This week we’re joined by Kyle Paoletta to talk about his book American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest.
We discuss the growth and history of southwestern U.S. cities, how indigenous people didn’t disappear but adapted, the importance of language and identity and climate adaptation lessons for cities from the driest region.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.
Jeff Wood: The cities that grew up in the Southwest, what’s really fascinating to me is the marketing that happened and the growth from the folks, selling it to a certain extent — the Arizona Highways magazine, Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe’s Native American arts motif that they had going on.
How much of that was the push that helped these cities grow and move into kind of this next generation of building?
Kyle Paoletta: I think it was really important. I think, it’s never just one thing when you’re talking about a city like Phoenix growing as dynamically as it did and continues to. It’s still one of the fastest growing cities in the country. But I think I wanted to focus on that side of things in the book because the history of oh, “We’re gonna offer this tax break to Honeywell,” or “We’re gonna try and charm these real estate developer,” I think that’s really important.
And I do write about — here’s the people who got the bank loans to build the subdivisions, and here’s why they got them and why these other people didn’t. But I think you need to pair it with that more cultural analysis. And I really believe that for Arizona to become what it became, American consciousness needed to change.
And that change was going from thinking about the desert as totally hostile, alien, this kind of place without life in it to, oh, this is actually a wonderland. Or this is, like, a mystical place. This is a magical place. And Arizona Highways really did a lot to accomplish that because this is a magazine that was, and still is, owned by the Department of Transportation [of] the state of Arizona.
So it’s, like, a state-run journal. And it had started out basically as a circular for people who worked in highway construction. But what happened is this guy, Raymond Carlson — he had gone to Stanford, he was very bright, [an] aspiring writer — moved back home to Arizona and managed to get appointed editor because, I believe, his wife’s uncle became governor.
And this is what could happen in the 1920s and ’30s in Arizona when it was a very small state. But he becomes editor and he has this vision of turning it into a real tourism magazine. And he does that by bringing in a lot of photography, bringing a lot of more kind of like essayistic travelogues, like a reading National Geographic or Smithsonian magazine.
Arizona Highways is one of the first magazines to have any color photography. It has color photography on the cover long before National Geographic does. And they go from a circulation of a couple thousand to over a half a million in the 1960s. And almost all of those subscribers were out of Arizona.
So it became this way of just sending out like a signal to the rest of the country of, “Look at this beautiful place. Don’t you want to come see? Lake Havasu, don’t you want to come see Monument Valley? Don’t you want to?”
Jeff Wood: “Aren’t you cold right now?”
Kyle Paoletta: Totally. Oh, “Don’t you want to golf in the winter? Wouldn’t that be fun to golf in February?” And so to me, that really worked in tandem with what was happening on the political level and with the Chamber of Commerce, where there was all this kind of real public effort to attract industry, to especially attract aerospace and technology. And that when you were bringing in someone to do a site visit because they’re thinking of opening up a new facility for, one of these big aerospace companies, you could then shower them with the good life and shower them with this fantasy life.
And clearly it was very effective. One of the big questions for me in the book was like, why did Phoenix get so much bigger than Albuquerque? Albuquerque is 200-something years older than Phoenix and existed long before, had the railroad earlier, like, you name it. What was it that Phoenix did?
And I think it just was much better at selling this total package that combined with, again, the fact that, when you’re that visiting executive from Chicago, you’re not hearing Spanish on the street, you’re not hearing Tewa on the street. There was not that previous population there that you had to contend with.
You could go to Phoenix and really imagine it as whatever you wanted to be, build whatever kind of house you wanted and so on. And I think that fantasy exists today. I think a lot of the suburban sprawl. Throughout the region, but especially in Phoenix and Las Vegas, you go out to these communities and they do have this real sense of oh, someone has their own little palace out here in the desert.
And yeah, it’s a 50 minute drive to downtown Phoenix, but whatever. They’ve got six bedrooms and a pool and you name it. So that, kind of, dream of making the desert your own, I think, is alive and well.
Jeff Wood: That drove the architecture too, right?
Kyle Paoletta: Yeah, absolutely. I think you have obviously the kind of classic ranch-style house that’s very popular everywhere, but you also had this effort to import architectural styles from the rest of the country. So, certainly, when you’re in Phoenix and you’re going into neighborhoods that were built in the 1950s and ’60s, a lot of them look like they could be in Milwaukee or Philadelphia or whatever. Like it’s a lot of brick, it’s a lot of clapboard, Cape Cod style houses.
And it’s only more recently that you get more of the kind of like Spanish revival, more like California-style. Even the suburban sprawl. And again, it was this idea of whatever your life is in Minnesota, Michigan, you can come [and have] just that, but also have a warm winter. And, like, that kind of idea of importing a lifestyle was really popular.
But also what came with that is green lawns, having this very kind of consumptive lifestyle that now the city has spent 30 years trying to reverse and has made progress, but there’s still resistance to all of those kind of common sense ways to live more sustainably because you have people who maybe moved there in the ’70s or ’80s and are now retiring and are like, why are you telling me to rip out my lawn?
Jeff Wood: That’s a big part of your story too, is just the need for conservation and the lack of water. And early on when they were doing all the treaties and the deals about water and how much it was to be spread out between California and Nevada and Arizona. There’s a whole thing about how I wrote down in my notes, I was like, “was Phoenix just founded because of a lucky wet spell?” They had so much water in some of those earlier days of massive development and now it’s less than they, planned for.
Kyle Paoletta: Yeah, no, I think that’s a great question because, I write in the book that, like, the entire history of Phoenix is running out of water and then needing to get more water. There was this kind of on-off cycle for the first couple of decades of the city’s existence where, you’re right, like, the first decade that it was founded was a really wet cycle. And then right after that there was a big drought and then there’s a really wet cycle that caused all this flooding that took out bridges.
And that flooding is partially what leads to the Bureau of Reclamation being founded, which is the agency that built the Hoover Dam, built all of the water infrastructure in the West to smooth out that natural variation that indigenous people had been adapted to for millennia. In the twentieth century it became, no, we’re gonna use technology to change the environment.
And yeah, so Phoenix, in only a few decades, it goes from using basically as much of the Salt River as they can to building an aqueduct to the Verde River, using that up and then embarking on this very long process of getting the Colorado River project built, which is the 200-some mile aqueduct. I think it was completed in the early ’90s, and which now provides a lot of the water.
And that project is partially why the entire Colorado River basin is in the mess it is, where it’s really overdrawn the amount of water that’s available. And certainly California played its part. California way overused its water for a long time. And the agriculture in California, especially in the Imperial Valley, still uses way more water than any city does.
But it’s all part of this broader story of people coming to the desert, wanting to live outside its natural limits, and then using technology to do that. And it’s just kind of climate change and microcosm. And now we are dealing with the consequences and needing to adapt and become more sustainable because we spent a century doing the exact opposite.
And in many ways it feels like a little too little, too late. I think there’s been progress, but the basin faces a lot of challenges. It’s not certain that they’re gonna be able to figure it out without some protracted legal case that goes to the Supreme Court.
