Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City

This essay is a summation/excerpt from Chapter 2 of Andrew Ross' book "Bird on Fire" and is as essential to understanding American urbanism as Jerry Herron's writings on Detroit. In many ways these two cities have a great deal in common - they both purely embody the ideology of the time and culture in which they grew. The future of Phoenix, like Detroit, will be nothing like its past. I suspect that resource scarcity (in this case water, oil and the lack of continued federal subsidies for sprawl) will cause Phoenix to shrivel to a more reasonable desert city of a quarter its current size (back to 1 million from 4 million... if not less).

Phoenix is the poster child of the elements of American culture/politics that want something for nothing. In this case, the birth place of modern Libertarianism happens to be a city that was essentially built as a military outpost by the Federal Government, and who's life has been largely dependent on both the military industrial complex (subsidiary tech and manufacturing companies), suburban housing subsidy, and social security (a massive retirement community). Phoenix has entire suburbs of people drawing military pensions and healthcare, essentially living a socialist lifestyle, who nevertheless live in planned communities where no one under 55 is allowed to live so that they can avoid paying a taxes for schools. In other words, ironically, if it were actually forced to a compete - in a world of a dramatically reduced Federal Government (as it's most prominent politicians champion), Phoenix doesn't have a chance.