General Phoenix Metro Discussion Thread

[combusean]

You know, if all those buildings in Downtown were saved, let's play devil's advocate for a bit.

- Downtown probably wouldn't be a nice place to hang around if the Duce, Phoenix's skid row, wasn't replaced with the convention center. We'd have the issue of SF's Tenderloin hanging off the government district, which is rarely conducive to a healthy neighborhood.

- We'd have sixty-odd houses instead of the regional economic powerhouse of the biomedical district. For as bad as the biomed district is built, it's still better for the city than a bunch of old houses.

- No ASU downtown without the large lots to build that on.

- Probably not much of an arts scene if all the unwanted structures that crowd attracts were otherwise occupied. No First Friday.

- In fact, redeveloping anything would be a giant pain in the butt. Old downtown Phoenix just wasn't that dense, and we'd be stuck with an aging stock of structures and a "save this building" campaign any time somebody wanted to build something denser. Maybe that's a nice problem to have...

- Midtown would be the new downtown, but not built in any remotely cohesive manner like it is today. Just a quagmire of office towers, maybe a few more of them, with workers leaving quickly at the end of the day like downtown was in the 1970s - 2000s.

I could be wrong about some of this, but, maybe, just maybe, the demolitions that wreaked havoc on downtown weren't actually the worst thing that's happened to the area.