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MJLO

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I actually love Scottsdale. My parents still live there on occasion and I visit frequently to see some friends that have moved to the Phoenix Area. I see the changes in Scottsdale as very positive. I had always introduced myself at college as from Phoenix, but Scottsdale has really earned itself a national identity. People no longer ask where Scottsdale is, and it even has a positive reputation as a nice area to live from most people I know in NYC and LA.

I enjoy LA, its large and sprawled but I don't mind it. I would like to move back to Scottsdale sometime however.

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  • 1 year later...

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We've had a bunch of new forumers, probabally most have stopped checking in, but feel free to give a bio about yourself here :) it hasn't been used in over a year. Hi I'm Matt, i'm the absentee Moderator for PHX and the west as well of parts of the midwest. Need help i'm here. (no sarcasm)

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I guess I never really introduced myself. I am a community planner in West Mesa. I grew up in Mesa, but have lived in Indy, Ut, and so cal. All different and have their pros and cons. I am getting ready to go to grad school (see where I get in)

I am a huge fan of sustainable urbanism (ie new urbanism, smartgrowth, LEED stuff) I do not like sprawl, especially the newer home developments. They are like prisons. My parents live in one, and so did I for about 3 years. Traveling around, I see that most people here are anti-social. I really like to research how design affects our social atmosphere and so forth.

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Hi. My name is David. I'm 42 and live in North Central Phoenix. I have no professional connection to urban planning, but it's a topic that interests me greatly. I've lived in Phoenix for almost 20 years and have a great deal of enthusiasm for the city and its potential. For the past two decades, I've enjoyed all the hiking trails and the semi-resort lifestyle, but I think Phoenix has reached the limits of reasonable horizontal growth. I'm therefore more interested these days in high-rise development, historic preservation (Those two goals can coexist!), and transit issues. My usual habitat is Central Phoenix and Tempe. I'm a big fan of independent, locally based stores and restaurants and publish a blog called PHX Rail Food.

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I'm Derek, I'm 34 and I recently moved to San Diego from Mesa. My parents and most of my siblings still live there. I also lived in and near Tokyo in the early 90s. I really liked being able to get by without a car there. Imagine not having to worry about a car payment, insurance, registration, maintenance (both regular and unplanned), fueling up, traffic, finding places to park, or getting tickets, and still being able to get wherever you need to go in a timely manner.

I'd like to be proud to say I'm from Mesa, which is my main motivation for voicing my opinions and ideas on this forum. But if I were to return to the valley, it would probably be to somewhere close to downtown Tempe, within walking distance of all the shops and restaurants and the light rail line.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hello everyone. I came across this by way of an E-mail alert that I get. Amazing what you can find by clicking links...

Anyway, sounds like an interesting local forum, so I thought I'd hang for a while, see what's up.

I grew up here, Scottsdale actually, and I remember when there was no Pima Road, much less the 101. I'm 52, in construction most of my life, both Comm & Resid. Personally responsible for sprawl, so you can blame me.

A lot of the posters here seem to think that a urban lifestyle is easy and quick to come by if we only make some cosmetic changes to the existing system (transportation, building design, you name it). In my experience, and I've been to some great cities, Paris, London, NYC, SF, what these places had is what PHX never did, and that was AGE. Great urban cities sprang from the closeness and density that was planned from the start by necessity. Also from centuries of life concentrated within a few miles of area. We may never get to that point here simply because the scale of our cities, even the central core is far to large to accomodate pedestrian travel for more than a few minutes in the summer.

MAYBE, if a large underground subway system was already in place, the urban lifestyle might have taken hold, but without a cool way to get around, this will always be a winter stopover for most people.

Simply put, the automobile killed PHX before it even had a chance to be a great city... That said, I'd much rather be on the beach in SD. Later.

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Welcome, cueball!

Good point about Phoenix growing up around the automobile. I do think that was somewhat of a crutch that hampered its development and why it now has to catch up with older cities like San Francisco and east coast cities like Philly and Boston.

But I also think that building urbanism is way more than just transit. Connecting the population centers with the employment centers is a must, but I also think that there's a lot of exciting things going on now in the actual implementation of modern urban planning concepts, especially those that involve the live-work situation. It's just a matter of time before it's realistically (instead of small-scale stuff like Civano here in Tucson) implemented in Arizona and, when it is, we'll see some really cool environs sprout up. For Phoenix, the light rail, IMHO, is definitely a step in that direction, if not a leap. The Central corridor is already turning into a much more urbanist area, and the light rail hasn't even opened yet.

It's exciting!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Wow i'm loving hearing all of these stories of everyone! It's great to hear people talk about these things. Cueball, I love what you said about the cities and age. I've long been saying that the developers in Phoenix can't just make an older looking facade, and add a couple of bricks in the road and call it urban. We have to embrace Phoenix for what it is, and what it has been. All of the major dense cities across the country had the majority of their infrastructure put in place before the automobile, and turned out that way out of necessity. Phoenix is just to new. I love Phoenix for what it is and would love to see the forecoming developement from here out, to be just well thought out. We will get there, we are on our way.

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