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Article Excerpt
This is a slightly modified version of chapter eight in Landscapes of Fraud: Mission Tumacacori, the Baca Float, and the Betrayal of the O'odham, published in 2006 by the University of Arizona Press. Landscapes of Fraud explores how the Upper Santa Cruz River Valley of southern Arizona was transformed from a landscape of community occupied by O'odham groups when Spanish settlers arrived in the late 1600s to a landscape of fraud as Mexican and Anglo speculators in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries traded paper titles to the Tumacacori land grant and Baca Float No. 3. In the process, two land-based communities--the O'odham at Mission Tumacacori in the 1840s and homesteaders during World War I--were destroyed as the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the valid Tumacacori grant in 1898 and confirmed the fraudulent Baca Float in 1914. The development of Rio Rico is located on the Baca Float. The present developers of Rio Rico have no connection to either Gulf American or GAC.
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On December 21, 1951, a drunken truck driver swerved across the Old Nogales Highway and slammed into a truck driven by Howell Manning Jr., who ran his father's half-million-acre Canoa Ranch. Manning died at the scene. His widow, Deezy Manning Catron, remembers hearing the phone ring at her father-in-law's house, where she was waiting for the return of her husband to have dinner. Howell Sr. slumped, dropped the receiver, and walked out to the corral. The showcase ranch with its Arabian horses and purebred Herefords turned to ashes as the old man struggled to grasp the death of his son.
Two years later, Manning sold much of his deeded land to liquor wholesaler Kemper Marley, who was later implicated in the bombing murder of reporter Don Bolles. With the sale went most of the federal and State Trust Land grazing leases as well. The greatest ranch in southern Arizona shrank from 500,000 to 20,000 acres (Hadley 2000).
It was the end of an era in the upper Santa Cruz River valley. Manning held on to the southern half of the San Ignacio de la Canoa land grant. Tol Pendleton still ran Baca Float Ranch, Inc. But the high times were winding down as age, alcohol, and the changing economy of Arizona took their toll. When Georges Simenon left southern Arizona in 1950, the landscape of the upper Santa Cruz still conjured romantic visions of Spanish missions and the Old West. By the 1960s, those visions were being chewed up and spit out by the transformation of the American West triggered by World War II (Nash 1985). Arizona was one of the fastest growing states in the country. Military bases and defense plants attracted thousands of newcomers during the war. Business-friendly tax laws and right-to-work legislation lured even more businesses during the postwar boom (Sheridan 1995).
Then Del Webb, who had made fortunes off federal contracts since the New Deal, found yet another way to make money in Arizona. Webb looked at the demographics of postwar America and built Sun City west of Phoenix, a self-contained community for "active seniors" who wanted to thaw out and play golf in the Arizona sun. Sun City quickly became the model for other retirement communities across the state, including Green Valley south of Tucson. Soon the showcase ranches were surrounded by a curious mixture of the old extractive Arizona--dark pecan orchards along the Santa Cruz and great open-pit copper mines in the eastern foothills of the Sierrita Mountains--and the new Arizona of red-riled roofs and jaunty retirees (Sheridan 1995).
In the process, land values seemed to rise as fast as the velocity of traffic on 1-19, the new freeway that sliced the valley in hall and sped travelers between Tucson and the international border at Ambos Nogales. Once again, speculators descended on the Santa Cruz Valley. This rime, they were not searching for silver or gentlemen's spreads. Instead, they wanted grids on the bare ground that they could sell to sun-starved buyers from Chicago or the East Coast. The geography of capital was making the transition from rural to exurban with a rapidity that bordered on the surreal.
THE POSTWAR HOUSING BOOM AND SUBURBAN SPRAWL
Developers are often portrayed as the root of environmental evil in the modern West. Battles in the Southwest have been particularly incendiary, with two of the most radical environmentalist organizations--Earth First! and the Center for Biological Diversity--originating there. "Arizona is the native haunt of the scorpion, the solpugid, the sidewinder, the tarantula, the vampire bat, the conenose kissing bug, the vinegarroon, the centipede, and three species of poisonous lizard: namely, the Gila monster, the land speculator and the real estate broker," Edward Abbey growled (Abbey 1977:147). He went on to say that metropolitan Phoenix, with a population of 1,355,000 in 1976, had "swollen up worse than a poisoned pup" (148).
Those figures seem quaint by comparison to the more than three million people living in the Salt River valley today. Down south, Pima County's visionary Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan tries to control metropolitan Tucson's growth by tying it to the endangered wings of the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl. Meanwhile, bulldozers chew up thirteen acres of desert a day in eastern Pima County alone.
Half a century ago, in contrast, a home-hungry nation hailed developers as industrial pioneers. In 1940, only 41 percent of non-farm Americans owned their own homes. That was the same rate of homeownership Herbert Hoover decried when he launched a national crusade to modernize the construction industry in 1921. Henry Ford had democratized automobile ownership through the techniques of mass production. Hoover wanted the "backward" and "inefficient" building trades to do the same. "To own one's home is a physical expression of individualism, of enterprise, of independence, and of freedom of spirit," the buttoned-down engineer turned secretary of commerce rhapsodized. "This aspiration penetrates the heart of our national well-being. It makes for happier married life, it makes for better children, it makes for confidence and security, it makes for courage to meet the battle of life, it makes for better citizenship. There can be no fear for democracy or self-government or for liberty or freedom from home owners no matter how humble they may be" (quoted in Rome 2001:24).
Hoover wanted homebuilding Henry Fords to step forward, and resisted any attempt at federal intervention, even after he became president. But the Great Depression torpedoed both his political career and his dream of expanded homeownership. Housing starts plummeted while home foreclosures soared. By 1932, even Fortune magazine concluded, "Housing is the one field where private enterprise and individual initiative have failed" (quoted in Rome 2001:26).
Ironically, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal laid the foundation for the resurrection of Hoover's dream after World War II. In 1934, Roosevelt ramrodded the National Housing Act through Congress. Until then, homebuyers had to cough up 50 percent down payments and pay off their mortgages in rive to ten years. The National Housing Act allowed the new Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to back twenty-year mortgages for up to 80 percent of a home's cost. Twenty percent of broke was still broke during the Depression years, but low down payments and long-term mortgages revolutionized home financing during the postwar boom (Rome 2001).
By insuring mortgages, the FHA rode the Keynesian wave of rising federal manipulation of economic affairs. British economist John Maynard Keynes and his disciples contended that consumer spending drove modern industrial economies. To promote economic growth, national governments should encourage spending, particularly for durable goods like cars, houses, and appliances. To accomplish that goal, they had to increase the flow of capital and spread it more evenly across their populations.
One way to do so was to expand and democratize the available money supply by making saving, investing, and lending more secure. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (1933) guaranteed bank deposits and protected savers against bank failures. By guaranteeing long-term mortgages with low down payments, the FHA enlarged the pool of prospective homebuyers and made lending money to them more attractive to savings and loans. For the first rime in U.S. history, the federal government put its immense resources and growing revenue-generating ability behind homebuyers, the housing industry, and the financial institutions upon which both producers and consumers depended. That strategy paid off with a vengeance when the GIs came home from war.
At first, the returning soldiers faced a severe housing shortage. Some of them had to live in tents, streetcars, or even the fuselages of scrapped bombers. To stimulate both construction and homeownership, Democratic and Republican administrations alike passed legislation such as the GI Bill, which eliminated down payments for veterans and granted them thirty-year, low-interest mortgages. Such measures boosted demand, and also made it easier for builders to borrow the money they needed to construct subdivisions, not just single homes (Rome 2001).
The march to the suburbs was on. Builders like William Levitt in New York--or John F. Long in metropolitan Phoenix--developed "planned communities" on the fringes of urban centers where land was cheaper. In these Levittowns or Maryvales, nonunion workers assembled homes with almost the same standardization as Detroit manufactured cars. By 1956, 60 percent of Americans owned their own homes. By 1959, big builders using mass-production techniques had cornered 64 percent of the housing market. Hoover's dream was becoming a reality through FHA and Veterans Housing Administration (VHA) loans (Rome 2001).
And along with tract homes came built-in appliances and a skyrocketing dependence upon the automobile. Historian Adam Rome (2001) reveals how giant appliance manufacturers helped create the postwar consumer culture by convincing developers to add refrigerators, stoves, washing machines, and water heaters to their dwellings. Journalist Godfrey Hodgson called it the "suburban-industrial complex," as defense industries converted to the production of consumer goods with the same ideological fervor with which they had churned out wartime supplies (quoted in Rome 2001:43).
But if FHA and VHA loans fueled the housing boom, the interstate highway program of the 1950s propelled the exodus from the "inner" cities. Urban America was reconfigured as white ethnics moved to the suburbs and the construction of suburban shopping centers bled downtowns. Those left behind never had access to the credit needed to revitalize older neighborhoods, which often decayed (Duany et al 2000). In the West, small cities like Albuquerque, Phoenix, and Tucson largely bypassed urbanization altogether and developed as massive suburbs with puny mass-transit systems and mobile populations that often seemed to be just passing through ( Abbott 1993; Luckingham 1989;Sheridan 1995).
Cold War fears and military contracts kept defense plants in the Southwest. Cheap labor, low taxes, and aggressive promotion attracted new companies as well, primarily in the electronics and aeronautics industries. And once air-conditioning vanquished the desert heat, at least inside offices and homes, thousands of servicemen who had trained in Arizona during the war returned to buy tract homes with VHA loans. The result was a suburban geography of mass-produced neighborhoods with mass-produced homes filled with mass-produced appliances, including air-conditioners. The only way to reach those neighborhoods, of course, was by mass-produced automobiles with built-in ACs. Both personal and business spaces were being produced that defied regional constraints like climate.
GREEN VALLEY AND THE END OF SANTA BOOZE LANE
But young veterans wanting to start families were not the only ones flocking to Arizona suburbs. In 1962, Del Webb appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Time did not bestow the honor because Webb was co-owner of the New York Yankees during their postwar glory years. Nor did he achieve that recognition for building mobster Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. Del Webb made Time because he mass-marketed a new kind of community on the Arizona landscape--one designed for retirees who wanted to play golf rather than shovel snow (Sheridan 1995).
Webb's Sun City northwest of Phoenix was a particularly brilliant feat of entrepreneurship. Postwar prosperity freed a growing segment of America's elderly from the need to live with their children. Advances in health care allowed them to live longer after they reached retirement age. Many of these middle-class retirees were not ready for the rocking chair. Instead, they wanted to golf, swim, play tennis, and socialize with people their own age. They had survived a depression and won a world war, and now they wanted to have fun. Webb recognized a latent market for planned retirement communities and turned it into an aggressively active one. Youngtown (1954) might have been the first age-segregated "geriatric ghetto," but Sun City was the biggest and best-promoted. There would be many more.
The most spectacular in southern Arizona was Green Valley, which took root on the northern half of the San Ignacio de la Canoa land grant. Located along I-19 about thirty-five minutes away from Tucson and its medical facilities, Green Valley was an exurban rather than a suburban retirement community, like Sun City. Its vistas--at least to the east--were breathtaking: desert bajadas rising...
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