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National Geographic : 1977 Oct
Contents
reality. Between Phoenix and Tucson, I saw the carcasses of the dreams, ghost towns that never were. At one, a grid of asphalt streets, and nothing else, lay precisely in the middle of nowhere. At another, street signs, their names obliterated, canted out over dusty ruts through scrub desert. A sign advertised lots at $4,295. I called the phone number given. It had been changed. I called the new number. A sleepy-voiced wom an said no, no, she didn't know anything about it, and hung up. "The era of the big land rip-off peaked in the early '70's," Anthony Ching, chief counsel for the state attorney general's economic pro tection division, told me. He said that news stories, the economic downturn, and new laws have sharply curtailed high-pressure sales of dubious land to out-of-staters. "The real crooks," Ching said, "took the money and skipped town. Some bad actors used bankruptcy to avoid responsibility." But others, he said, whose developments were more legitimate, "have made serious efforts to keep their promises." At the height of the sales frenzy even some promoters came to grief. Ching showed me a four-page ad featuring an imaginary boat sailing a nonexistent lake west of Phoenix. Despite columns of glowing gush, the pro moter didn't sell a single lot. The sales pitch had been run in a Honolulu paper! Abandoned Lots Scar Landscape From a light plane climbing in a slack spiral, the streets and cul-de-sacs of aban doned land developments took on the mysteri ous geometry of some ancient, unrecorded civilization. Jim Little, extension agent for Pinal County, cataloged the rest of the land scape that surrounded the town of Casa Grande. To the north spread a Pima reservation, threaded by a double strand of interstate high way suturing Phoenix to Tucson. To the south, mountains rose to a Papago reserva tion. Below, an open-pit copper mine-Ari zona is the nation's leading producer-looked like an inverted gelatin mold. Where the water table had dropped too far to pump, scrub followed old furrow lines. Where the water had dropped farther, and the ground had collapsed, great cracks ran perpendicular to the natural lines of drainage (page 501). Across broad expanses, machines divided fields into two colors-green where cotton had been picked, gauzy gray where bolls yet hung on the plants like popcorn. Jim Little told me that farms of high quality cotton ran upwards of 2,000 acres. "The guys who own those farms are sitting on boards of directors," he said. "They're not the kind of farmers who come to town on Saturday night in bib overalls." Growth War Rages in Tucson Farther south lay Tucson, a city in the farmland business. Since the mid-'50's it has been acquiring farmland and now controls 11,000 acres outside the municipal borders. No cotton, alfalfa, or wheat is planted in this phantom Tucson. Nothing much grows but tumbleweed. Yet the city harvests a vital crop from under the land-water. Wholly depen dent on groundwater, Tucson has a mighty, growing thirst and pumps water that seeped under the desert tens of thousands of years before the first Hohokam dug the first canal. Like Phoenix, Tucson has been growing prodigiously, its mellow core of tile and stuc co, reds and tans, arches and courtyards cor ralled by the sharp edges of the up-to-date. Unlike Phoenix, Tucson has been arguing the consequences and future of growth at length, in public, and at the top of its collective lungs. Like all good range wars, this one involves a land dispute, with each side trying to put black hats on the other. One faction, whose leadership has come from business people, including members of the activist Chamber of Commerce, has fought for traditional growth. The basic credo: Let people by their individual choices decide for themselves where they want to build and live, and let growth follow the dictates of the free market. No! says the other side, a loose coalition of Drifting along with the tumbleweed, Texan Ray Averi, with his dog, Buddy, hopes for a job at the end of a lonely road. In a tight employment market, many have turned back or passed on through desert Arizona. Still others have been eager to take a step down in salary to take a step up in living, with sun and climate as fringe benefits. National Geographic, October 1977 512
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