Does Phoenix have an identity problem?

[locolife]

Originally Posted by Valley Native

I hope you noticed one important fact in that Wikipedia link: Phoenix metro had the highest growth rate of any other that you mentioned (2.05%). Even Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta didn't grow as much, and many other metros registered a population decrease. That just proves how rapidly we continue to grow, and we're going to become a top 10 metro before you know it. Statistically, Phoenix already is a top 10 MSA, surpassing Boston in the last census! This stresses how important it is to strive to be more of a national & global hub than what we currently are. If this means doing whatever it takes to bring in more corporations, international flights, year round tourism, and building up the central core so that it resembles a true big city, I'm all for it.

Yes but we're currently 2 million behind getting in the top 10 CSA ranking in 2022. It would take 20 years at our current growth rate of 100K per year, assuming we can maintain that. By then places like Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas (which are growing around 50-90K per year) will be in the 9-10million CSA population range. So we'd still be likely around number 11 in 20-years, unless Boston, Philly and Miami just continue to lose population and we actually maintain this figure, which is an outlier in recent growth years. A lot can change in 2-3 decades, I predict we'll only be around 6.5M-7.5M people by 2050 and around 11-12 on the CSA ranking.


Being a Top 10 MSA is great but the CSA determines things like our media market size, which helps drive things that make a place a "big city market" as they say in the MLB. Getting to that level would be amazing.

[Valley Native]

Originally Posted by locolife

Yes but we're currently 2 million behind getting in the top 10 CSA ranking in 2022. It would take 20 years at our current growth rate of 100K per year, assuming we can maintain that. By then places like Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas (which are growing around 50-90K per year) will be in the 9-10million CSA population range. So we'd still be likely around number 11 in 20-years, unless Boston, Philly and Miami just continue to lose population and we actually maintain this figure, which is an outlier in recent growth years. A lot can change in 2-3 decades, I predict we'll only be around 6.5M-7.5M people by 2050 and around 11-12 on the CSA ranking.

All this makes sense, but it's still no excuse for Phoenix continuing to behave smaller than what it is, and not strive for higher standards. All the other cities mentioned were significant hubs, and on the national & global radar when they were much smaller than what Phoenix is now. Our growth rate is a clear indication that we need to step up our game & move ahead. In the thread about Phoenix being the #2 city in the west, you ranked Phoenix below Denver as far as prominence, and that's unacceptable considering our size.

Originally Posted by locolife

Being a Top 10 MSA is great but the CSA determines things like our media market size, which helps drive things that make a place a "big city market" as they say in the MLB. Getting to that level would be amazing.

Our media market covers a large area, making up about 6 million residents. It ranks #11 nationally, which statistically makes it a big city market.

https://newsgeneration.com/broadcast...radio-markets/

[MN-Born-n-Raised]

Originally Posted by Mike from back east

Egads! I used to buy Honeywell mainframes and minicomputers off the WWMCCS contracts for my Army agency. People will find it hard to believe that a 550Mb disk drive was the size of a washing machine and cost $55k in the 1980s. Now that much storage fits in a pinkie ring for a couple of bucks. I saw and lived through the years when Moore's Law was hard at work in the IT hardware business, and BTW, Gordon Moore, a founder of INTEL and the person who opined what's known as Moore's Law died recently.

While going to college out of HS in 1984, I worked two 12-hour weekend shifts in Bloomington, MN assembling disk drives in a cleanroom. The place was called Magnetic Peripheral Incorporated or MPI. This was a joint venture between Honeywell and Control Data. These drives were HUGE. The drives we built had a platter size of around 12" wide.

[Mike from back east]

Originally Posted by MN-Born-n-Raised

While going to college out of HS in 1984, I worked two 12-hour weekend shifts in Bloomington, MN assembling disk drives in a cleanroom. The place was called Magnetic Peripheral Incorporated or MPI. This was a joint venture between Honeywell and Control Data. These drives were HUGE. The drives we built had a platter size of around 12" wide.

Yes, and IIRC there were multiples of the 12-inch disks in a disk-pack that could be swapped out for other disks with different data sets on them. Something like this disk pack.

True story. We had a GCOS-8 mainframe running our worldwide household goods moving and storage business for DoD ($1-2B/annually) and the monthly run took 77 hours -- if nothing went wrong. I did a sole-source acquisition for a Teradata DataBase Machine (DBM) to hold all that data and it lowered our monthly run time from 77 hours to just 28 minutes. We went to war in Desert Storm on that DBM handling the data on all the shipments -- 950k pieces of military equipment and couple millions tons of munitions, in 567 shiploads. I tracked every ship and every morning our CG took a 3-mile drive to the Pentagon to brief the 4-stars on the status of MLRS refill pods, the pacing item for start of the ground war.

With technology now prominent around the world, I think Phoenix is going to identify as the nation's IT foundry, what Pittsburgh was to steel, this city will be the Pittsburgh of semiconductor ships -- a new sort of 'big iron.'

[locolife]

Originally Posted by Valley Native

All this makes sense, but it's still no excuse for Phoenix continuing to behave smaller than what it is, and not strive for higher standards. All the other cities mentioned were significant hubs, and on the national & global radar when they were much smaller than what Phoenix is now. Our growth rate is a clear indication that we need to step up our game & move ahead. In the thread about Phoenix being the #2 city in the west, you ranked Phoenix below Denver as far as prominence, and that's unacceptable considering our size.

Our media market covers a large area, making up about 6 million residents. It ranks #11 nationally, which statistically makes it a big city market.

https://newsgeneration.com/broadcast...radio-markets/

At number 11 we're a full 1/2 million homes behind number 10 and we're basically 1 million homes from being in the top 5 big city media markets. That is a BIG difference. We're closer in media market size to Orlando than we are to being a top 10 market.

I do think Phoenix behind Denver, not by a lot and that's probably debatable but I've spent a lot of time there and think we have some catching up to do still. I think we get there soon.

[Pincho-toot]

Originally Posted by locolife

Minneapolis must be really bad off then, not a single one of their teams uses the city name. Sheesh, I can't imagine how terrible of a place it must be due to the naming of their teams. Has the thought occurred to you that the pro-teams here want to appeal to the other 2.5 or so million people that live in AZ but not in Phoenix metro? C'mon it's marketing 101.

That's because we are the Twin Cities. It makes more sense to name our teams after the state that way neither one city hogs the spotlight. Minnesota Vikings, Twins, Timberwolves play in Minneapolis. Minnesota Wild and Minnesota United FC play in Saint Paul.

But, to your credit, I don't think the name of a sports team tells you all that much, but with that being said, Phoenix does have an identity problem that other cities in the Southwest like El Paso, Albuquerque and Las Vegas lack.

[timothyaw]

Maybe Phoenix can have an architectural identity? This architect thinks so.
https://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/...oenix-for.html

[Valley Native]

Originally Posted by timothyaw

Maybe Phoenix can have an architectural identity? This architect thinks so.
https://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/...oenix-for.html

Phoenix needs to step up construction on taller & more iconic structures that would present a truer big city identity. We certainly are big enough now for this. No need to keep plodding along with the same bland cookie cutter developments, including the many cheaply built 5 story wood framed apartment buildings, or a few 20 story boxes downtown. I mean, those are fine to a certain extent, but let's get creative and have some unique skyscrapers in the central core like these:

[singlegirlinaz]

Originally Posted by Valley Native

Phoenix needs to step up construction on taller & more iconic structures that would present a truer big city identity. We certainly are big enough now for this. No need to keep plodding along with the same bland cookie cutter developments, including the many cheaply built 5 story wood framed apartment buildings, or a few 20 story boxes downtown. I mean, those are fine to a certain extent, but let's get creative and have some unique skyscrapers in the central core like these:

I'd like to see more of those too but it won't make Downtown any more visited I don't think.

I agree with you about the apartment buildings. I live near what used to be PV Mall and they're putting in those same kinds of apartments we're seeing all over, kind of uninteresting and not much character to them.

[timothyaw]

Click-bait article of course - but this one article ranks us pretty high on the boring list. Indianapolis as #1 is absolutely correct, it's called Nap town after all.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news...s/73293407007/