INSIDE TUCSON BUSINESS: Mon., Jan. 23, 2006
Sprawl haters should blame themselves
by Steve Emerine
Every month or so, a big local news outlet tells us Tucson is spreading in all directions.
Thousands of homes are being built up in the Tortolitas and Pinal County, down in Sahuarita and into Santa Cruz County, eastward past Vail to Benson and Cochise County, and west of the Tucson Mountains. More are planned.
Television anchors and newspaper reporters wring their hands and moan about the sprawl. They interview environmental, neighborhood and county leaders, who also wring their hands and moan. People who have been here longer than six months wring their hands and moan, too.
“It's terrible,” they say. “Look what those developers and newcomers are doing to MY desert.” (They conveniently forget what they did to my desert if they moved here after 1960, the year I became a Tucsonan).
Many of these wringers and moaners need to understand who's to blame for all the growth they deplore. They are.
As long as the North, the Midwest and the East have cold winters and as long as California has sky-high home prices, earthquakes and bad weather, people are going to move to Tucson.
And when they do, they'll need homes. Companies will build those homes, and the newcomers will buy them. So will Tucsonans who want to upgrade their lifestyle.
A few years ago, some environmentalists and neighborhood activists pressured county officials to “do something” about growth. The result was the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, which basically keeps county land owners from building anything on 70 to 80% of their property. They must leave it in its natural state forever.
As a result, the owner who planned to sell his 100 acres as one-acre home sites for $1,000 each to make $100,000 did the only thing he could do. He changed his plans and offered 20 five-acre sites for $5,000 apiece.
Not only would there be fewer homes on his property, but the cost of each home site would suddenly quintuple. And 80 families who might have lived there had to look somewhere else.
Many found they couldn't buy in the city because some neighborhood nuts opposed virtually every in-fill project that builders proposed.
Meanwhile, at the urging of our environmental and neighborhood buddies, local officials enacted impact fees and then raised the cost of water and sewer hook-ups, building permits and inspections, plats, rezonings and other building services.
With some buyers unable to afford to live in Tucson, developers sold some of their land in neighboring counties to builders who erected homes for less than they would cost here. And despite rising gas prices, people who work in Tucson bought them.
So now Tucson workers drive to other counties every day to build homes for people who will commute to work in Tucson every day. How's that for wasting energy?
When I flew to Tucson in the spring of 1960 for a job interview with Bill Small Jr., assistant publisher of the Tucson Daily Citizen, he drove me almost as far east on Speedway as we could go, then back on Broadway to downtown, where the Citizen and Star shared a building at 208 N. Stone Ave. (It's a parking lot now).
“How do you like Tucson?” he asked.
“Great,” I replied. “I'd like to live in a town this size.” (It was 212,000 then).
“Then don't take the job,” he said. “It will never be this size again.”
He was right, but I took the job anyway. I apologize to the folks who were wringing their hands and bemoaning Tucson's growth then, but I've never regretted the move.