Phoenix 101: What killed downtown

[JManc]

Originally Posted by 10023

I think everyone understands the reasons why. That doesn’t change the reality.

They don't otherwise we would not be having this discussion. Phoenix started out briefly with traditional growth expanding from downtown outward but early on its history (the 50's), cars, freeways, and suburbia happened which changed the fabric of cities everywhere. LA and Dallas were already big to have grown largish urban centers, Phoenix was not even a blip on anyone's radar but even their development decentralized which is why their cores are pretty small given their massive populations...as Crawford mentioned above.

[pj3000]

Originally Posted by JManc

They don't otherwise we would not be having this discussion. Phoenix started out briefly with traditional growth expanding from downtown outward but early on its history (the 50's), cars, freeways, and suburbia happened which changed the fabric of cities everywhere. LA and Dallas were already big to have grown largish urban centers, Phoenix was not even a blip on anyone's radar but even their development decentralized which is why their cores are pretty small given their massive populations...as Crawford mentioned above.

We know this. Which is exactly why you can't put Phoenix in the same league with LA and Dallas and other sunbelt downtowns.

Those cities were already kinda big by the time Phoenix started to develop, so they already had sizable-for-the-era downtowns. Sprawl limited intensive development in a broadly similar manner as what happened in Phoenix downtown's case... BUT even with massive suburban sprawl in the sunbelt, those other cities were still developing their cores on a highly significant scale.

To put it in plain terms, LA and Dallas (and Houston and Atlanta and Miami... and Tampa and San Diego and Charlotte...) were putting up their tallest buildings in their downtowns in the golden age of sprawl. And so was Phoenix.

But I think we all know that the results of all that construction are just a bit different when considering all of those other cities in comparison with Phoenix, no?

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by pj3000

Yeah, what you're saying here is true. It's just that LA and Dallas (and other sunbelt cities) did in fact develop more significant downtowns than Phoenix did... a minor reason being that they developed earlier than Phoenix did, before auto sprawl displaced a lot of major development outside the core.

While LA and Dallas do have smaller downtown areas (though they still are pretty big) relative to the overall vast size of their multi-nodal metro areas, their downtowns are still orders of magnitude larger than Phoenix's downtown in relation... because they developed earlier and because they were and are more prominent cities. So it's very difficult to claim that Phoenix is in the same boat with LA and Dallas and others when it comes to why their downtowns didn't develop -- because they actually did, while Phoenix's did not. Phoenix seems to be kind of an outlier in this case.

No its a massiver difference

LA Metro Pop 1950: 4,934,246 (about as big as Phoenix is now) City ~1.9m

Dallas Fort Worth Pop 1950: 976,052 City: ~434,462

Phoenix MSA 1950: 375,000 City: 100k

Both LA and Dallas had pre-suburb populations that multiple times larger than phoenix had.

Lets take a look at the difference:

LA:



Dallas:



This was the absolutely most flattering angle of downtown from the 1950's with an arial to give you the actual scope of our "downtown"





Its not surprising at all, this was the center of a small growing city, Dallas and LA were already major cities by the time Phoenix even began to grow, they had established pre-war downtown. And other than some 1 and two story buildings almost everything you see above that is over 1 or 2 stories is still downtown now.

And if you are wondering same intersection a few months back: https://goo.gl/maps/pd6Bs4JkEh8gXEh39

[pj3000]

^ good pics.

I shouldn't have said "minor" reason being that those other cities developed earlier than Phoenix did. I know that's a big reason.

And that's why I think it's just very difficult to put Phoenix in the same category as LA and Dallas.

I guess my main question is, what happened/didn't happen from 1950 to 2000?

Look at what happened in LA and Dallas (and in all those other sunbelt cities I mentioned as examples) and then look at what happened/didn't happen in Phoenix in comparison during that "sprawl" period.

It's an interesting topic to consider.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by pj3000

BUT even with massive suburban sprawl in the sunbelt, those other cities were still developing their cores on a highly significant scale.

Again, these other cities have something to develop in the first place. LA has a pretty large walk-able downtown area, Dallas's and Houston's are pretty respectable given their development and all are large enough to attract new development. Phoenix's downtown is just a bunch of tallish post war buildings clustered together. There's nothing inviting about the area. At least not yet. It will take a very pioneering developer to take a gamble on downtown and hope there's an interest for urban/ downtown living at some point. Much as there was with Houston 15-20 years ago.

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by JManc

Again, these other cities have something to develop in the first place. LA has a pretty large walk-able downtown area, Dallas's and Houston's are pretty respectable given their development and all are large enough to attract new development. Phoenix's downtown is just a bunch of tallish post war buildings clustered together. There's nothing inviting about the area. At least not yet. It will take a very pioneering developer to take a gamble on downtown and hope there's an interest for urban/ downtown living at some point. Much as there was with Houston 15-20 years ago.

There is a lot of apartments and condos going up at the moment, by our city specific forum something like 25 towers planned and 6 currently under construction not to mention low 5 story apartment blocks and restaurant rehabs. The real change isnt in how the skyline looks but the activity on the ground and that is really where things are night and day from even a few years ago. There are thousands of apartment units coming online, as thousands already have in the last decade. The city will be unrecognizable in a few years.

If even half of whats on the books comes to fruition it would be an incredible change in a downtown that has already gone from all but pointless to actually a place people live and spend time in.

[dc_denizen]

Funny, Los Angeles still looks like that, not Dallas though.

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by pj3000

Look at what happened in LA and Dallas (and in all those other sunbelt cities I mentioned as examples) and then look at what happened/didn't happen in Phoenix in comparison during that "sprawl" period.

It's an interesting topic to consider.

They really didnt though, they got some high rise offices as everywhere did but other than the existing pre war buildings Dallas and LA's cores remained pretty stagnant like almost every city from the 1950's-2000's They simply had more to begin with before this current urban expansion began.

Then we can also get into the fact that LA and Dallas operate as regional financial centers both are major energy producers etc etc. LA is a port city on and on, there are a lot of reasons why these places got bigger faster and sooner than a desert river valley who's primary economic engine was copper, oranges and cotton until about 1980

[JAYNYC]

Originally Posted by Obadno

Dallas:

Wow! Would not have expected it to look like that back then.

[PHX31]

Phoenix was the 99th largest city by population in 1950, between Corpus Christi, Texas and Allentown, Pennsylvania. Even then, it was younger than those cities with most early growth predicated on not much more than some agriculture and such. Regardless, it did have a cohesive and attractive pre-war built environment for a similarly-sized city of the time (although younger). There are still several 1920s and art deco "high rises" in DT Phoenix.

And then, yes, as was the point of this thread, it's downtown was killed by any number of factors. It was once a vibrant core of a small US City, then it became a forgotten and destroyed area of a booming metropolis.

I'll try not to hash out all the many reasons this happened, but one thing I feel that isn't mentioned much is the air conditioning aspect. Obviously, Phoenix needs air conditioning during the summer, much like other areas need heat in the winter - only heating a building is much easier back in the "olden days" and has a longer history than cooling a building. Everyone knows Phoenix boomed once air condition became widespread, but I feel like one reason so many historic buildings were destroyed, especially swaths of historic houses, was because retrofitting a house/building with an air conditioning system was just difficult and pricey. Imagine trying to retrofit air conditioning system with all the duct work and registers and returns and vents in a victorian mansion of Phoenix. This fact could have been the reason many people felt saving buildings in Phoenix just wasn't worth it (in conjunction with many other factors).

It's easy to look up historic phoenix pictures and see what once was and realize, yes, there was a downtown (which was relative to the City's size at the time) and the majority of the cohesion has been "killed". Anyone in this thread saying there never was anything in Phoenix to kill is just wrong.

I think soon people will be surprised at the progress the City is making now, though, as Obadno has mentioned. It was left with one of the barest-boned and relatively small downtowns in the country and it really is rising from the ashes. What's being built will never rival a true pre-war in tact downtown area, but it'll have small pieces of that and is becoming much more lively.

[LA21st]

How is Dallas's downtown in the same category has downtown LA here? Does Dallas have a large historic core? No. How big was Dallas in 1930 or 1940? 300,000?
LA had 1.5 by 1940. There's no comparison at all there.

[Obadno]

People should also realize that Phoenix metro has two other cores in Scottsdale and Tempe that for a very long time got much more love and attention than the actual downtown did.

Why couldn't Phoenix been right across the river from Tempe with Scottsdale only a mile to the northeast instead of having competing city cores for entertainment and business each surrounded by miles of suburban sprawl?

That just isn't how things went, all of these small farming communities did their own thing and ran into each-other. Downtown Phoenix's biggest competitor for office and condo development hasn't been other Metros but its own suburbs.

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by LA21st

How is Dallas's downtown in the same category has downtown LA here? Does Dallas have a large historic core? No. How big was Dallas in 1930 or 1940? 300,000?
LA had 1.5 by 1940. There's no comparison at all there.

I did the comparison above, Dallas Fort Worth was about 1 million in the 1950s, LA was hitting 5 million, Phoenix was at under 500k

So people were asking why the two closest sunbelt cities in age and size (dallas and LA) have bigger downtown than Phoenix does and the answer is that they were much bigger at the time the classic bones of a downtown would have been built before mass suburbanization before cars.

Nobody is claiming Dallas is as big as LA relax bud

[LA21st]

Ok, so Dallas was much closer to Phoenix than LA in population in 1950. Just seems like a odd comparison.

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by LA21st

Ok, so Dallas was much closer to Phoenix than LA in population in 1950. Just seems like a odd comparison.

This is why nobody likes people from LA

[LA21st]

Because I pointed out a fact instead of something you wanted it to be? Is 500,000 not closer to a million than one one million is to 5 million?

[pj3000]

Originally Posted by JManc

Again, these other cities have something to develop in the first place. LA has a pretty large walk-able downtown area, Dallas's and Houston's are pretty respectable given their development and all are large enough to attract new development. Phoenix's downtown is just a bunch of tallish post war buildings clustered together. There's nothing inviting about the area. At least not yet. It will take a very pioneering developer to take a gamble on downtown and hope there's an interest for urban/ downtown living at some point. Much as there was with Houston 15-20 years ago.

And again, right. Simply cannot put Phoenix in the same category as LA and/or Dallas. They were bigger cities that had already developed more significant downtown cores... and they continued to develop those cores to a MUCH greater extent than Phoenix ever did, even with the advent of suburban sprawl to draw development away from those downtown cores.

Originally Posted by Obadno

They really didnt though, they got some high rise offices as everywhere did but other than the existing pre war buildings Dallas and LA's cores remained pretty stagnant like almost every city from the 1950's-2000's They simply had more to begin with before this current urban expansion began.

Then we can also get into the fact that LA and Dallas operate as regional financial centers both are major energy producers etc etc. LA is a port city on and on, there are a lot of reasons why these places got bigger faster and sooner than a desert river valley who's primary economic engine was copper, oranges and cotton until about 1980

Yes they did. Reducing the impact of the development of their cores by saying that "they got some high rise offices as everywhere did" obscures reality. It's not just that they more to begin with.

LA and Dallas (and Houston, Atlanta, and other sunbelt cities) were much more important cities than Phoenix was... and that's why Dallas was able to build 17 500+ foot towers between 1960 and 1990... and why LA built 18 of them... and why Houston built 27 of them... and why Phoenix built 0 of them.

Tall buildings are certainly not everything when it comes to a vibrant, large downtown core. But when you consider the tens of thousands of people that work and live in those large buildings in each city on a daily basis, it significantly expands the downtown area. There is no getting around that.

What I have been saying from the beginning... to claim that downtown Phoenix never developed because of the age of sprawl like downtown LA and Dallas didn't develop because of sprawl is just not accurate.

And by saying accurate things like, Phoenix was a much smaller city than the others before sprawl happened and how those other were more important commercial centers, you're disproving your original claim.

Phoenix is younger, so it never had the same chance to develop its core before suburban sprawl became the dominant development pattern; and Phoenix has never been important enough of a commercial center to develop a dense downtown core (of which, yes, tall buildings with high intensity of use, are a very significant part). It's not specifically because of sprawl... those other cities majorly developed their downtowns in the age of sprawl.

"why did downtown never develop to begin with?"

"And the answer to that is the same for LA, Dallas, or any other large sunbelt city Sprawl was the order of the day."


So the question above isn't relevant to LA or Dallas... because as we've all said, their downtowns were developed (in comparison to Phoenix's).

And the answer isn't relevant to LA or Dallas either... because as we've now agreed on, LA and Dallas were more important cities, and the downtowns of LA, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta boomed with big time skyscraper construction in the age of suburban sprawl to ALL leap into the top 6 highest skylines in the nation because of that importance. The demand to develop like this in Phoenix was obviously not there at the time.

I think we just need to acknowledge that Phoenix is a sharp outlier in the sunbelt when it comes to this specific topic.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by LA21st

How is Dallas's downtown in the same category has downtown LA here? Does Dallas have a large historic core? No. How big was Dallas in 1930 or 1940? 300,000?
LA had 1.5 by 1940. There's no comparison at all there.

Who said Dallas was the same as LA besides you? They were however, already well established economic centers when people realized Phoenix was actually a place and started moving there.

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by LA21st

Because I pointed out a fact instead of something you wanted it to be? Is 500,000 not closer to a million than one one million is to 5 million?

No because you came here to disprove a point that nobody made.

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by pj3000

And again, right. Simply cannot put Phoenix in the same category as LA and/or Dallas. They were bigger cities that had already developed more significant downtown cores... and they continued to develop those cores to a MUCH greater extent than Phoenix ever did, even with the advent of suburban sprawl to draw development away from those downtown cores.



Yes they did. Reducing the impact of the development of their cores by saying that "they got some high rise offices as everywhere did" obscures reality. It's not just that they more to begin with.

LA and Dallas (and Houston, Atlanta, and other sunbelt cities) were much more important cities than Phoenix was... and that's why Dallas was able to build 17 500+ foot towers between 1960 and 1990... and why LA built 18 of them... and why Houston built 27 of them... and why Phoenix built 0 of them.

Tall buildings are certainly not everything when it comes to a vibrant, large downtown core. But when you consider the tens of thousands of people that work and live in those large buildings in each city on a daily basis, it significantly expands the downtown area. There is no getting around that.

What I have been saying from the beginning... to claim that downtown Phoenix never developed because of the age of sprawl like downtown LA and Dallas didn't develop because of sprawl is just not accurate.

And by saying accurate things like, Phoenix was a much smaller city than the others before sprawl happened and how those other were more important commercial centers, you're disproving your original claim.

Phoenix is younger, so it never had the same chance to develop its core before suburban sprawl became the dominant development pattern; and Phoenix has never been important enough of a commercial center to develop a dense downtown core (of which, yes, tall buildings with high intensity of use, are a very significant part). It's not specifically because of sprawl... those other cities majorly developed their downtowns in the age of sprawl.

"why did downtown never develop to begin with?"

"And the answer to that is the same for LA, Dallas, or any other large sunbelt city Sprawl was the order of the day."


So the question above isn't relevant to LA or Dallas... because as we've all said, their downtowns were developed (in comparison to Phoenix's).

And the answer isn't relevant to LA or Dallas either... because as we've now agreed on, LA and Dallas were more important cities, and the downtowns of LA, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta boomed with big time skyscraper construction in the age of suburban sprawl to ALL leap into the top 6 highest skylines in the nation because of that importance. The demand to develop like this in Phoenix was obviously not there at the time.

I think we just need to acknowledge that Phoenix is a sharp outlier in the sunbelt when it comes to this specific topic.

No because relative to their own sizes they are still very small downtown's.