A recent chirpy story in the Arizona Daily Star was about a new endeavor between Tucson’s Rio Nuevo downtown redevelopment district and the athletic department of the University of Arizona (UA). The district will pay the university $100,000 a year to market downtown Tucson and to encourage sports fans to eat and drink at certain downtown spots.
Rio Nuevo’s message to bars and restaurants outside of the district: Go pound sand!
UA’s message to the city’s poor: Go eat cake, or, alternatively, have a $50 meal and a $12 drink downtown.
The story brings to mind the award-winning book “Bad City.”
The book is a testament to investigative journalism, which is a rarity nowadays in US newspapers. It details the dogged determination of an investigative reporter for the L.A. Times in exposing a crime and the sordid lifestyle of the renowned head of the medical school at the University of Southern California.
The reporter had to prevail against the longstanding practice of squelching bad news about USC, due to an unholy alliance between USC, the City of Pasadena, the Pasadena police department, and the reporter’s own newspaper. Years earlier, the Times had published an expose on the USC football team, but only because the misdeeds were too overt to cover up.
What does this have to do with Tucson?
It is not to suggest that Tucson’s powerful establishment of Rio Nuevo, UA, local media, and the one-party political monopoly that runs the city and county are in cahoots to cover up criminal activity. But it is to question whether it is healthy for so much coordinated cheerleading to be taking place among these unified powers, when hundreds of millions of public dollars are sloshing around.
It’s usually not good when watchdogs over the public purse become lapdogs of those who depend on the public purse.
The story quoted Rio Nuevo Vice Chairman Edmond Marquez, who criticized Texas Tech and the University of New Mexico for not having a connection to their downtown, as he wants UA to have to downtown Tucson.
Texas Tech is located in Lubbock, Texas, and the University of New Mexico is located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Are these the kind of cities that Marquez and the rest of the Rio Nuevo board use as a basis of comparison?
Well, they have a point. Tucson and Lubbock have the same high rate of poverty, and Albuquerque is ridden with high crime and widespread seediness, as is the case for many of the Tucson neighborhoods that are in close proximity to the Rio Nuevo redevelopment district.
Albuquerque is a city that once had a burgeoning tech industry but became an economic backwater through bad governance and unfavorable demographics. Still, its poverty rate, although high, is three percentage points lower than Tucson’s, even though the University of New Mexico is not connected to downtown Albuquerque.
Meanwhile, Stanford University is not connected to downtown San Francisco, and, instead, is located in Palo Alto, a suburban center of innovation and prosperity, where the median household income is $220,408 and the poverty rate is miniscule.
At the same time, the main campus of the University of Washington in Seattle is 13 miles from Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft is headquartered, where the median household income is $162,099, and where 75 percent of residents over the age of 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Similarly, two hours up the interstate from Tucson is Scottsdale, which doesn’t have a four-year university within its city limit but is quite prosperous and known for superb eateries, attractive amenities and entertainment venues, and a thriving business climate, including companies that moved there and to other parts of metro Phoenix from Tucson.
There are scores of other comparisons that call into question the foundational belief of Rio Nuevo that downtown development and connections to UA will magically bring prosperity to Tucson.
The foregoing would make an interesting subject for investigative reporting. So would these questions:
– Has the redevelopment of downtown come at the expense of neighborhoods and simply shifted business to downtown from other parts of the city?
– Is it the mission of a land-grant university such as UA to spend taxpayer money on a money-losing athletic program while, at the same time, the university is screwing students through the tuition loan scam?
– Is it the mission of Rio Nuevo to give money to the athletic program?
– Why is the focus on low-wage bars and restaurants instead of high-wage industry further up the value chain? Why aren’t there promotional displays downtown that market Tucson to visitors as the home of 12,000 rocket scientists at Raytheon Missile Systems and as the location of one of the best charter schools in the nation?
– Why has UA spawned so few startups, technology transfers, and venture capitalists?
– Given the city’s poverty, crime, and poor upkeep, how does the political monopoly stay in power?
Someone should write a book on these questions. It could be titled, “Bad City Revisited.”
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].
