Phoenix as a suburb of Los Angeles


Today I'm thinking of Phoenix as a suburb of Los Angeles. So let's time-travel, not to the distant future when the two cities will connect, but back to the 1980s, and I'll see if I can explain it from my point of view.

For my friends who have always lived in Phoenix, Los Angeles is VERY different, but to me the two cities have always been very similar. Yes, there are more people, and more freeways in LA, but I've always compared Phoenix and Los Angeles to where I grew up, which was Minneapolis.

The first time I saw Phoenix, in 1977, coming from nineteen years in Minneapolis, I was absolutely blown away. The weather was nice, it never snowed, and it even got real hot! There were palm trees! And catuses (cacti?)! Everything was so wide open, the streets were so wide, and I could go on an on, but mostly I knew that I wasn't in Minneapolis anymore. Especially when winter arrived with no snow! Did I mention no snow?!

There were red tile roofs, and everything was just so new (I'm talking about Phoenix AND Los Angeles now). I had grown up in a neighborhood that was just old. Not classic, just old. Everything there was just tight, and cramped. I did learn how to parallel park, but never needed that skill in Phoenix, and very rarely in Los Angeles.

I moved to Los Angeles after I graduated from ASU, and ended up in the San Fernando Valley, which was built up in the 1950s as a "bedroom community", a suburb, for people who worked in the city (downtown LA). When I lived there, in the '80s, it was unthinkable for me to commute through some of the densest traffic in the world to work downtown, so I found a job right there in the valley. And my plans were to stay there, as I had landed a very good job at a big company, and I remember looking at the beautiful new communities being built nearby, in Thousand Oaks, and Simi Valley. And I knew that some day, with the right promotions, I would be able to afford a house there. But in the meantime I was getting older (almost thirty!) and there would have been no way that I could have afforded one of those houses, and people suggested that I look at places like Palmdale, several miles north of LA, in the desert.

I never really considered living out in the California desert, and commuting for several hours into the San Fernando Valley, but I know a lot of people who did. Houses were much cheaper in the desert! And the more I pondered it, the more I thought, "If I'm gonna live in the desert, why not just go back to Phoenix?" Of course I knew that I would cut off my ties to California, but I'd lived in the suburbs there, and didn't commute. So I moved to Phoenix in 1989, when I was thirty-one.

And to me, Phoenix remains a suburb of Los Angeles, the same way that the San Fernando Valley was. I like living in the 'burbs, and I like working there. I did work for several years in downtown Phoenix, but then I found work right nearby, in the suburbs. I worked at the local Community College, which is just a few blocks from me, for many years. And then I worked on the internet, which requires an even shorter commute.

Welcome to the suburbs! If you need anything from the city, just remember that trains, planes, and automobiles go back and forth all of the time.

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