[Peace-discuss] Surprisingly good piece from WaPo

[C. G. Estabrook]

*In Tucson's sprawling suburbs, recession has dimmed the American dream*

By Philip Rucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 11, 2011; 10:16 AM

TUCSON - North Soledad Avenue is wide and perfectly curved. The sun rises from 
the east, up over the Santa Catalina Mountains, painting a morning sky of 
brilliant pinks and soft blues. Each ranch house is ornamented with the kind of 
desert yard that requires little maintenance: palm trees and prickly-pear 
cactuses, gravel or stone or red pebbles.

This was the dream - a quiet and peaceful block tucked within the endless 
suburban sprawl of northwest Tucson. It drew working-class settlers over the 
past 15 years in search of a fresh start. A construction worker came because 
there were thousands of kitchens to build. An aircraft mechanic came for the 
sunshine. A nursing home worker came because everything was cheap - land, gas, 
groceries.

But now, recession-ravaged North Soledad Avenue is a symbol of shattered dreams. 
The street's asphalt is cracked, like a windshield hit by tiny rocks. One man's 
three-tier plaster fountain has no water. Another's inflatable Santa sits in his 
front yard, out of air.

And the 22-year-old high school dropout who lives with his parents at the middle 
of the block is in federal custody, accused of attempting to assassinate Rep. 
Gabrielle Giffords <http://www.whorunsgov.com/Profiles/Gabrielle_Giffords> 
(D-Ariz.) and killing six others in a shooting rampage Saturday.

"I had so much hope when I moved here, but it's down now," said Stephen Woods, 
the aircraft mechanic, who has been out of a job for a year. "It's difficult to 
live here nowadays."

Arizona is a state being defined by the nation at this hour, even as it 
redefines itself. This onetime border outpost grew into an oasis of wide open 
spaces and limitless opportunity, a place where people could parachute in 
anonymously and hit restart.

Here was one of America's greatest booms, but also one of its biggest busts, and 
the just-bottomed-out economy seems to have given way to a simmering ugliness. 
Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik, in a news conference Saturday, called 
Arizona "the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

There is no evidence that the inflammatory rhetoric that recently came to define 
Arizona's politics set the stage for Jared Loughner's alleged shooting spree. 
Yet the gunning-down of a congresswoman who had been laboring to bridge that 
divide, an ambitious Tucson native who had a sunny, even romantic view of 
Arizona and what it could become, has focused the attention of a country still 
searching for answers on what Arizona is.

The neighborhood where Loughner grew up, and where authorities said he planned 
Saturday's devastation, opens a window onto the stew of cultural, economic and 
political tensions that are shaping modern Arizona.

In the area around North Soledad Avenue, the median household income is $65,000; 
the median age, 35. Most of the houses have three bedrooms and were built in the 
1970s or 1980s. Nearly half of the households moved in during the 2000s, 
according to an analysis of census data.

Roger Whithead arrived here in 1995. Tucson was an escape from Detroit, where he 
grew up and went to college, and from Colorado, where had had been living after 
that. He builds kitchens and bathrooms, and with Arizona's population swelling, 
there was plenty of work.

He didn't know most of his neighbors, but that didn't seem to matter much. 
"Socially, everyone keeps to themselves," said Whithead, 52. "I know the fella 
right here and over there, but that's about it."

Over the past decade, things started changing. People moved in from California 
and Oregon. Whithead was doing their kitchens, but he's a conservative and 
didn't like their liberal politics.

"We don't need to start that here - the bigger government, more welfare," 
Whithead said.

At the other end of the block, Shauna Quintero and her utility-inspector husband 
are raising a young family. Quintero, 29, calls herself a conservative 
independent and said she is concerned about what's happening 80 miles south at 
the Mexican border.

Quintero said her neighborhood, like her state, is divided politically. "You 
have your yeses and you have your nos ... and there's no gray in between," she 
said, holding her daughter, Lola, 1.

The recession of 2008 brought Arizona a blitz of bad news: layoffs and 
foreclosures, more layoffs and more foreclosures. Suddenly, life for folks 
across this sprawling city seemed like it might not be sustainable.

Whithead stopped vacationing in the Virgin Islands. Woods drew unemployment 
benefits. The Quinteros downsized.

"We're not obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses anymore," Shauna Quintero 
said. "Arizona was big into that - buying more, living bigger - and we 
participated in all of that. Now our lives are smaller."

Tom Zoellner, a writer and fifth-generation Arizonan who is a close friend of 
Giffords's, said this state represented "a certain manifestation of the American 
dream - a place to move that's clean and bright and free of prior associations. ...

"You have, in a sense, a comfortable fantasy."

But, added Zoellner, who has lived here only off and on since 2003: "The 
relentless growth in housing and in real estate helped cover the rocks under the 
river. It papered over the kind of hard reality that we've been avoiding here 
for many years."

That reality is a place where people have few, if any, ties to one another. 
Tucson is divided by boulevards stretching six or eight lanes wide and extending 
for 15 or more miles into the horizon. The subdivisions here are often separated 
by concrete walls.

"There's a society of perpetual newcomers, where it's been very, very difficult 
to create any kind of community cohesion," said Thomas Sheridan, a state 
historian and University of Arizona anthropology professor.

Giffords tried to use her office to create a stronger sense of community. It is 
telling, then, that she held her "Congress On Your Corner" meet-and-greet 
outside a Safeway.

"There may be no more iconic public square in Tucson than a strip mall on a 
major street," Zoellner said.

Five miles west of the crime scene, Whithead has been living off savings for the 
better part of a year, since the home design firm he worked at shuttered. He 
does odd jobs here and there, but ever since the banks tightened up lending, 
fewer people can score a $50,000 check to remodel their kitchens.

"Now, they come in with just what they've saved to replace a cabinet," Whithead 
said, standing in his front yard near the paloverde tree that he said will bloom 
this spring into "a big yellow ball."

He hasn't given up on Arizona. As he walked back into his house, he passed his 
white pickup. On the rear windshield is a sticker: "Capture the Dream."

/Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
/

/http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/11/AR2011011102838.html?hpid=topnews
/

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20110111/773d1501/attachment.html>