Welcome to Mesa, on of the fastest-growing cities in America!
Where secluded suburban gated enclaves are the hottest-selling "Master-Planned Communities" all along the Outer Loops, with industrial and high-tech corridors all along the Inner Loops. Yes, we do an Apple Center using solar power at the same time it uses lots of water. Commuter car-driven culture and fossil fuel-burning industries we got that too.
Except for the city of Phoenix, every other city in The East Valley is mostly conservative Republican. That's been that way for generations. It's a rare thing anywhere for mayors or Republicans of any stripe to be on-board stewardship for the environment unless they can extract or exploit natural resources and "develop" vast tracts of acreage. After the post-World War 2 1950's, the game became build-it-and-they-will-come.
Now we get to do with the consequences 50 years later.
The moving image you see to the right only shows patterns of suburban expansion up to the year 2010. There was a pause for about eight years, then it started all over again.
The city bought 3,500 acres that were the old General Motors Proving Ground, only to prove the point that the horizontal single-home-with-backyard-and-two garages was the choice of those who could afford live there: commuting 50 miles each way to-go-to-work. The expansion of gated Master-Planned Communities like Eastmark and Cadence @ Gateway got their own legal structure as community facilities districts. Farther south housing exploded in Queen Creek and we got an entire new sprawling city called San Tan Valley with lots more single-family homes and shopping centers.
Here in Arizona, we don't hear much about that except for some more investment in solar renewable energy and trail runs for self-driving cars or autonomous vehicles. Net-zero is starting to get off-the-ground.
At least one mayor is showing leadership, according to a report in https://www.latimes.com
According to Tim Frank, air quality director of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, the ozone produced because of vehicles is the biggest problem, and it's the most controllable.
If 10 to 20 percent of Arizona's workers decided to telecommute instead of drive their cars each day, he said, the positive effect would overwhelm other causes of ozone pollution. . .
Maricopa County continues to be one of the fastest-growing regions of the country, and all signs point to increasing numbers of "vehicle miles traveled" in metro Phoenix, which means more, not less, pollution from cars. . .
The American Lung Association's "F" rating is a reminder that the air here is some of the most unhealthy in the country.
City Rankings > https://www.lung.org/our-initiatives/healthy-air/sota/city-rankings/
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Ozone Pollution in Phoenix Can't Get Much Worse From Climate Change
| April 30, 2019 | 7:00am
"Ground-level ozone, an invisible air pollution that has an effect likened to sunburn for the lungs, gets worse when it's hotter, according to experts. That effect has profound implications when linked to climate change, which predicts generally increased temperatures over time.It's yet another reason why Phoenix is toast when it comes to climate change, right?
Not necessarily.
Studies show that mid-90s temperatures and higher result in "ozone suppression" according to Harvard University researchers.
The effect means climate change won't make the ozone problem in metro Phoenix and Tucson much worse . . ."
READ MORE > Phoenix New Times
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Ray Stern has worked as a newspaper reporter in Arizona for more than two decades. He's won many awards for his reporting, including the Arizona Press Club's Don Bolles Award for Investigative Journalism. Contact > Click or tap Ray Stern
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Most Polluted Cities
The cities are ranked by the air quality in the most polluted county in the metropolitan area. Select your city name to open links to a chart of the trends for ozone and year-round particle levels, as well as more information about air pollution and the local Lung Association. Note that some cities rank high on one list and don’t show up on other lists because of the differences in their pollution problems. Each city includes all the counties that form the economic and transportation network that makes up the metropolitan area as defined by the federal government.
