Tucson’s nickname among UA grads who’ve left for real world jobs, is “the Dirty T”. Most (>80%) leave, knowing the locals in the psychological assessment above, have come to love their squalor. Thematically, it’s downright Orwellian.
Anyone who’s been to a functioning & prosperous city of 546,000+ (metro 1.1 million), will realize this moniker fits Tucson like a glove. Outside its subsidized and newly reconstructed downtown, the place could be a seedy 1969 throwback from Tarantino’s latest movie, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”
Downtown’s financial benefactor–the Rio Nuevo District means well, but it’s really a zero-sum, tax-scheme masquerading as a giant version of urban trickle-down theory. Evidentially, this contradiction has escaped all the UA pointy-headed, leftist ideologues, and other misguided, rich Tucson liberals.
All seem to have missed a key characteristic of the Internet Age…. (let me shout): TOP-DOWN DOESN’T WORK ANYMORE! Especially in modern urbanity; build for bottom-up as ‘Gig-City’, Chattanooga, demonstrates.
Meanwhile, the City of Tucson is controlled by some of America’s wackiest liberal nobodies; it’s 100% Hard-Left Demshevik. Only one of their 6 Councilors + Mayor has any real world business [for-profit] experience; several are double dippers at the state government trough.
Their new Mayor, and Grijalva Gang alumnus, Regina Romero, is straight out of the enviro-left’s central casting, having been some kind of flunky for the notorious Druid-religion, lawsuit-Godzilla, CBD (Center for Biological Diversity). CBD is headquartered in Tucson (where else? Santa Fe? Berkeley?).
Tucson-the-tumor is now openly infecting the rest of Arizona. Smug Phoenix conservatives deserve it.
Every bit of this crazy playing field could be easily leveled by the craven & clueless Arizona Legislature. They could roll back Tucson’s cursed 1929 City Charter, which allows for a hybridized “at-large” council voting scheme, basically legalizing bloc-voting for the Demsheviks’ mandatory slate of candidates.
More than 20 states have abolished local “at-large” schemes at their respective state constitutional level.
Who’s really suffering here? It sure isn’t the legions of Tucson’s government workers, or the uber-wealthy, trophy home occupants up in the heights. As I noted previously about Tucson’s abysmal per capita income stats in Tucson Pays A Terrible Price to be the Anti-Phoenix, Tucson’s poverty is pervasive.
Young people are suffering, and leaving. Tucson squanders a tremendous inheritance from the University of Arizona, one that produces a bumper crop twice a year. What a waste.
They have taken this amazing gift for granted, and thumbed their noses at the rest of Arizona.
Sellers is a South Park Republican who lives in incorporated Oro Valley. His background is federal tech-transfer commercialization.