Open letter to South Phoenix:

There are many changes taking place throughout your community.  Ambitious plans are being put into motion.  South Phoenix has always been a busy place, but now new luxury homes and golf courses are sprouting up everywhere you look. With all of these new homes come new residents and their arrival is bound to have an effect on the longtime members of the community.  The effect can be a positive one.

            Over the past eight weeks in Dr. Koptiuch’s “Learning from South Phoenix” class, I had the opportunity to experience and explore life in South Phoenix on various levels.   From learning about the goals of the city’s planning department, to meeting longtime residents, to studying the minute details that make the individual subdivisions making up this area unique in their own way, I was exposed to a side of South Phoenix I had never known. 

            I learned about the history of the area and about the area’s environmental problems.  Through all of this I came to realize that South Phoenix is an astonishingly vibrant and diverse place.  From the serenity of the Calm Village Buddhist Temple to the sprawling majesty of South Mountain Park, to the “village core” area at Broadway and Central, there are numerous opportunities for different cultures to interact.

Because of the plentiful, cheap land in South Phoenix, the influx of higher-income residents has occurred with out gentrification’s typical pattern of total displacement of lower-income groups.  The “old” South Phoenix stands alongside “new” South Phoenix for now.  Therefore South Phoenix has a uniqueness and diversity that, if properly nourished, could make this the perfect part of the city to settle in.

However, this is not necessarily the future that those who are developing huge chunks of this area have in mind for South Phoenix.  Many of them want to transform this vibrant place into an area indistinguishable from any other neighborhood in the city.

This does not need to happen.  It is within the power of all of you (new and old residents alike) with a stake in this area’s future to unite and shape South Phoenix’s destiny.  With your involvement, you can establish your vision of the area’s future and overcome the outsiders whose only true interest in your community is to exploit it for monetary gain. 

The time to meet this challenge is now.

James Czarnik

back:  To Czarnik Homepage

email: James.Czarnik@asu.edu