Here's some 20/20 hindsight on urban renewal and downtown Tucson's redevelopment history:
Posted: Monday, Oct 10, 2005 - 09:13:29 am MDT
Four decades later, watershed year still affect's Tucson's future
By Philip S. Moore, Inside Tucson Business
This is an anniversary year, but only some people are celebrating.
It was four decades ago this year that Gene C. Reid, the City of Tucson’s Parks and Recreation director, decided that a zoo might be a good idea for Randolph Park. What he chose to do, then, continues to expand today, attracting more than 400,000 visitors each year as one of the city’s leading tourist and community destinations.
Also celebrating a 40th anniversary, on Sept. 21 was the Wilmot library building. Tucson-Pima Public Library spent $406,730 to construct the 15,550 square foot branch, the third for the regional library district. In 1966 the Wilmot Branch Library and its architect, Nicholas Sakellar and Associates, were selected as one of eleven winners of a biennial national architectural award for “distinguished accomplishment in library architecture” sponsored by the American Institute of Architects in cooperation with the American Library Association, and has since been named a Tucson landmark.
It was also exactly 40 years ago, this year, between February 1965 and May 1966, that the city’s government and citizens decided to end a decade of debate over the costs and benefits, and voted to breathe life back into Tucson’s fading downtown with a sweeping urban renewal project that would clear away the old and make way for the new.
Backed by $15 million in bonds to leverage federal, state and private investment, the city made a commitment to clear 29 decaying city blocks west of Church Avenue, between Washington Street on the north and 14th Street on the south, and make it into what all the best minds of the times conceived as the city of the future.
They decided to give the city a series of new government buildings to attract offices and bring people back to the downtown’s stores and restaurants, and they decided to build a new convention center, the city’s first, to finally get a local share of the nation’s growing convention and trade show business.
While universally condemned today, for the Tucson of 1965, it made sense. Southern California architect and new urbanist Stefanos Polyzoides, designer of the new Mercado at Menlo Park, may compare Tucson’s urban renewal to the firebombing of Coventry, Dresden or Berlin, or the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima, but James Corbett, Tucson’s mayor at the time, said it was simply the best option available.
After all, the barrio had it coming, he said. Federal urban renewal was specifically targeted at areas that met the standard for blighted neighborhoods and West Congress Street, along with Barrio Libre and La Hoya (the hole) were obvious choices.
Since the railroad came to town in 1880, Tucson’s center had shifted from the old Presidio and Royal Road, now Granada Avenue, to the intersection of Stone Avenue and East Congress Street.
West Congress, which had served the many small farms that once flourished along the banks of the Santa Cruz River, had declined along with the farms to become a dilapidated series of rundown businesses catering to Tucson’s lowlife.
Sentiment and the distance of time have emphasized its qualities, but low home ownership rates, a high percentage of housing units that failed to make minimum safety and health standards, and declining population all marked the old neighborhoods for extinction.
Speaking to a Tucson Weekly reporter in 1997 about later objections to the project, Corbett said, “I never quite figured it out. Were they talking about the bars on West Congress, the derelicts and drug users on Meyer Street or the slumlords owning properties down there?”
What made the renewal project essential, according to the city’s planners of the era, was the completion of Interstate 10 along the east bank of the river. That made the west side of downtown important again, and with the federal government willing to put up $4.5 million to help pay for it, Tucson could transform seedy back streets into a modern urban center that the public could embrace.
Discussing the inner west side area in a 1971 report on the urban renewal project and the later-discarded Butterfield Freeway proposal, a city report acknowledged the historic character of the community but said, “With the rising mobility of the younger Mexican-American population, the older, less stylish areas have lost favor. Many of them would now prefer to live on the more prestigious far east and west sides.”
The city planners said the area was “at the stage in its life cycle when older, long-term residents are beginning to die, and some of the middle-aged residents finally have amassed enough money to move to their dream homes in more stylish areas. Fewer and fewer young Mexican-Americans stay in the area to raise their own families.”
As a result, “Original owners or their descendents are becoming absentee landlords. Renters then come from one social class, people who cannot afford to move to any other area. Houses and vacant land, over a long period, cease to be owned by the original families of the area and increasingly fall into the hands of speculators.”
Whatever the intentions of the time might have been, four decades later the project remains, “a ghost that hangs over anything and everything we do downtown,” said Marty McCune, coordinator of historic preservation and Río Nuevo for the City of Tucson. “It’s something we have to live with and address.”
McCune said, “The one thing that urban renewal did was awaken the barrio. The whole preservation movement was born as a result, and that has had a major impact on the city in the years since.”
She said, “There are still improvements that need to be made, but if you look at where these neighborhoods were 40 years ago and where they are now, you can see how much has been accomplished through the public and private investment in preservation that emerged as a reaction to the wholesale land clearance that happened then.”
Urban renewal also set the agenda for the Río Nuevo project. It made community improvement the highest priority. “Thanks to the lessons learned from urban renewal, we never wanted Río Nuevo to be about forcing people from their homes,” McCune said. “We worked hard to meet with all the neighborhoods affected and worked closely with them to make sure if Río Nuevo affected them, it did so in a positive way.”
It also made accepting and embracing national population trends important, she said, “A lot of people’s lives were turned upside down to do something that people thought was a good idea.” However, in the end, little was changed for the city as the 1960s march to the suburbs continued without slowing.
While urban renewal accomplished almost everything it set out to do, “it wasn’t enough,” McCune said. “We learned from the experience that it takes a lot of different features to make urban renewal possible. It takes a mix of housing, commercial development and parking. It takes public money leveraging private investment, and it takes a trend that favors redevelopment, which wasn’t there in the 1960s when everyone was moving from the city center to the suburbs.”
Now, there is support for what city is trying to accomplish, said Río Nuevo Director Greg Shelko.
“There are people out there that say the day of the downtown is past but if you look at every master-planned housing development in the suburbs, they talk about community and show pictures of a town center. Downtowns are centers of culture and commerce. They define a city,” he said. “That’s why downtown is still important. Choosing to live downtown is a lifestyle choice for some but everyone, whether they live there or not, wants to be proud of it.”
In the 1960s, urban renewal was about buildings, Shelko said. That’s why it failed. “You can’t rebuild communities by tearing them down and replacing them with a magic bullet kind of a civic project like an arena or convention center.”
Shelko said, “You need to create a multifaceted approach that takes in everything that needs to be done to address the quality of life. You create a diversity of attractions, of housing and incomes. That what creates a vital downtown.”
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