Jon Talton: Tongue-Lashing All "The Phony Happy Jive-Talk" For Phoenix

Sure looks like the indomitable Jon Talton is hitting his stride once again with a warmed-up pen in excessive heat and dirty air all across the entire East Valley and the Phoenix Metro Area - with Mesa as the biggest suburban sprawl  in the entire nation.
Rogue Columnist

Hype rises as the heat accelerates. Talton takes it all down when he disrupts some newly-concocted "Urban Myths" about fast growth:
Growth doesn't pay for itself.
"As regular readers know, population growth brings carrying costs: Increased need for

• infrastructure
• public services
• schools
• healthcare
• not to mention the externalities — the cloaked expenses from more sprawl, destruction of the environment, pollution, etc. . . "

NOT TO MENTION? WHY LET IT TRAIL OFF THERE?
Readers of this blog can find out more by using the Searchbox on this blog - type in "Mesa Ranks" or "Phoenix Ranks" or "Arizona Ranks"
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Debunking the myths:Population increase in Phoenix can be attributed to retirees and the low-wage service jobs that cater to them.

If the local-yokel boosters — "things must be good because people keep moving here" — are having a growthgasm, they're faking it.
> Phoenix ranks as one of the worst cities for growth of its millennial population. It even ranks poorly for baby boomers. This helps explain why it has such a low percentage of its adult population with bachelor's degrees or higher among major metros. It's home to one of the largest public universities in the country but can't retain this talent base.
On the latest Brookings Institution Metro Monitor, Phoenix came in No. 74 on standard of living and No. 31 in average annual wage. Phoenix has an abysmal showing in job concentration, a critical measure of how metros perform in the most advanced technology sectors. Astoundingly, Phoenix even does poorly in so-called opportunity jobs — promising positions for those without a college degree (coming in 76th in this rigorous Federal Reserve study). In other words, this is no blue-collar heaven, even if it performs poorly in advanced, high-skilled college-degree jobs.
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