Going Way Off-Track: Shady Deals Replace Plans for The Sun Corridor

Intro: The mirage of making millions-and-billions turning dry barren land into dreams of paydirt for developers are the attention of two reporters for one story. There's another in the East Valley.

The Interstate 11 boondoggle

Rogue Columnist | December 07, 2021

"I don't know why they call the agency the Arizona Department of Transportation. It's the highway department, it's historic name. All it does is plan, build, expand, and maintain highways. No trains – Phoenix is the largest city in North America without intercity passenger rail. No commuter rail or light rail or transit. ADOT is all about highways. Behold its new creation.

Interstate 11 is planned to eventually run from Nogales to Reno, cutting the above swath through hundreds of miles of virgin desert as it winds to the west of Phoenix. I-11 could cost as much as $10 billion to build from Phoenix to Las Vegas alone. But this doesn’t include externalities: Air pollution, emissions that worsen climate change, loss of desert habitat, bladed desert plants, including increasingly vulnerable saguaros.

Kristen Mosbrucker in New Times reported on how the route will benefit Mike Ingram's holdings in Maricopa, as well as Douglas Ranch, acquired for $600 million by the Howard Hughes Corp. with Ingram and Jerry Colangelo as partners. Without freeways, this is worthless empty desert north and west of the White Tanks.

With I-11, a goldmine — even though gold mines of the West play out quickly.

We are creating a city of the future," Colangelo, onetime savior of downtown Phoenix said. Here it is:

[..] "Hmmm. Curvilinear streets. Dead ends. Wide arterials. Separation of uses. No efficient density. Entirely car-dependent. No light rail. No commuter rail to downtown Phoenix (40 miles east) or anywhere else. As I wrote last month, it looks exactly like the "city" of the past, that is, an agglomeration of single-family, car-dependent tract houses and retail breathlessly called "a master planned community." The sales term makes as much sense as the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman nor an empire.

The Howard Hughes Co. says all the right things on its website about doing the right thing. The U.S. Green Building Council, which certifies LEED buildings, is a partner. How any place can be green that's all cars and a freeway, carved out of virgin desert is beyond me. It has a varied portfolio, including in New York City and Chicago, as well as Houston's suburban Woodlands. But no challenge like Douglas Ranch.

Hughes is committed "to the ideals first expressed by James Rouse over 50 years ago. In founding ... Columbia, Maryland — one of the country's first master planned communities— Rouse imagined a beautiful, self-sustaining "new American City" that fosters economic, racial, and cultural harmony, believing that people are at their best in communities where there is a sense of responsibility to one's city and to one's neighbor."

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