Yesterday I spent the afternoon hanging out with my friend Kathy, who lives up against the White Tank Mountains that form the Valley’s western boundary.
The far west and east sides of the Valley were the scenes of the most frantic building campaigns during the late, great Real Estate Bubble, whose collapse has affected the Phoenix area possibly more than any other major metropolis in the country. Phoenix, like Las Vegas (another hard-hit town), has a typically Southwestern boom-and-bust economy. Based on nothing solid, our spates of prosperity evaporate into the dry desert air at the first breath of a hard wind.
The west side has been filled with toss-’em-up tracts, styrofoam-and-stick houses that go off like Roman candles if a fire starts somewhere in the structure, that split and fall apart as the poorly compacted clay beneath them settles, and that stand eave-to-eave, crammed so close together that you might as well be living in an apartment as in one of the laughably dubbed “single-family homes.” Even the most expensive housing there is built this way: people packed in like hens in a commercial chicken farm.
These tracts are half empty. As housing prices ran up, new housing sold for even more than existing housing, which itself was selling for far more than what it was worth. As buyers defaulted, builders went belly-up, leaving many developments only partially built out and many houses standing empty.
Because the frantic building took place on the edges of the sprawl (Phoenix’s City Parents carefully study Los Angeles so they can imitate everything L.A. did wrong), the bust has affected the new areas far more than the central parts of the city.
I was amazed at what we saw as we drove around: mile on mile on mile of shiny new strip shopping malls, all of them empty. One mall had a single Italian restaurant in it. Another had housed a couple of businesses that had closed and cleared out their equipment, while other space evidently had never been leased.
In one development, an empty mall had a dusty sign next to an empty bank building: “Citibank: Coming Soon!”
We went by a shoe store we both like, because it sells European styles that look nice on your feet without crushing your bones.
Gone.
By and large, the surviving commerce consists of big box stores, beauty salons and supply houses, and a few chain restaurants. Everything else is absent.
It’s eerie to drive through a vast area and see swaths of empty buildings. The place looks like an empty movie set. Or like it had been evacuated and the residents never returned.
Kathy was surprised when I said that our part of town has no empty shopping malls, and in fact centrally located strip malls are being renovated and are fully occupied. She has seen these ghost strip malls for so long, she’s come to think of them as a normal part of the landscape.
What a landscape it is! Vast Potemkin villages of ghost neighborhoods and ghost shopping malls. If this is going on all across the country, America is in deep trouble.
Image: “United States Housing Bubble,” Wikipedia. GNU Free Documentation License.
