How Trump could affect thriving cities
Forgive Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton if he feels caught in crossfire. For years, Phoenix has been at the center of a nationwide struggle between progressive cities and conservative Republican state legislatures dominated by voices from suburban and rural areas. Now, Phoenix is on the front line of the impending confrontation between cities and an incoming Donald Trump administration championing a racially divisive nationalism most urban leaders consider anathema to both their values and strategies for economic development.
“When they try to preempt us at the state or federal government, we’re going to fight,” Stanton, a Democrat in his second term, told me recently. “I believe we’re going to make the right choices so that we can become a tier-one economy ... and we’re going to do it despite attempts to interfere with [us].”
Phoenix encapsulates the precarious urban dynamic of 2016: As Trump nears the White House, big cities are economically ascendant but politically isolated. Most big cities are growing in population and jobs, while emerging as hubs of information-age innovation open to ideas, people, trade and investment from around the globe. But politically, cities are reeling under a furious counter-revolt from mostly white voters outside urban areas who feel eclipsed by the racially diverse, economically globalized, and largely post-industrial future America’s largest metropolitan areas are forging.
These dynamics are unfolding as starkly in Arizona as anywhere. After staggering in the 2007 housing crash, Phoenix is again the state’s undisputed engine of growth. One recent national ranking put it second to only San Francisco in creating technology jobs since 2013.
In 2015, Stanton supported a ballot proposition that increased the city’s sales tax to fund a $31.5-billion, 35-year expansion of Phoenix’s light rail and bus service. The effort to create a more walkable, denser downtown is fundamental to Stanton’s ambitions to build a city economy beyond tourism and real estate. Phoenix has aggressively pursued trade with Mexico (doubling exports since 2012), attracted $8 billion in development investment along its light rail line (which will next extend into heavily black and Latino neighborhoods) and partnered with Arizona State University to expand its downtown campus.
Like most cities, Phoenix is still struggling to connect more of its minority kids to the economic opportunities it is creating. But those opportunities are blossoming: The Phoenix metro area now accounts for 70% of Arizona’s total economic output, according to Brookings Institution calculations. Tucson, Arizona’s second-largest city, adds about another 15%.
Yet while driving the state’s economy, these diverse urban centers have faced steady hostility from an Arizona state Legislature dominated by Republicans representing older and preponderantly white voters from suburban and rural areas. (Whites make up 77% of Arizona residents older than 55 but only 43% of those younger than 35, the widest “racial generation gap” in any state.).The Legislature’s pushback includes eliminating all state funding for the community colleges serving the two cities. In 2010, the Legislature conscripted all of its cities into the crackdown on undocumented immigrants embodied in SB 1070, legislation that became a national flashpoint. That same year, the Legislature barred Tucson public schools, from offering a Mexican American studies program that conservatives opposed. In 2014, a “religious freedom” bill would have undermined Phoenix’s gay rights ordinance, had then-GOP Gov. Jan Brewer not vetoed it under intense national pressure.
This year, Arizona’s Republican Gov. Doug Ducey took preemption to a new level by signing a law that denies cities their portion of shared state tax revenue if they pass any regulation the attorney general deems to conflict with state law. Stanton is bracing for a challenge to the municipal identification card the Phoenix created for immigrants in the U.S. illegally.
The stakes are huge: shared state revenue accounts for one-third of Phoenix’s budget. But Stanton is prepared to fight in court if the state acts. “Do we really want a state legislator from Lake Havasu City deciding public policy for what happens here in urban Phoenix?” he told me.
Stanton is promising the same posture toward the incoming Trump administration. Rescinding Obama’s deferred action program for children brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents, he says, “is completely self-defeating.” Nearly 50,000 so-called “dreamers” have received protected status in Phoenix.
Trump’s pledges to build a wall along the Mexican border and possibly withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement “would be terrible,” Stanton continues. “That’s a fast-growing economy [in Mexico] … a growing middle class. Let’s take advantage of it. A wall would go in exactly the wrong direction.”
And if Trump tries to “force our [police] to be part of some mass deportation unit,” Stanton says, “we’re not buying it.”
With all those battle lines hardening, a defining question of the Trump era may be whether the dynamic metropolitan areas molding the America of 2050 can continue to thrive under an insular presidential agenda aimed largely at non-urban voters who believe the U.S. was a better place in 1950.