(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 526: American Oasis

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 US 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.

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Listen to this show first at Streetsblog USA.  Episode list can be found at our archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Kyle Paoletta Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Jeff Wood: Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

I’ve written for a number of places I think most frequently, like Harper’s Magazine, the Nation, the New Republic, Columbia Journalism Review. And then just this year I published my first book, which is called American Oasis, finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest. And what’s your relationship with the Southwest?

So I was born in New Mexico and grew up mostly in Albuquerque, and that’s, where I’m from. And my grandmother was born in Albuquerque in the 1930s. So of relatively deep family history for the region, at least for, being in Anglo from the region. And I moved to Boston for college and then lived in Boston and New York basically from then until recently moving to California, I.

And I don’t know, when you grow up in the southwest and you go back east, you just are immediately confronted with like how little anyone knows about the place you’re from. Certainly being from Albuquerque rather than Santa Fe, where maybe people would, know about George O’Keeffe or have some kind of affinity for turquoise jewelry

So I think I, I always had this real sense of the region being poorly understood and certainly its cities being really overlooked that if people have been to the Southwest it’s usually, to go to the one, the national parks to go hiking. And obviously the landscape’s spectacular. So I don’t blame anyone for being interested in it.

But having grown up in a big city there, you’re just like, most people are. City dwellers, like it’s the most urbanized region in the country. I think Nevada especially is like 90, 95%. Everyone lives in either Las Vegas or Reno, Arizona. Similarly, basically the entire population is in Metro Phoenix or Metro Tucson.

Yeah, I think just as someone who loves cities and gravitated towards those big destinations on the east Coast. Partially because of that. I always had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about like the cities of the Southwest. And then, yeah, in my work as a journalist, I, got interested in a lot of issues around water.

He these kind of very present. All consuming issues in the Southwest. And that kind of became a way into this book where it started out with like different journalism projects and magazine pieces before figuring out how to make a book out of it. But I really found this, what I think is a nice way of bringing the five biggest cities of the region.

So Albuquerque, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tucson, and El Paso. Putting them into conversation with each other, talking about, that shared history of indigenous settlement of Spanish colonization and then of the region being integrated into the US after the Mexican American war in 1848. And going through the history, but then projecting it forward and saying like, how did these cities get here?

And now that they are here and these places where people are. Adapted to living in, 120 degree temperatures living with much less water than is available in the rest of the country. What are the lessons that they can teach people in cities everywhere?

And I think for a lot of folks it’s breaking bad and for me it’s Tony Hillerman novels that my used to read and stuff like that. But I’m wondering how, like, how that affects folks locally. You said you had a chip on your shoulder, but like locally, how do people feel like they’re seen from the rest of the United States?

There’s still, there’s a famous candy shop in Old Town that sells like blue meth candy To this day. There’s if there’s a place where they filmed, like they’ll have a sign outside. So I think there was a lot of local pride around getting that national recognition. But it does come out of that sense of being kinda overlooked too.

And honestly, I think that ties into the history of, the early 20th century and getting into kind of the post-war era where you have the boosters in all of these cities, having this idea of how do we attract investment, how do we attract people to move here, tourism dollars, et cetera.

And obviously Phoenix is the apotheosis of this idea of figuring out like, oh, how do we assert ourselves and force our way into the national conversation. But even as big as Phoenix is, like I’ve had plenty of people who, I’m talking to and I mentioned that Phoenix is a bigger city than Philadelphia and they just like, that blows their mind.

So I think even as. Big and important in American life and culture as certainly Phoenix and Las Vegas are now. Even then, I think a lot of the country just doesn’t really think about them. Either that or they think they

Tell the autumn or the kind of descendants of those peoples that no one should live in the Sonoran Desert.

Like even that was not something we were taught in school and kind of blew my mind to learn about. But I think that sort of thinking about all of the cities together is just the ways in which both, like their existence is quite natural. But also their size required a lot of like effort. Phoenix didn’t become the fifth largest city in the country by accident, but also anywhere where there is a river in the desert you can live.

So the fact that these cities are all on rivers by the mountains in these kind of natural crossing over places where, there’s a reason. There were dozens of pueblos where Albuquerque is now, before any of the conquistadors got there. It’s just like a natural place to live and to grow crops. And that fact that these are these sort of were destined to exist.

But then only in the American era was that destiny I don’t wanna say fulfilled ’cause it’s more like their existence wasn’t enough. They had to be more, be bigger, be all consuming and just learning. Especially in Phoenix that there was just this whole class of early boosters who are, familiar names, the Goldwater family, Dell Webb, who is, one of the largest home builders today is still the Dell Webb companies.

Charles Hayden named for the Hayden Act. There like all these kind of familiar people who all at a time when Phoenix was, an agricultural city of 10, 20, 30,000 people had this vision of it becoming what it became and actually accomplished that. And so that to me feels like a really, a uniquely southwestern thing.

That sense of we are in this vast place with so much space and we’re gonna fill it. And I think that’s maybe a part of southwestern culture that is not, certainly not sustainable, maybe not something I would prescribe to places elsewhere, but that kind of almost Messianic quality of city building.

I think that was not something that I had an appreciation for before I really dug into the history.

The kind of older cities, the ones that were Spanish settlements, where you’re right, they were really co-opted and transformed into American cities when they had been Mexican cities and before that Spanish colonies. But I think Phoenix and Las Vegas, part of why they are bigger or they grew much faster, all of these cities were about the same size during World War ii.

They were all like around a hundred thousand people. And then, Phoenix Explodes and Las Vegas in more recent decades has surpassed Albuquerque, Tucson, et cetera. And like the fact that there wasn’t a Spanish speaking population in place there, I think helps explain why they were the quote unquote winners of that regional rivalry, that it was easier there to just biggify and not worry about the co-option.

Although there were many times that they were pushed out, Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde being two of those examples. But I’m fascinated by that too. The pre conquistador era.

I think people lived in them about a hundred years. They weren’t super long tenured, but then the climate changed and they left and mostly went to the Rio Grande. And I think for a long time there was this sort of idea of oh, these vanish civilizations, so what happened to the Chaco Canyon people in the Salt River Valley?

What happened to the Hoho Calm Society that left behind these canals that when Anglos came, they were able to just start farming using those old canals. And really, it’s not that the people vanished, it’s just that they recognized their world had changed and adapted, and part of that adaptation was moving or finding a place that was more favorable.

And even the kind of more settled society and talking about the pueblos in New Mexico that have survived to this day. Most of them are not like American cities where you know, oh, this river is our reason for being here. We’re gonna build right up to the river bank. If you go to most Pueblos, they’re at least a mile, if not further removed from the water source.

And they have their farms by the water source. But why would you build with mud bricks next to a river that’s gonna flood every couple years? There’s just some kind of common sense things that were recognitions of. The ways in which the natural world can be unpredictable, can be hostile, and just like more innately adapting to it.

And I think that is something all of us need to be doing with our cities

I’d watch out for potential flooding, I’d watch out for where earthquakes might be or where there might be some silty soil or things like that. It’s you have to think about these things. But people came and just sued previous knowledge and decided this is where we’re gonna be, so we’re gonna set up shop.

And there is something to be said about that kind of lack of permanence and the failures of the settlements of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde where, they learn something from those they look cool and they are very interesting to us looking back at history. But there’s a deep lesson about being able to adapt and, manage retreat as we talk about today in our climate discourse.

And so yeah, going to the river and building out of mud instead of building out of rock, it’s a lot quicker. It maybe doesn’t last as long, but hey, you can always make more Adobe blocks. So yeah, I think that’s a great takeaway.

And I find that fascinating too, is the language of people who are living in this areas and like the Chicanos, the Anglos, the Mexicans, everybody else. And then also, when you’re talking about border crossings and stuff like that, there’s obviously a discussion about central American countries too.

So yeah, the different ways people describe each other or the languages that they use, I think that’s a part of the story too.

It can be confusing outside the region where I think a lot of people in the Southwest who are white identify as Anglo because there’s also a lot of Hispanic people who are white because they identify with the Spanish lineage rather than necessarily the like Misti, so tradition of Mexico or Central America.

So it’s even in that simple way, just whiteness is really fraught in the region. And one of the kind of historical things that I learned while researching that blew me away was that. Basically after the Mexican American War, New Mexico had a sufficient population to be a state, so it could have been a state in 1848.

But the reason it wasn’t was because almost everyone who lived there was either Indian or Mexican. And so in a country when at that time, all of the laws were based on, are you white or are you black? And if you’re Indian, then you’re not a citizen, so we don’t worry about you. Just the fact that 90% of the population was.

Spanish speaking, they just didn’t know what to do with them. And so you have decades of New Mexico trying to become a state. And it doesn’t happen until 1912. So we’re talking about 60 years where over that course, you know, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, all of these states that were basically white settlers moving into places where, the Plains Indians had lived.

But like the kind of existing population, that’s how hard it was for America to integrate it. And during that time, you have a lot of Spanish speaking peoples who previously identified as Mexican, now identifying as Spanish or Spanish American. And you have this real idea of. I think I have a quote from someone who was writing in a paper, like during those campaigns of the Blood of Cortez and all of these smash runs in my veins.

And it was this way of claiming whiteness and saying yeah, maybe I like look darker. ’cause maybe at some point someone in my family married an Indian, but really I’m Spanish, I’m not Mexican. Those battles continue today that, there’s plenty of people I know in New Mexico who can still tell you that they’re, I.

Families came over in 1598 with one Day Onte and they settled in Northern New Mexico. And that’s still how they identify their family. Even though we’re talking this centuries ago. It’s like people in New England talking about, oh, my family came over on the Mayflower. It’s a very similar dynamic.

Is that you, there’s

So if you see people on public comments all the time, they’re like I’ve lived in the city since, blah, blah, blah. And it’s the same with Austin and other places I’ve lived too. And the Austinites, the famous thing about Austin is like the city is the best it ever was the day you arrived. And it’ll never be a better ever again.

And if you’re a local or if you’ve lived there a long time, that’s how you plant your flag. And I think that’s really fascinating as well. And as somebody who’s, who had people who lived in California since before the gold rush or drove wagon trains or whatever I like this history, but also it’s, there’s a little bit of weirdness to it as well.

So that was a way of me claiming my authenticity in New

That’s before they were a state, I believe. I think Arizona was after New Mexico.

And I was interested in the discussions that you had with Ophelia about all the language and the preservation that happened from people that were there before, before the conquistadors came. And so that’s another part of it that’s really fascinating too, is not just the language of who’s what and where you’re from and all those things, but the language itself and how people talk and history that’s embedded in the place where people lived for so long.

And so yeah, she had grown up speaking at home and then, she was an amazing student. Ended up going to the University of Arizona in Tucson and bachelor’s, master’s, PhD and worked with, there was like a visiting linguist from MIT who had grown up there and came back and pushed her to be like, oh no, if you speak autumn fluently and this is a language that needs preservation.

And she ended up, really devoting much of her life and career to that. And to this day, her work is how that language is taught on the Autumn reservation. And there’s a school in Tucson that teaches Atum. So that, I think those stories are amazing because. Many Native Americans will talk about that sense that people have of, oh, these are like people of the past or something, and that need to really assert we’re still here, we’re still present, we’re still part of America and our cultures are vibrant and thriving and language is such a part of that.

Yeah, I spent a decent amount of time reporting on the Navajo Nation, and that’s a place where. Almost everyone speaks Dene. All of the kind of like public meetings or public forums are, everyone certainly introduces themself in Dene. And if you don’t speak it, which I don’t, then you will spend a lot of time kind of sitting patiently because it’s oh yeah, this is the language of this place.

And if you’re a visitor, you need to kind be respectful of it and adapt to it. And that’s something I really treasure about the Southwest is the real strength of those communities and the perseverance, and that there are people like Ophelia who have made that possible through their work.

But when you’re watching people, there’s a delicate like dance that’s played as well of people and how they interact with each other through their hands or through the way that they’re holding themselves and things like that. So I think that’s fascinating too.

And there’s certainly people out there who have a sense of revulsion anytime they’re like in the supermarket and they hear a language they don’t recognize or understand. But to me, I think it’s something we should celebrate. And I learned so much from those experiences personally.

The cities that grew up in the Southwest, what’s really fascinating to me a little bit is the marketing that happened and the growth from the folks, selling it to a certain extent, which, 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?

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 oh, 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 in the state of Arizona.

So it’s like a state run journal. And it had started out basically as like a circular for people who worked in highway construction. But what happened is this guy, Raymond Carlson, who he had gone to Stanford, he was, very bright, 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 thirties 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 travel log, like a reading National Geographic or the Smithsonian Magazine.

The 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? Aren’t you cold right now? 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, like 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 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. That drove the architecture too, right? 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 sixties, 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 clabbered, 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 just that, but also have a warm winter. And like that kind of idea of importing a lifestyle was really popular.

But it’s 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 seventies, eighties and are now retiring and are like, why are you telling me to rip out my lawn?

That there was this kind of on off cycle for the first couple of decades of the disease 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 Hofer 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 20th 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 to the Colorado, I think it was completed in the early nineties, 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 this part. California way overuse 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.

And anybody, with anybody who’s paying attention to what’s happening in climate change and the amount of water that Phoenix is getting, you’d say, oh, yeah, you should be restricting, what can get billed if there’s no water available in 2100? Yeah. But they’re still pushing back on that. I was heartened though by what was happening in Las Vegas and how much water they actually are recycling and turning back to Lake Mead.

And just yesterday I saw an announcement that El Paso was gonna build the first of its kind water recycling plant to be opened in 2028, for Las Vegas. They recycle the water and then put it back in Lake Mead and then it goes into the circulation. But El Pasos, they’re just gonna turn out the water and that’s gonna go back into the drinking water system directly.

And so that’s a first that might get followed by Phoenix as well. I was interested in that too, is some of the technological advances that in a place like Las Vegas are ultimately necessary and they made some huge compromises to get there. But what would happen if you took those lessons that they learned and brought it to other cities around the country and they could basically take back 80% of the water that they used and use it over and over again?

I was really excited to see that announcement from El Paso. I know Phoenix has been working on its own plan. That’s still in the early stages. Los Angeles is spending like $8 billion on water recycling here in San Diego. I think they’re spending like $3 billion on a plan to do that, and to me, that’s what the future is in this region.

It’s not building, desalination plants. It’s not building an aqueduct to the Mississippi, which is like a real thing that Carrie campaigned for the Senate on. Didn’t somebody like, was it Mark Kelly was in your book, he was talking about the Gulf of Cortez. Gulf of Cortez, okay. Yeah.

Building a desalination plant down there and then running an aqueduct up to Phoenix. Yeah. All of those ideas would cost. Tens of billions of dollars. I if you’re talking about these aqueducts, it’s more like hundreds of billions of dollars and you can build a water recycling system that just reuses wastewater for.

I don’t know, even if it’s $10 billion, the amount of water savings is so disproportionate that I’m pretty hopeful that, the market dynamics are just so clear that it’s yeah, you invest in recycling that’s where the future is.

No more green lawns. They escaping all that stuff. But it also points to this idea that sprawl is inevitable. And that’s what’s happening in Las Vegas and in Phoenix. But that’s the least efficient way to develop a region where you’re scarce of water, is to build single family homes.

And especially now that we’re talking about AI and all this development of these data centers and stuff like that, that are huge, water sucks too. That’s another wrinkle in the story that’s, getting worse.

Yeah. It seems crazy to me to be locating that where they are. But there is this kind of notion of, in a place that has so much space, you just inevitably keep growing out into it. And I do think there are pretty, I. Vibrant movements in all these cities to combat that and to try to push for a different land use policies, push for more densification, push for better public transit.

In Albuquerque there’s actually been a lot of really exciting things happening in the past couple years where. They invested in a separated busway on Central Avenue, which is the main drag through town that connects downtown to the university. And when I was just there, I hadn’t been back in a couple years and even in those like two or three years, there are so many more apartment buildings being built along that bus way, which, it’s just really exciting for me to see as someone who’s from there and definitely would prefer a dense city that you can walk around.

It’s much more possible to live there now without a car than it ever was when I was in high school. And Tucson has a really great light rail system as well that they’re gonna be expanding to the airport and similarly have been building around it. I think the challenge is that there’s often a big disjunction between what the people in the city want and what the state wants.

So in Arizona, I think this is most challenging because recently the governor Hobbs was trying to get a bunch more money for the light rail system in Phoenix, which is currently s somewhat limited. I mean you can get around on it, but for such a huge sprawling city, it’s a very small slice of it that served as she was trying to get more money to basically add a new line and do some expansion and the state legislature wouldn’t give it to her and basically force ’cause the legislature’s controlled by Republicans and they basically force her to.

Put all that money just into highways and it was just like, to me it was a real dispiriting moment of, a real effort that the mayor has been working on for a long time. K Gallego, to invest in public transit, invest in center housing, and then to have the state legislature just say, no, we’re just gonna keep pulling highways.

Those are the things where you’re like, oh have we not learned

You can’t build it by the state capitol. That’s the thing you can’t do the most. Because

There’s a lot of environmental racism with a nearby industrial facility, so the city really wants to get public transit to Maryvale because it will, connect those people with a lot of opportunities and yeah, they say legislators like, oh, we don’t want to see trains near the capitol building, so we’re just gonna shut this down.

It’s just so shortsighted.

People aren’t moving as much for jobs and for opportunity, but that feels like a story about East west mobility. But what about north South mobility, right? It feels like there’s a disconnect between the discussion about people trying to get a better life by moving from one side of the country to the other, versus people moving from the south into the United States.

And this is a big part of your book, is like the discussion about the early sanctuary movement, the migration of people who are looking for sanctuary from, wars that we helped start, or wars that we were perpetuating in Central America and things like that. And so I found that a really interesting part, and that’s what I thought about when I was reading it too, is like we allow for east West migration fairly easily, but we don’t allow for North South necessarily.

Migrants and refugees who are coming to this country seeking often safety from war, but also economic opportunity, that it’s such a small fraction of the number of Americans who just move from what I recently did from Massachusetts to California every year, that if we thought about them as people in transit, like how different would our level of camp passion be?

Rather than thinking of them as like alien foreign invaders, but just being like. They’re all people who are coming here for their own reasons and often moving for the same reasons that native born Americans are. They’re moving to be with family for a job, or to get an education. Like these are all completely unobjectionable things if you’re born in this country to move somewhere else.

Trying to prioritize those things. But yeah, you’re so right. We have this, to me, very artificial idea that the southern border needs to be a wall that you can’t cross through. And as I hope my book makes clear, this border could not be more artificial. And not only was this whole swath of the country, Mexico before it was Amer, before the United States, but all of these cities exist in ecosystems that don’t really know any political boundary.

So if you’re talking about the Chihuahua Desert where I grew up, it goes from Albuquerque all the way into the middle of Mexico to within about a hundred miles of Mexico City. It includes El Paso, but it also includes Juarez and Sada Chihuahua and so on. And you talk about this Sonoran desert. It includes Tucson and Phoenix, but it also includes Sonora in Mexico.

And so there is this just thinking more environmentally or thinking ecologically, these are parts of the world that have intrinsic ties and there’s an intrinsic conversation that will always be happening between them regardless of what the political reality is. And I guess I wish that our political reality recognized that rather than looking at the map and the lines and saying that’s the only thing that matters.

And so it’s all interconnected and it’s frustrating that we can’t have that discussion.

There continues to be, it is still, Mexico is the United States largest and most important trading partner. Regardless of what’s happening with tariffs, like we, our faith are interconnected and intertwined, and we should celebrate that. We should make the best of it. We shouldn’t try and cut those people out.

I found that really interesting too.

So for me, when I’m talking in those terms. Usually it’s not an accident of history. I think all places have, cities are almost like icebergs, right? There’s here’s what above the water and here’s what you don’t see. That is actually what makes everything above the water possible. Las Vegas, I think is probably the most obvious example where, I don’t know, I’m guessing 90% of the people who visit Las Vegas don’t go anywhere aside from the Strip or maybe Glitter Gulch downtown, and we’re talking about a city of 2 million people that, not everyone works in tourism or entertainment, but.

All of those people make the fantasy possible. And so yeah, in the chapters about Las Vegas, I tell the story of, the mob setting up the first casinos and how they went from being these, syndicate backed operations to publicly traded companies. But I also tell the story of the West side, the historically African American part of the city, and the really inspiring civil rights history there.

I talk a little bit about Chinatown and Las Vegas, which if you want a good meal in Las Vegas, do not eat in a casino, go to Chinatown. There’s like some of the most amazing restaurants in the country are there, talking about North Las Vegas, which has always been very Mexican American. That all of that kind of makes the place possible.

But what makes Las Vegas real unique is that working class people, there are some of the most organized of anywhere in the country, and it’s mostly the SEIU, the Service employees Union, where they, over the course of decades have fought really hard to say there is no Mandalay Bay, there is no Caesars Palace without us, without the people taking your drink, the people working at the craft table, whatever.

I think they proudly say Las Vegas is one of the only seas in the country where you can buy a house if you’re a waiter and you know that is a mark of collective organizing and the part of the iceberg under the water, you don’t see really forcefully saying you’re not gonna pay attention to us, but we’re here and you need us.

As far as when I wish people would ask, I have been surprised that there’s a reluctance to engage with what’s been happening politically in the past couple months, and certainly with the Trump administration coming in and what it means for these cities specifically where. I feel like there’s just like a really interesting dynamic at play where part of what got Trump elected, again was voters in Arizona and Nevada and very much multicultural working class voters shifting towards him and something I’ve been thinking a lot about and thinking about okay, these are cities that.

Are very demographically diverse, but by and large, very divided in terms of income. Some of the more unequal cities in the country, and what does it mean that someone like Trump could find such a purchase among a lot of people who are really struggling and certainly plenty of Mexican American people who are struggling when he has obviously demonized Mexican immigrants at every turn.

It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about. I don’t know that I have a great way to understand it, aside from just the fact that a lot of the kind of latter half of the book is talking about histories of urban renewal, neighborhoods being bulldozed, highway expansion, displacing people. I. Thinking about how does that history of government being a part of ruining someone’s life or ruining their family’s life, how do you inherit that trauma and how does that leave you when there is a political candidate who says, everyone’s lying to you.

The system is crooked and the books are crooked against you, but I’ll fix it. In some ways, I do understand how people maybe get to a point where they’re very distrustful because the country has really not done right by them. And so this isn’t so much to say oh. That’s an okay way to think about it.

I’m more interested of okay, how do we build a political movement that brings those people back in that says government did bad things in the past because it was prioritizing the wrong things, but now we are prioritizing affordable housing, public transportation, opportunity, free college. What are the ways that you bring those people back and say even though you have every right to be distrustful, like we are fighting for you, we are trying to make this country a better place, or the city or the state.

I don’t know what that looks like yet, but I think that’s what we need as a

And so these are intractable truths that you have to deal with over a long period of time and negotiate and try to figure out, to try to save, what you believe is a city worth saving. And so I find that interesting too from the standpoint of looking at Washington DC and what’s happening there with all of the, the recklessness that’s happening related to climate change regulations and offices that care about this stuff and water policy and whatever else it may be, but.

These are some of the regions that are gonna be most affected by this. The increase in temperatures over time is gonna hit the Southwest really hard. The lack of water is going to create fights. There’s been all discussions over the last 30 years or so about this, Cadillac desert, whatnot.

And so I feel like forgetting that is gonna happen whether wanna wish it away or not, is another kind of aspect of this that I, I feel frustrated by.

And to Climate

Anyone has really reckoned with that of people keep moving to Las Vegas and Phoenix. Those cities keep getting hotter. Perhaps there is a breaking point in the future where that changes, but I’m like, I don’t know. Florida keeps growing no matter how many times a hurricane plows through it. When we think about climate adaptation, people want to offer these kind of simplistic understandings of it, and human behavior is so complicated.

So there’s a lot of question marks on the horizon for the region. And in the book, I think I try to argue like what is the biggest thing we can do to get to a more sustainable place? And I think it’s changing our mentality and changing from that idea of we need to bulldoze the environment.

We need to overpower the environment to, we need to live within it and listen to it and pay attention. It’s hard to know what that actually looks like in practice and that’s certainly something that, as a journalist, I’m going to keep thinking about and writing about because the future feels really uncertain.

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Jeff Wood: Awesome. Kyle, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Kyle Paoletta: Yeah, thanks so much. I love Streets blog and love getting into the urbanism nerd world.