Column: Tucson is coming up in the world

September 23, 2016

Carlyn Arteaga, a BICAS employee, left, assists Ernisto Duarte, right, in patching a hole in his inner tube at BICAS on Tuesday, Oct. 27. Operating as a collective nonprofit, the shop allows locals to use community tools and purchase bike parts for low cost as a service to the public.

In a recent Bloomberg article, research by economist Jed Kolko showed that Tucson was ranked third in the list of cities with fastest job growth in the US.

Two cities in Utah, Ogden-Clearfield and Provo-Orem, beat out Tucson with a 0.4 percent higher job growth difference.

The list is composed mostly of small or mid-size cities, the article highlights.

It was estimated that Tucson added 10,400 new jobs in the first three months of the year, as reported by the Daily Wildcat.

That’s a lot of jobs.

What does this rapid growth imply to our city and to our university? What things will change if we manage to grow into a bigger city, with more readily available jobs?

More jobs means more people. This means more people will be attracted to living here, studying here, eating here, performing here, and vacationing here—our population will ultimately grow.

People should wonder though: Is our city equipped to house all these new opportunities?

Most of the growing jobs in Tucson seem to be jobs focused on infrastructure. These jobs are necessary in order for our city to grow and be accessible to the many people now working here.

It seems that most of Tucson is under construction at the moment, but what is our goal? Is our city growing in proportion to our job growth, or are we simply growing in jobs that won’t contribute to the overall growth of our city? Maybe we are on our way to becoming the largest city in Arizona.

Sorry, Phoenix.

One visually important thing that Phoenix has and that Tucson doesn’t, is the presence of skyscrapers. Skyscrapers, although not a requirement of a big city, are tall-tell signs that a city is well-developed, modern, and innovative.

Skyscrapers are built when there is no longer room to build sprawling complexes to house buisnesses, organizations or people. Instead of building new offices far away, skyscrapers allow people to still be near to the heart of the city.

Could our rapid job growth, and the massive space that Tucson covers, mean that we will soon be adding higher, taller, buildings to our skyline?

We have some tall buildings already, including the recently constructed Sol and Luna apartment buildings, that are considered some of the tallest in Tucson.

I guess you could say skyscrapers are few and far between in Tucson. Our skyscrapers are really small, too.

Actually, other than the One South Church building and the Bank Of America Plaza downtown, there are few buildings that would even be considered tall enough to be called skyscrapers.

Sure, they’re tall in comparison to the rest of the buildings in Tucson, but they certainly aren’t scraping the sky.

Why, you may ask yourself, am I rambling on about skyscrapers? Because, for me, it’s extremely interesting to think about the possibility of skyscrapers in Tucson.

We currently, luckily, have a lot of unused space to build on, but eventually we’re going to run out of it.

People are attracted to Tucson’s views and the feeling of a mid-sized city.

But if we want more jobs to be available, eventually we will have to realize that we’re running out of space on the ground and start building up.

Tucson will be forced to become a more metropolitan and nationally recognized city whether we like it or not.

With growth comes great responsibility and the possibiltiy of great change.

Yes, you should be excited about Tucson’s growth, but also be prepared for the exciting new changes to come in terms of how we view Tucson.

Follow Julian Cardenas on Twitter.