Local opinion: The Pima County urban doom loop and Metro Tucson

There is no better indication of the lack of an engaged and effective civic leadership in Tucson proper, than the collective failure here to recognize a serious urban pathology right before their very eyes.

The setting, backdrop, and history are critical, and it underpins a kind of urban fatalism and xenophobia hiding behind all the current rah-rah boosterism. While Metro Tucson is still growing (very anemically), it has become a conurbation with over a million inhabitants and yet, is nearly 40% unincorporated; those giant parts governed under the thumb of an expanding, morbidly obese, barely responsive Pima County.

So much for the fantasies of a sinecured and detached elite (now approaching Geezer status), who thought Tucson would remain a quaint little college town and funky hipster hangout in the Desert Southwest at the Mexican border. Hint: it has a far better chance of that with the solution below; so consider the alternatives.

If Metro Tucson continues on with the current distorted urban footprint; it will surely fall into what numerous technologists and city thinkers are now calling the ‘urban doom loop’ (UDL). Google that, it’s not pretty.

Tucson’s present unincorporated Metro is comprised of some 13 Census Designated Places (CDP), ranging in size from Catalina (~7,500 pop.) (15 sq. miles), up to Casas Adobes (~76,000 pop.) at 27 square miles.

All this under the barely competent governance and stewardship of Pima County, a ~9,200 sq. mile, employment scheme monstrosity that stretches ~170 miles to its western boundary.

But incorporating just six adjacent pairs of the Metro’s CDPs into three self-sustaining, larger municipalities would go a long way to addressing this glaring problem of malgovernance.

The three adjacent pairs in mind, Casas Adobes and Flowing Wells (31 sq. mi.); Valencia West, Drexel Heights and Tucson Estates (43 sq.mi.); and Catalina Foothills and Tanque Verde (75 sq.mi.), would result in three standalone cities of 93,000, 56,000, 69,000 populations, respectively. And if they were smart about it, they’d claw back all the taxes Pima County has levied (and wasted) over the past few decades.

Can this be done? It’s a purely political question, and goes to the heart of civic leadership. I’m optimistic, inasmuch as Metro Tucson has already numerous things that would still tie the resulting discrete units into a bigger urban whole. But a failure here, and should Tucson’s anemic growth falter, then things will get real ugly demographically, after 2030.

If the technology already here (and the new stuff coming) is telling us anything, it’s screaming, “flatten your organizations, and focus them into discrete units.”

Next time: two giant, seminal waves headed our way.