If I have shattered you illusions about Arizona, I'm sorry. Arizona is a fine place, but it is not perfect and Hooterville is not Scottsdale or Sedona. Hooterville is a metropolitan area of 195 square miles in size. That's the size of Manhattan and Queens, more or less. Our population is just over one million, making us the 52nd metro area in the country. I have no objective data to confirm this, but I suspect that we are the poorest city with a population of over one million. Hooterville is only 60 miles north of the Mexican border and in many parts of our city, it is indistinguishable from Mexico. In a large swath of our city I'm guessing that English is the second language. That's important because recent immigrants tend to work lower service jobs. To illustrate my point about the disparities in the city, consider income by zip code. In my zip code 85711, the average income as reported to the Internal Revenue Service for 2006 was exactly in the 50th percentile for the United States. In the four zip codes that cover our northern foothills, the incomes ranged for the 95th to the 98th percentiles nationally. On the south side in the 4 predominant zip codes, the percentiles ranged from the 2nd to the 14th. This huge disparity causes all sorts of problems. Also, like many places the city has grown outward, chiefly eastward and northwesterly. The affluent and the middle class have gone those ways, leaving many parts of the core of the city to the lower middle classes and the poor. Our northern foothills are home to the city's elite and wealthy, as is the far east side. The adjoining towns of Marana and Oro Valley on our north are both over 90% anglo in the poplulation makeup. they are poster children for the concept of whiter flight. In general, if you have a south address, you live in an less desirable area than if you have a north address. The farther south you go the worse the neighborhoods get. There is also so really rough neighborhoods in the near northeast address, north of the old downtown. that's not uniformly true, but mostly true. There are pockets of affluence in the core of the city, especially around the University of Arizona. One of the big drivers of poverty and its associated social problems is that we are a service economy. Unless you work for the government, or a government-related industry, you likely work in service or construction. Right now things suck for non-governmental workers. So, while Hooterville is a great place to live for many of us, it is a huge struggle for many more. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky