Arizona traces its growth back to World War II. According to Mark Stapp, Executive Director of the Masters of Real Estate Development Program at Arizona State University, Arizona attracted people because of its relationship with the defense industry. The military trained many of the pilots at Luke Airforce Base in Glendale. Living here was less risky because of the low potential of being spied on or attacked because, according to Stapp, the skies were so open.
Nancy Selover, Senior Sustainability Scientist and Arizona State Climatologist, said that before the 1950s, Arizona was pretty much an agricultural community.
“Farm communities become suburbs and then we move beyond those suburbs to more rural areas. That rapid expansion was the reason why Phoenix was considered to be the sprawl capital of the U.S.,” said Stapp.
Grady Gammage Jr.
Grady Gammage, Jr., Senior Research Fellow at ASU’s Morrison Institute and Senior Scholar at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, said that Arizona’s growth boomed beginning in the 1960s.
“We were routinely either the fastest growing big city in America or at least in the top three or four. And that was our goal every year, was to be the fastest growing,” he said.
Arizona’s growth has continued exponentially since then at a rate of 1.8 percent every year, said Stapp.
In the late 1990s and early 2000’s, Arizona and the Phoenix Valley focused on transportation, due to the influx of people. Freeways became a priority in the 1990s, and in 2005, construction on the light rail system began.
Downtown Phoenix Light Rail
The recession of 2008-2009 hit the Phoenix Metropolitan area hard, just like the rest of the country. However, Phoenix bounced back relatively well.
“We were able to stabilize the market much faster,” Stapp said.
According to Stapp, a few different factors contributed to Arizona’s recovery, primarily the fact that Arizona has always been a growth market.
With the big growth explosion, Valley leaders' primary focus wasn't on sustainability.
“We weren’t thinking a lot about sustainability, and for one thing no one even used that word,” Gammage said.
Sustainability is a fairly recent term. In 1987, a report called the Brundtland Report first defined “sustainable development” as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’”
Mark Hartman
As the term became more common, understanding increased. For example, Mark Hartman, Chief Sustainability Officer of Phoenix, said he’s happy with the progress he’s seen from when he first started working on sustainability in Canada.
“In 2006, when I first had the role in Vancouver, I must have told 50 people of my new job in sustainability and not one person knew what that was.” He continued, “So it’s amazing how much has changed just in the last 10 years in people’s awareness.”
"I don't think you can say that we were sitting there wondering, 'What would happen if we get big?' We just wanted to get big."
John Neville (Photo Courtesy of John Neville)
John Neville’s interest in making Arizona more sustainable started at first because he had property in Sedona. He began working with others in the area to build sustainable principles into the city plan. When he went to city meetings, they were having conversations he’d had 15 years earlier when he worked on sustainability issues in his home state of Minnesota.
“I was going, ‘Where have you guys been?’” he said. “’Why is your economy based on building houses and building shopping malls? How is that going to make things better for the future?’”
Neville also noticed Arizona wasn’t taking advantage of the resources they had.
“When I came to Arizona, there weren’t solar panels anywhere. I had solar panels on my house in Minnesota in 1979. And I’m looking around in this state, which has 300 days of sunshine, and there are no solar panels anywhere,” he said.
Gammage said that the Phoenix Valley wasn’t necessarily thinking ahead in the beginning.
“I don’t think you can say that we were sitting there wondering, ‘What would happen if we get big?’ We just wanted to get big,” he said.
Back then, Gammage said, the business-view of sustainability was that growth was good and more growth was even better. So, Phoenix continued to grow, as much as 8 percent a year at one point.
However, in spite of lack of effort in the past to preserve finite resources, like water and fossil fuels, Arizona is still able to grow today.
“The fact that we weren’t thinking about long term consequences doesn’t mean that we made terrible mistakes that we can’t recover from or that we devastated the environment in our quest to grow really quickly. We weren’t thinking a lot about it, but I don’t think it worked to the detriment of this place,” Gammage said.