Let's reach back a few decades and review a little of what happened when an extended neighborhood scattered along the entire Tucson Mountains' sunrise-facing watershed got together to oppose dense housing and a shopping mall development of an approximate square mile of rugged, deep arroyo-crossed, sparsely populated, still pristine, Arizona/Sonoran semi-arid, saguaro, cacti, mesquite, ironwood, and palo verde tree-covered landscape; habitat to every sort of arid-lands-adapted wild creatures of that unique area of the world.
The whole Tucson Mountain watershed, known simply as The West Side, spills into the south-to-north-flowing Santa Cruz River where the oldest parts of Tucson are clustered. This area is known as Downtown. Eastward from the river, the landscape gently rises across the broad valley for 15 to 20 miles to the Rincon Mountains and the Saguaro National Monument East. It's also uncomplicatedly called the Eastside.
Between about 1950 to the early '70s, the Eastside grew with multiple housing developments and a couple of regional shopping malls. The quiet little town of Tucson clustered along the Santa Cruz River began its exponential eastward growth after WWII, driven by climate, defense industry and related jobs, and a lower cost-of-living. In 1950, the metropolitan population of around 50,000 residents had increased to about 250,000 by1970. Today, it's just over a million.
The Tucson Mountains foothills' rugged, sparsely populated terrain lay between the river and the mountains. By the late 1960s and early 70s, developers were running out of room on the Eastside and turned their attention to the Westside, the Tucson Mountain Foothills.
Soon, in downtown Tucson at a Pima County three-member Board of Supervisors' monthly, open meeting, a development rezoning proposal of an approximate square mile of the Westside asked for a dense housing project and a shopping center located between Sweetwater Drive, Oxbow Road, Sunset Road, and the Saguaro National Monument West.
That's when the residents along Tucson's Westside showed up and said, "No!"
That "No" went on for two-plus years. Again and again, the developers' lawyers presented various proposal changes, but always kept up pressure for higher densities. As they had touted on the Eastside, their presentations insisted that they provided good jobs. Yet, it was well-known that as soon as the last nail was hammered in the developments, the jobs disappeared and the house sales profits went out of state to corporations. Plus, all the new people buying them needed schools, water, roads, electricity, and myriad other infrastructure built or upgraded.
Where would that money come from? From taxing the homeowners and small businesses, of course. Not the developers headquartered out-of-state. So, any shortfall to establish infrastructure created tremendous pressures and often led to the next development approval to help widen the tax base to pay for the infrastructure needs of the previous development. Now the cycle was moving to the Westside.
All this is to say, getting together and working hard on opposition to exploitation is a primer for knowing what and how in today's divided world to get stuff done. Knocking on doors, calling, going to supervisors' meetings, petitioning, speaking, barbeques, local political figures invited, and we were informed--a newsletter was regularly mailed. A community. I was part of it.
Here's one of the newsletters from 1973. The drawings and little poem reminder are mine. Contributions and construction are typewriter, hard copy cut/paste done by Tucson Mountain Association (TMA) members, copied at a local business, hand-assembled and mailed by members. To pause, press space bar...
No, we didn't chase away the developers, but we held their feet to the fire long enough that the zoning changes were much less dense, held to one dwelling per acre, and the shopping center went away. It was a long stretch keeping up the resistance, but enough that the developers sold off chunks of the property that were later developed by others as one-acre plots. The people kept showing up for those zoning struggles, too, and the subsequent housing was built with much more respect for the impact on the arid, rugged terrain and the Saguaro National Monument West.
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Now our challenges are
national
global
existential.
We The People
are showing up
again
and again
and again.
We Are The People.
Hear Us Roar!!!!!
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