The creeping unease in some of Tucson’s innermost neighborhoods is starting to seep into the race for mayor.
For years, people in neighborhoods like Menlo Park, Armory Park and Dunbar Spring have worried as new development has occurred nearby and property values have soared. A couple of new houses on small lots in Barrio Anita, for example, are on the market for $375,000 apiece.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing — new businesses and wealthier neighbors can bring a variety of benefits, not just expensive coffee — but soaring home values can lead eventually to displacement, especially for renters. It can also change the demographics of the neighborhood, replacing some longtime brown or black residents with white newcomers.
The displacement of longtime residents by newcomers and new development is the heart of the idea of gentrification, which has been going on furiously in crowded California cities.
But it’s been more subtle in most of the neighborhoods surrounding Tucson.
Brian Flagg, consistent with his nature, was not subtle about the threat he sees when he hosted a community meeting on gentrification Sunday in South Tucson.
“Gentrification is good if you have money,” Flagg said in the meeting at the Capilla de Guadalupe, 409 E. 31st Street. “It’s really bad for poor and working people who are on the bottom and who are going to be displaced as this process plays out.”
“We need to fight to protect our barrio,” said Flagg, who heads the Casa Maria soup kitchen, just up the street from the capilla.
Flagg and some others in the areas south of East 22nd Street worry that as downtown Tucson property values have soared to unaffordability for most people, pressure is building on the South Fourth Avenue corridor.
Speaker Raul Ramirez pointed to city tax incentives as possibly playing a role in development that ends up hurting neighborhoods.
Only one of the Democratic mayoral candidates made the Sunday event — Ward 1 Council Member Regina Romero. But as the campaign goes on, each is having to address the problem, and each has unique vulnerabilities.
Romero, for example, has had a difficult relationship with the political progressives of Barrio Hollywood. They fought her initial support of the 2013 proposal that would have put a Grand Canyon University campus where the El Rio Golf Course is, and eventually persuaded her to change course.
Hollywood resident Scott Egan spoke at the Sunday meeting and said his neighborhood’s successful fight against the GCU deal sets a template for other neighborhoods wanting to stop development deals.
“I stopped it,” Romero said from the audience as Egan accused her of being on the wrong side of the issue.
But she also has the advantage of having dealt with the issue for years, and she’s honed her thoughts. What Romero worries about, she told me Tuesday, is not “gentrification.”
“To me, displacement is the problem,” she said. “Everyone has a different definition of gentrification. It’s loaded language.”
To that end, each development project in these neighborhoods should be looked at from the perspective of its impacts on affordability and neighborhood health.
Democratic mayoral candidate Steve Farley is one of the main forces behind Tucson’s streetcar. As he first envisioned it, in a proposal voters rejected in 2003, streetcar routes would have run down East Broadway and South Sixth Avenue. As it turned out, the only line built was between the west side of the Santa Cruz River, adjacent to downtown, and the University of Arizona.
The route became the focal point of development in central Tucson, but as Flagg sees it, it’s a boondoggle for transit users.
“It is a significant contributor to gentrification by raising property values on and near its route,” Flagg wrote in a piece introducing the Sunday event. “Its main purpose is economic development, not transit.”
When we spoke Tuesday, Farley said he considers the streetcar successful as both transit and economic development, and that it’s paid for itself many times over.
The key to holding off gentrification, he said, is neighborhood involvement in development projects, as has happened with the monastery project on North Country Club Road and other projects on North Fourth Avenue. But he noted so-called “gentrification” can be a plus for some longtime residents.
“One person’s displacement is another person’s ability to leave their children with a nest egg,” Farley said. “You don’t want to limit equity for people who have lived in these neighborhoods a long time.”
The third major Democratic candidate, Randi Dorman, has perhaps the greatest vulnerability on the issue. She is a developer of downtown-area projects who, arguably, has contributed to increasing property values. She and her husband, Rob Paulus, developed the Ice House Lofts near Armory Park and are redeveloping Trinity Presbyterian Church on North Fourth Avenue.
But she was asked about gentrification at an April 18 forum at the UA and had clearly thought the subject through.
“When you invest in an area like we have in downtown, surrounding areas can be subjected to being displaced,” she said. “The role of the city is to be able to protect people from being displaced while ensuring the continued investment in the community.”
“We’ve created tools to invest in downtown. We can create tools for affordability,” Dorman said.
It is those tools that, I think, should be the subject of scrutiny as the campaign goes forward. The Government Property Lease Excise Tax program, for one, has been used prolifically in the downtown area to give tax incentives to developers.
At some point, perhaps now, these incentives have done what they are there for — sparking development in the downtown area — and they need to be dropped so that developers pay their fair share and so local government isn’t making the affordability problem worse.
Re-evaluating these incentives in light of displacement, and ensuring that housing affordability is protected, ought to be the minimum these candidates are willing to stand for.
