ABSTRACT
The achievement of the goals Downs described has carried high costs in the form of growth-related problems such as traffic congestion, air pollution, rising taxes for infrastructure, loss of open space, and separation and segregation of the poverty stricken in inner-city neighborhoods. To some degree, most American metropolitan areas face increasingly tough choices because of these dynamics and the not coincidental stream of twenty-first-century challenges. The many diverse communities within the booming Phoenix region as well as the rapidly expanding region itself represent natural experiments for understanding public capacity to respond to such big-ticket forces as the impact of increased immigration and diversity, scarcity of resources, environmental erosion, and decreasing emphasis on community in exchange for sprawl and individuation.
