The Beginning of the Beginning

It's 2025, what are we doing here?

If you're here, you're curious about Surprise, Arizona.

You might be a fan of baseball, investigating the vibe of the city you'll be travelling to in the spring.

Yes, this is where your beloved Kansas City Royals or Texas Rangers lob practice balls into traffic on Parkview Place during Spring Training. Where you might catch an impromptu Dominican Rangers scrimmage late on a warm evening.

You can come and stay in Scottsdale, or with your cousin in Glendale for your pilgrimmage. You'll make the easy drive in, and directly back out, of the city to catch a game.

But first, I digress.

There's no nightlife to speak of besides the few sporadic sports bars. No concert venues in the city center, no clubs. There are a few gems for cocktails and hangouts, but they roll up the sidewalks at 9.

The city's home to a large Tennis and Racket complex that hosts national tournaments, a for-profit university with its developing exploitative college sports culture, tax-incentive, and student visa schemes. But there is a baby Xeriscape demonstration garden that aims to encourage native plantings.

There's a Tractor Supply Co, a National RV Centers, and some lower-end car dealerships across the freeway from Prasada, a strip-mall-on-steroids with its attendant sea of parking and local-gem-turned-corporate-sellout restaurants.

There's the Great Grey Wall north of Bell Rd, the bulwark age-gated communities of Sun City West, Sun Village, Sun City Grand, Happy Trails, and Arizona Traditions that split the city in half - complicating traffic and ensuring school bonds never pass.

The city center is empty, fallow due to private land developers from cave creek holding out for decades as they unsuccessfully bid for a master-planned payday - and ending up too old to enjoy it.

Partially due to legacy city planning not evolving to keep up with modern realities, and difficulties with state and federal authorities (Agreements with Luke AFB didn't allow overnight stays in the city center until sometime after 2012.)

Projects that were planned and approved in 2006, with 2006 planning and sensibilities, are just now reaching build-out.

*“The original Prasada master plan was approved in June 2006. However, the Great Recession led to delays and changes to the development plans. The current Village at Prasada, a shopping, dining, and entertainment center within the larger Prasada development, had its groundbreaking ceremony in December 2021. ”*

A modern, walkable, interesting, human-scale place this is not.

Surprise is cursed with having had explosive growth at the very tail-end of the worst period of suburban sprawl Phoenix has experienced. And that's saying a lot. Newer sprawly developments like Verrado and Vistancia experiment with fresher ideas of suburbanism, still flawed but with elements of humanist design that offer relief.

I don't hate it, I promise

I know what you're thinking, this is a lot of negativity. But I hope that in exploring the city, talking to residents and investigating how we got here and what's changing, I - and you, dear reader, can come to a deeper understanding of it. And maybe, we can help it to be better for us and our kids.