tucson Business, a biweekly also reporting in newsprint. It tracks business, financial, and economic affairs employing the same administrative, advertising, and editorial staff as the Weekly, and not surprisingly, the two publications often carry many of the same articles.
(Update, July 18, 2019: The Weekly began this month to appear in dimensions markedly smaller than formerly. Presumably tongue-in-cheek, it explained the shrinkage as “designed to make it 23 percent easier to turn the pages.” It might more candidly have admitted to adopting smaller proportions in an urgent bid to trim costs. Ironically, in this the countercultural Weekly is less an "alternative" to the Star and more the traditional paper's mirror image, as they both reach for the radical remedy of self-cannibalization in their attempts to survive.)
Here as well are quarterly BizTucson Magazine and monthly Tucson Lifestyle Magazine, glossies that dare to charge subscription fees. Their production values are commendably high; in that respect each warrants its price. In editorial outlook and content, however, the former is purely a vehicle for uncritical local and regional promotion, and the latter urges on its readers an aspirational and self-centered consumerism blind to civic concerns and issues of public welfare.
BizTucson takes as its remit unbounded boosterism. Attuned exclusively to the positive, it recurrently prognosticates snowballing progress for the city, in every sphere. Conceiving itself a showcase for "dynamic" Tucson, it alternates uniformly acclamatory surveys of local economic sectors with appraisals of the city’s fiscal, regulatory, and business policies that qualify them as exemplary in every way. No less adulatory are its frequent profiles of area entrepreneurs and university, city, and county officials.
(Update, August 28, 2019: Indefatigably optimistic, BizTucson banners its forthcoming Fall 2019 issue with “10 Reasons Millennials Love Tucson.” Among them, the magazine adduces hiking opportunities, Mexican food, a streetcar line that facilitates runs from the university to downtown bars and nightclubs for craft beer, and the exemption from lawn mowing granted by a desert climate unfriendly to grass.
Unmentioned is that federal census data on the top 54 U.S. metros of at least one million people show that in 2018 the Tucson statistical area was dead last in attracting and holding young professionals. The number one reason that millennials cite as to why they bypass the city on their career paths or decamp if they are already here: salaries too low to enable them to secure decent housing.)
For its part, Tucson Lifestyle strives to be tastemaker to the richest and most status-conscious slice of the region's population. Replete with ads for prestigious jewelry, aesthetic treatments, and vanity plastic surgery, it reports on the galas of affluent about-towners, and gourmet kitchens, luxury home furnishings, and sumptuous villas are the stars of its eye-catching photographic spreads. Another staple: accounts of "masterful" (i.e. lavish) house and garden makeovers, executed à la mode and with the finest fittings and finishes by upmarket interior designers and landscape architects. It is the height of irony that a magazine which purports to define the "lifestyle" of Tucson leaves readers none the wiser about life as actually lived by 99 percent of the people within its area of distribution.
It would be unrealistic to expect Tucson Lifestyle – dedicated to the beautification of the bodies of the wealthy and of their private homes and gardens – to advocate enhancing the appearance of poor neighborhoods, improving public spaces, and increasing greenery in its namesake city, so as to bestow aesthetic, environmental, and health benefits on residents who cannot afford them out of their own pocket. Nonetheless, such an ethos is sorely needed in a community with barely eight percent urban tree cover (the national average is 15 percent) and only 128 municipal and neighborhood playgrounds, parks, pools, and sports field complexes. The city spends but $63 annually per resident on recreation programs and construction and maintenance at these facilities. The budget is similarly slender for greens and clubhouse maintenance at five municipal golf courses, with a backlog of $25 million in long-deferred refurbishment projects.
Our electronic media display an equally dispiriting neglect of public service and accountability journalism that would supply a serious source of information in support of civic betterment.
Producers and reporters of Arizona Public Media (AZPM), the University of Arizona's PBS television and NPR radio affiliate, receive more awards than at any other southern Arizona broadcaster, and more than at any other public broadcaster in the region. Yet although on the air 24 hours a day, AZPM carries only an insubstantial two hours per week of original programming covering local and state public affairs, on radio and TV combined.
Commercial broadcasters in Tucson are more disappointing still. As in most U.S. cities these days, they are little more than traffic, sports, and weather reporting agencies, and their TV newscasts are for the most part mere recitals of car crashes, fires, sudden deaths and dramatic rescues, and crime entries on the day's police blotter. A "special in-depth investigative report” – even on so complex a topic as the area’s epidemic of deaths caused by overdoses of methamphetamines and opioids – can reliably be counted on to wrap up in under four minutes.
Rounding out Tucson’s media ecosystem are news outlets in Spanish, peculiarly few and marginal in a city so close to Mexico and in a metro region with nearly half a million Hispanics.
La Estrella de Tucson is a Spanish-language version of the Star, but so severely abridged that it seems an unloved stepchild, published only as an afterthought. A weekly, it resembles a supermarket tabloid in its dimensions, oversize cover and inside photos, and abbreviated news content, the articles in a typical issue filling only about as many column inches as in three pages of the daily paper. Its on-line edition is refreshed even less frequently than the Star's website in English.
(Update, June 28, 2019: The chief asset of La Estrella is its editor. In addition to directing La Estrella's three-person editorial team, he contributes Sunday commentary to the Star, offering a rare Hispanic perspective on the area's political and social issues and its Mexican-American history. He is however yet another of the 12 long-time journalists that the Star recently pressed to retire. Today he did so. Also as of today, five others have agreed to buyouts to avoid being laid off.)
Likewise in tabloid format is the only other local regular periodical in Spanish, the monthly Arizona Bilingual. It focuses in print and online on Hispanic heritage events, immigration guidance, and health and pet care tips.
Fewer than half a dozen radio stations in Tucson broadcast in Spanish, in sports, religious, and regional Mexican and Tejano music formats; several have hourly news summaries. Two television stations operated by Telemundo and Univision (headquartered in Miami and New York City, respectively) compete for viewers with newscasts, sports events, sitcoms, movies, telenovelas, and their websites.
Tucson also has two regular faith-based publications. The Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona puts out the biweekly Arizona Jewish Post, and the Diocese of Tucson issues the monthly Catholic Outlook. Apart from them and communication vehicles aimed at Hispanics, there are no locally originated print, broadcast, or on-line media tailored for the city's and the region's other religious, ethnic, linguistic, immigrant, and minority groups, not even for the Native American and African American communities.
THE SHORT:
Thanks for persevering in reading my magnum opus, so lengthy because its purpose was to dive beneath the mere surface of Tucson. I hope it has provided you useful facts and insights. If, after studying this review, you conclude that Tucson appeals as a city to visit briefly but not, on the whole, in which to live, you have caught my drift.
I am not happy to represent this viewpoint. Tucson has many devotees who judge it approvingly on numerous counts. They are not necessarily mistaken. But reality always and everywhere insists on asserting itself, and any high estimate of the city must be considered in full awareness of its less favorable aspects. In the interest of a true-to-life rendering of our local scene, these cannot be passed over. That applies no matter how partial one feels toward the Old Pueblo, and however much one is inclined to see it in a positive light.
Examining the balance sheet, it is true that Tucson is far from the worst place in which you could choose to reside, but the odds against it becoming the best are insurmountable. And they are compounded because the city’s greatest handicaps – extensively decayed streets and roads, exceptionally high levels of crime, broad and entrenched poverty, a structurally weak, low-wage economy, and a municipal government that ill serves its citizens – have proven enduringly resistant to amelioration.
That Tucson's problems are so intractable stems in good measure from the unruffled tolerance of dysfunction shown by many residents, permanent and seasonal. Well and personally acquainted with the ills that afflict their city, they have nonetheless accommodated themselves to its shortcomings.
The causes of this state of affairs are many and complex. Their synthesis is deep-seated passivity, and I think it fair to say that high among the reasons for it are complacency, inertia, and too little self-examination. They have been like the entrammeling sleeves and buckles of a straitjacket, binding Tucson’s energies and constraining its potential.
I treasure my city's nearly numberless regional natural attractions and its few cooler months, the splendor of the full moon springing bright and beaming above the ridgelines of the Santa Catalinas, and the penetratingly crisp scent of creosote bushes after a monsoon storm has dampened the desert.
But I am an idealist. And I suffer the vulnerability of all idealists: when I see so much to be done to make things right, yet left undone, it pains me deeply. Tucson is very hard on idealists. So, after nearly two decades here, I have decided to move away as soon as I can.