Back From The Edge: Smart Growth, Creative Place Making > Re/Generation

Phoenix on the Verge: More Stories
04.05.2016 - LISC Stories

[ Photos by Annie O'Neill ]

In the wake of decades of unbridled sprawl, the Great Recession and the foreclosure crisis, there's new light in the Valley of the Sun. With the right support and resources, and the commitment of steadfast community partners, transit-oriented development along the burgeoning Phoenix light rail could be the region's ticket to a sustainable and affordable future.
If you’re new to Phoenix, a city blessed with dusky mountain backdrops and terracotta sunsets, it doesn’t take long to see why it’s also known as the capital of sprawl. Or to understand that the empty lots and swaths of scrubby Sonoran desert between endless tracts of sand-colored homes and chain-store strip malls are the byproduct of leapfrog development. That’s the process whereby builders erect subdivisions further and further away from the city center, leaving empty space in their wake, in order to profit from cheap land and laws that require taxpayers to foot the bill for new roads and utility lines.
This sort of growth has shaped the region for a long time, and has created a metro area that covers some 9,000 square miles (Phoenix alone is 500), all loosely connected by bands of highway and near-total dependence on the automobile. It also nurtured a heavy reliance on the building industry: before the Great Recession, 30 percent of Phoenix residents worked in construction-related jobs, and real estate development accounted for an outsized portion of the city’s economy.

"Leapfrog development" has left Phoenix, and the neighboring cities of Tempe and Mesa, scored with tracts of empty and under-utilized land. But private developers are snapping up lots along the light rail, threatening to displace low-income residents from neighborhoods where cheaper housing, however shoddy, was historically available.

When the recession hit, and with it, the foreclosure crisis, tens of thousands of Phoenix-area residents were stranded without homes or jobs. The city’s infamous sprawl had leeched energy, diversity and commerce out of the urban core and relegated the poorest residents to the very outer periphery, or left them to inner city pockets with virtually no services.
Today, one in five of the valley’s residents live in poverty (the national average is one in seven) and the center of the nation’s sixth-largest city is a federally designated food desert. To close the yawning housing gap, a recent LISC survey found, the Phoenix area needs 100,000 more units of affordable housing than currently exist.
There are exciting signs of progress, though, and true to its name, the city is rising from the ashes of the housing disaster. “If there was a silver lining to the foreclosure crisis, it’s that it was wake-up call,” says Terry Benelli, director of LISC’s Phoenix office. For one, a new light rail and bus rapid transit system are reorienting Phoenix and the adjoining cities of Tempe and Mesa away from their decades-long love affair with the freeway. Political leaders and developers are embracing transit-oriented development, known as TOD, a term for sustainable, higher density walkable communities, organized around affordable mass transit.
Leading the TOD charge is a handful of elected leaders determined to create mixed-use and mixed income “transit villages” around the rail line. There’s been a surge of public support for mass transit, enough to push through a sales tax that will help build 36 miles of light rail, some of it extending into low-income neighborhoods where the cost of owning and maintaining a car is prohibitive for many residents. The tax passed in spite of a legislature that opposes “inclusionary zoning” (regulations that would require new housing developments to include a percentage of affordable units).

The Valley Metro light rail has exceeded the expectations of city leaders and planners: ridership has already surpassed projections for 2020, and residents overwhelmingly approved a city sales tax that will fund an additional 36 miles of track and other mass transit improvements.

Even before construction on the light rail began, LISC and its longtime partner Raza Development Corp., the largest Hispanic development intermediary in the country, committed to ensuring that low-income and other vulnerable people would not be pushed away from the rail lines, and that they would reap its benefits, too. Together, they have invested $20 million to leverage equitable growth around transit stops, and this year pledged another $30 million.
“At the outset, there were zero units of affordable housing along the light rail,” says Benelli. Now there are 2,100. “LISC was able to get in there and help our partners build using tax credits, when nobody else could.”
Compared to the 100,000 needed, of course, 2,100 is a drop in the bucket. But the fact that development is happening in the urban center at all is a move in the right direction, housing advocates say. “You can’t have a sustainable community if you keep building out and you put poor people on the periphery where they can’t get to work, and they’re spending two hours to get where they need to go on the bus,” says Dede Yazzie Devine, CEO of Native American Connections, a LISC partner and one of the only Phoenix organizations building affordable housing in the city center. “Doing this in the urban core puts people near schools, culture, and all the other amenities that everybody deserves, regardless of whether they’re at 30 percent of the median area income.”

Ruben León, a staff member and former client of Native American Connections, with his family in the courtyard of Devine Legacy. The LEED-certified, affordable housing community sits adjacent to a light rail station in central Phoenix.

It’s hard to find a more enthusiastic proponent of TOD than Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton. Stanton is a born-and-bred local whose passion for mass transit grew from personal experience: his father, a shoe salesman for JC Penney, took the bus every day to and from work, and counted among his closest friends other workers he met on his commute. “This is not utopian,” says Stanton. “It’s about being a great city. That means everyone, whether they work as a waiter or as a lawyer, should be able to walk or bike or have an easy commute on public transportation.”
Not surprisingly, private developers and companies have jumped on the TOD bandwagon, too, eager to capitalize on the energy and income of millennials by building stylish market-rate housing, restaurants and office buildings. The benefit of this growth is jobs and vitality: State Farm recently opened a regional hub a short walk from the Tempe Transit Center and Arizona State University.  ASU, which is based in Tempe, has built an ambitious campus, 30 minutes away by rail, transforming a large chunk of downtown Phoenix.

But it’s the committed non-profit leaders and activists of this region, embedded in the community, who are relentless in pursuing investment for impoverished parts of the city, and trying to keep the valley from repeating old mistakes.
Native American Connections (NAC) is a perfect example of that kind of heart-and-soul dedication. Founded in 1979 as a substance abuse treatment program with supportive housing, NAC has grown into an extraordinary builder of handsome, LEED-certified affordable housing and treatment facilities that incorporate tribal healing practices. Nearly all of NAC’s 18 projects are clustered in central Phoenix along the rail line—a veritable Native American Connections transit village. A LISC loan helped NAC renovate its headquarters, which is also home to a range of Native and other minority organizations. Next door is Devine Legacy, a LEED Platinum affordable housing community.
The view from these buildings takes in the sweep of mostly empty land on the east side of Central Avenue where the vast Phoenix Indian School once stood, and where another of NAC’s projects is underway: the conversion of the former band building into a native cultural center and museum. The school, which opened in 1891 and functioned for 99 years, was part of the U.S. government’s forced acculturation strategy, molding native children according to a military model and turning out laborers and domestic servants who could serve Anglo society. Astoundingly, most non-native residents of Phoenix barely know it existed—in fact, says Devine, “most people don’t even know why one of the longest streets in Phoenix is called Indian School Road!”

Patty Talahongva, an alumna of the Phoenix Indian School, stands in front of the band building that Native American Connections and LISC are helping restore and repurpose as a tribal cultural center and historical gallery. When the school closed in 1990, most of its buildings on the 160-acre campus were razed, effectively erasing a painful but profoundly important record of Native Arizonan history.

Patty Talahongva, an NAC staffer helping oversee the renovation, has a true insider’s take on the project; she was a student at the Indian school in the 1980s, when attendance was no longer compulsory. “There was a saying: kill the Indian, save the man,” says Talahongva, who is Hopi. “Children were removed from their homes, their hair was cut, and they were stripped of their clothes, their language, their traditions. Some of them never went home again.”
The band building, which LISC is helping restore, is part of a larger effort to bring tribal history and culture to the fore in Phoenix, where a majority of the Valley’s 100,000 Native Americans live below the poverty line. “This is a very natural place for people to come learn about Native Americans, to meet Native Americans,” Talahongva says. “They want to know what our city is, where it comes from. Well, an important part of the answer is right here.”
In some ways, the Indian School band building—a school facility-turned-cultural center—is a prime example of what developers and planners call “adaptive reuse,” a strategy that preserves the history and flavor of a place, while repurposing old buildings and reducing sprawl. Adaptive reuse is now a hallmark of many equitable TOD efforts around Phoenix.

Once an iconic steakhouse, the Newton is a perfect example of how "adaptive reuse" can preserve the historic feel of a place while making way for new businesses and community activity.

There’s the Newton, for example, a rambling former steak house retooled to hold a well-stocked and well-patronized bookstore, a restaurant, a garden shop, a design firm and several community meeting spaces. Further south down Central Avenue on the light rail, Co+Hoots, a bustling co-working space, took up residence in a former automotive shop and will soon expand into a neglected office building downtown.
Jenny Poon conceived of CO+HOOTS while running a graphic design business from home, "siloed, and incredibly lonely. I wondered if we could build a community where people felt more connected, in an environment that would be financially low-risk for a new entrepreneur." The worktables that roll on skateboard wheels and the mid-week “mindtweaks,” where co-workers strategize and share skills, bring together people who might otherwise have no professional connection. “There’s nothing else in Phoenix that supports scaling small businesses,” says Poon.

CO+HOOTS, the only co-working space in downtown Phoenix, is the brain child of Jenny Poon. Peer-to-peer mentoring and networking has helped dozens of small businesses—web developers, designers, lawyers, start-ups—flourish, and many have "graduated" and moved on to their own spaces.

Twenty miles to the south-east of central Phoenix, you can step off the light rail at Center and Main Streets in Mesa, across from the dazzling façade of the Mesa Arts Center and neat rows of shops and restaurants—and feel you have arrived in a village that’s home to families from across the income spectrum. A directional sign on Main Street lists local shops and restaurants and notes the time it takes to walk to them. A block to the north is the IDEA children’s museum; a block to the south, volunteers water vegetables in raised beds against a backdrop of murals by local artists at the Mesa Urban Garden.
“This is an area that has not always been welcoming,” says Ryan Winkle, a community developer and co-founder of the garden who is running for a seat on Mesa’s city council. “The perception of Mesa as parochial is hard to change because it’s been like that for so long. But when the people who actually live in Mesa start feeling welcome downtown, that’s when it gets interesting.”
Today, that downtown is percolating with small, independent businesses, and many local merchants have taken part in a LISC-sponsored “creative placemaking” training, learning to use arts and culture to create inviting pedestrian spaces around their shops. The Mesa Arts Center, for its part, is working to draw its neighbors from low- and middle-income neighborhoods. A free Day of the Dead celebration drew 18,000 people last year. The Center also sponsors arts education in Mesa’s lowest-performing public schools where as many as 93 percent of students qualify for free lunch.

The Mesa Urban Garden, a block's walk from Main Street and the light rail, was collaboration between the city and community activists—a first for Mesa.Today, it's a hub for gardeners, artists and activists who are boosters for Mesa's diversity and home-grown creativity, like Laurie Blitz, the garden's volunteer coordinator.

Tim Mello, a transplanted New Yorker who came to the valley after 9/11 to be near family, is emblematic of the Mesa residents who want to see their city become an inclusive transit village. Mello lives at the Encore, an affordable senior housing complex built with LISC investment, appointed with solar panels, a reflecting pool and native plantings. A few months ago, he got rid of his car—an act that would have been unthinkable just last year, before the light rail opened.
“There are still a lot of conveniences that need to be built into the downtown, and there aren’t enough amenities for people without discretionary income,” he says, citing the themes he expounds at city council meetings and in daily blog posts. “But I can walk to the farmer’s market, the Food City is 15 minutes away on the express bus, and there’s the 99 cent store for bargains. Mesa is on its way.”
In spite of the progress around TOD in the Phoenix area, there’s much more to be done, especially on the affordable housing front, to get anywhere near those 100,000 needed units. Inclusionary zoning laws have stalled in the legislature, which means that multi-use neighborhoods and well-built, multi-family housing for people living below the poverty line are the exception, rather than the rule. Along the downtown Phoenix Central Avenue corridor, in the vicinity of NAC, there are 70 new affordable units vs. 4,000 market rate ones. And while infill development—using the city’s countless empty tracts for higher density buildings and mixed commercial space—seems like a no-brainer, it has run up against stubborn opposition.
But listening to Patty Talahongva or Dede Devine or Ryan Winkle, it’s hard not to feel hopeful about the future in the Valley of the Sun. As Devine puts it, “this is an exciting place. And if we stay on top of it, it can be a place that works for everyone.”
To read more on LISC's work in Phoenix, see 
Communities of Connection in the Valley of the Sun
The (Re)Making of Mesa