Why are Phoenicians so fat?
The new issue of Phoenix magazine says we’re “one of the fattest cities in the nation,” in a story that isn’t online. It’s a feature article with a lot of information about weight problems and how to overcome them, but the basis for its thesis is limited to a year-old Men’s Fitness survey.
There’s still a lot of grim info:
One in four Phoenicians is uninsured, according to the U.S. Census. Even for the insured, many policies have seemingly backward approaches toward obesity prevention. Insurance policies usually cover treatments for heart attacks, strokes or diabetes that may have been caused by obesity, but pockets clamp shut when paying for preventive servies such as nutritional counseling and education.
[…]
Almost 75 percent of Arizona high school students do not have a physical education class, and almost 60 percent do not receive physical education at all, according to Arizona’s Youth Risk Behavior Study.
The story touches on, but doesn’t explore, racial issues:
One reason for the city’s high rate of obesity is its cultural diversity. Due to a variety of factors such as genetics, cultural norms, lifestyle and socioeconomic conditions, certain ethnic and minority groups—especially the Hispanic, African American, and American INdian populations—tend to be the msot affected. That being said, obesity is happy to claim victims of an ehtnicty and age. The tragic increase of childhoo obesity is a case in point.
7:40 PM
PHXations, Thursday, January 28
Overheard in Borders. Our cast is a man and a woman, both fiftyish:
Man: Hon?
Woman: Mmmm?
Man: They got a book here about the iPod. [O’Reilly’s The Missing Manual
Woman: Really?
Man: Let’s get it and read it and then we can decide if we’ll get one.
Woman: Okay
[ Exeunt, pursued by a bear. ]
The Democratic Diva writes about a recent talk by ASU prez Michael Crow. One passage:
He clicked on a graph of state funding of ASU per student since 1990. Back then the state contributed roughly $11K per student. Today it’s around $5K.
Sounds like it’s time to introduce a bill to put the Ten Commandments on the state capitol.
The Arizona Cardinals’ Kurt Warner holds a press conference conference tomorrow. Most papers quote his agent saying that Warner will announce “whether” he will retire; this Chicago Tribune report says he will.
Warner, 38, is expected to retire after 12 seasons, including the past five with the Cardinals. A friend who talked with Warner after the Cardinals lost to the New Orleans Saints in the playoffs said “it sounded like he was done.”
2:25 PM
Arizona: C- in education
A report by the group that publishes Education Week magazine has rated the 50 states and Washington D.C. on education. Arizona comes in 46th—and dropped three places since the last report.
According to the Republic, however, there is some good news:
The good news is that for the second year in a row, Arizona earned an A- for the quality of its learning goals, tests and accountability. It is 18th in the nation with that grade, although last year it was eighth.
OK, so the good news isn’t really good. The bad news?
The bad news is the state lags in all other categories. In the “chance for success category,” Arizona sank from 42nd in the nation to 45th, although its grade was the same, C-.
7:00 AM
Phoenix murders drop by nearly half in two years
The front page of the Republic this a.m. featured this hed:
Phoenix Shootings leave 3 dead in 1st murders of ’10
The hed is accurate, but it obscures the real news in the story, which is that police expect to report that there were 130 murders in the city last year—down from 222 in 2007.
According to crime stats here, the city’s murder rate isn’t trending up or down overall. Rather, oddly, it bounces:
216 in 1999, 247 in 2003 and 234 in 2006 …
… but 152 in 2000, 183 in 2002, and 168 in 2008.
Still, given the rise in the area’s population, the drops over the last two years are solid improvements. (For 2009, the rate per 100,000 people will have dropped by half from the prevailing rate at the turn of the last decade.)
7:00 AM
Phoenix: Not a bang-for-your-buck kinda city, according to Forbes
Both Forbes and Fortune are nuts about lists; it’s the biz-mag-porn version of those “32 ways to please your man” stories in Cosmo. The latest from Forbes is “Best Bang-for-Your-Buck Cities.”
The idea is to track issues like unemployment, home affordability, commute times, and taxes. Tucson comes in at number 62 on the list, Phoenix at 82. The top five are Omaha, Little Rock, Jackson, Des Moines, and Augusta, which shows you the sort of trade-offs involved when you’re obsessed with bucks-related bangs.
The most telling statistic is real-estate taxes. Phoenicians whine constantly about them; according to Forbes, the city ranks 24th in that category. (That is, they are the 24th lowest in the country.)
There isn’t another top-ten city in the top fifty—a potent sign that property owners here are getting a pretty easy ride, taxwise.
7:00 AM
Can Phoenix make a "Creative Class" appeal?
Two local activists co-wrote an op-ed piece in the Republic on Sunday about one aspect of what Phoenix needs to do to move into the 21st century. That aspect is generally referred to as the Creative Class theory, though the authors don’t use the term.
A Canadian professor named Richard Florida in a series of books on the subject analyzes the relationship between economic development (particularly in high technology) and socioeconomic factors like education levels, social tolerance (particularly toward gays), and cultural accouterments.
The idea has been percolating around for nearly a decade and is a staple of discussions about modern city planning. (PHXated was on a panel at Phoenix Design Week recently that discussed how it related to Phoenix.)
In their essay, for example, Myra H. Millinger and Steve Betts cite this statistic:
In a Forbes survey of approximately 1,000 corporate executives, a strong and vibrant creative community was among the top-five determinants of location decisions for 74 percent of respondents. Only 24 percent ranked metro Phoenix as having that cultural vibrancy.
Even if the executives might have been overstating the issue’s importance, the fact that they felt compelled to do so is an indication of the analysis’s influence these days. The pair’s punch line, emphasized by me, is correspondingly devastating for the fifth-largest city in the country.
And remember that, in Creative Class terms, we’re not concerned about all corporate execs; we’re talking about a highly specialized (and desirable) slice of them: The ones at modern technology- and knowledge-related companies cities like Phoenix are now competing to attract. And you can bet the numbers for that slice would be much worse for Phoenix.
Anyway, most sane people will agree with what the pair say. I found two interesting things in their piece.
The first is they felt compelled to mince their words, and that’s not going to help anyone going forward. Here’s what they have to say about Arizona’s reputation:
This is of concern to every sector here competing for talent and industry. Add to this the recent unflattering images of Arizona transmitted virally across the globe, the misperceptions of who we are, and a lack of awareness of what makes us unique, and our world positioning will continue to falter.
Phoenix’s trouble is not about “misperceptions.” It’s about correct perceptions. This is the home of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a national poster boy for hostility to immigrants and arguably the most potent symbol of brutal police power in the U.S. since the Civil Rights Era. The Mormon church, one of the most powerful organizations in the state, has put itself in the forefront of the anti-gay marriage campaigns here and nationally, notably in California’s bitter Prop. 8 battle last year—right under the noses of the nation’s high-tech industries.
In other words, on a good day by most Creative Class measures, Arizona would come in right above the Deep South; those two additional issues put the state near the bottom nationally for such an appeal.
So let’s be honest. Arizona doesn’t have to overcome misperceptions; it has to overcome reality.
Now, the second interesting thing about the essay is that the writers tacitly understand these problems. In response, their idea is to stress what they call an oasis:
This effort, under the umbrella of the Metro Phoenix DNA Initiative, has identified a compelling focus and distinctive themes that define this region’s strengths as the “Opportunity Oasis”—a place where meritocracy reigns and where open-space thinking, urban pioneering and a lush desert oasis present to the world a profile that is at once distinctive and of enormous appeal.
That’s a good description of what downtown might be like in a few years; intellectually, however, the small but vibrant Creative Class Phoenix does boast now will have to reconcile an oasis like that with the tragedy and intolerance around it.
It’s not impossible; Atlanta, for example, has managed to position itself as the capital of the south and correspondingly created an oasis for enlightened whites, blacks, gays and creative people. Even so, it’s not really a Creative Class mecca nor a particular high-tech destination.
I haven’t thought this out, but I’m intrigued by a variant of this, which I call the Enclave Gambit.
Can Phoenix create a city-within-a-city—corporeally set downtown, but with symbolic residents throughout the area—that tries to live, and create, and interact amongst themselves, set apart from a lot of the hate talk, intolerance, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism and backwardness that otherwise characterizes most of the state?
Now, it’s a tough sell in Creative Class terms: “Trent Frank, John Kyl and John Shadegg hardly ever go downtown” isn’t something to base an economic development plan on.
But: One thing Phoenix doesn’t have as yet is a focused community dedicated to change—and for now, the Enclave Gambit might be the best way to form one.
p.s.: You can download the Metro Phoenix DNA Initiative here.
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