What are these "master-planned communities" I keep reading about? 

       One is coming to the desert northwest of Oracle. It will cram 8,516 homes and perhaps 50,000 people into rural Arizona. No doubt, strip malls will follow. Doesn't sound like much of a master plan, except to make a few land speculators rich. Doesn't sound much like community, either, if we look at the mounting evidence of how sprawl breeds social ills. 

       Arizona's land-use policies encourage fun with words. "Highest and best use," "Growing Smarter," "campus setting" -- add ironic quotation marks and reality starts to emerge. 

       Reality is that Arizona is intent on developing everything but an environmental ethic. 
We're not alone. Vast swaths of irreplaceable Eastern farmland have been paved over the past 10 years. In green Colorado, the Legislature just choked on a growth-control measure. 

       But it's hard to find a state where the balance of power is so far skewed to the purveyors of mass-production leapfrog sprawl. 

       Just ask Scottsdale. An effort to preserve 16,600 acres of Sonoran desert must be adjudicated by the state land commissioner, with the decision in doubt. This while perfectly viable parts of south Scottsdale languish far below their highest and best use. 
Ask Glendale, which was forced to use the ballot box to stop a huge Wal-Mart, and that outcome is also uncertain. Even the use of zoning seems to elude Arizona's weak public sector. 

       Or ask the residents of Oracle, who oppose this latest development. Their voices apparently count for nothing. 

       What about property rights? Or should we make it "property rights"? Well, I don't have a right to put a toxic dump in my backyard. Nor does the state owe me a profit from speculating in stocks. 

       Any "right" pushed to extremes, and denuded of accompanying responsibility, damages democracy. But we also suffer in hard, practical ways. 

       Arizona's experience proves every day that growth from land speculation doesn't pay for itself. Now, in addition to the unfunded costs of infrastructure and education, we must contemplate the costs of energy and the expanding heat island. 

       A Ponzi-scheme economy, based on selling the next house to the next chump from the Midwest, is badly out of place in a world where wealth increasingly depends on ideas, innovation and quality of life. 

       Restoring some balance will require structural change. For example, Scottsdale's preservation effort has run aground on state trust lands, whose sale was intended to fund education. This is an artifact of frontier days, of a mining and ranching economy. It is a curiosity considering how poorly education is actually funded. 

       Drive around amid the tract homes, strip malls and clogged traffic. Do we really want this for the 12.8 percent of Arizona in trust lands? 

       Reform might require a new state Constitution. But, as land speculator Thomas Jefferson said, "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing."