Some Parts of Arizona
Resemble the Wild West

TUCSON, Ariz. -- Marla Eby made her home on the range here 25 years ago, drawn by the very symbols that define the Old West -- open spaces, quiet starlit nights and sunsets that could bring tears to a cowboy.

But her dream was swept away by a sea of scruffy dwellings that now surround her sky-blue mobile home.

There are more than 500 homes concentrated here, along Taylor Lane, on the outskirts of Tucson. But there are no sidewalks and no paved roads -- only wide dirt trails marked by crude handmade signs. No speed limits are posted, so trucks blow past children waiting for school buses, making plumes of dust that hide the rising sun.

The Taylor Lane area is one of Arizona's most problem-plagued "wildcat" subdivisions -- sprawling tracts of land divided by a succession of owners in a way that leaves them exempt from basic county building requirements, such as putting in roads, sewers and sidewalks. States around the country, including North Carolina, Wisconsin and Louisiana, have similar residential outcroppings. But the problem has spread like a cancer through Arizona, largely because of the tremendous demand for land here, and state law that prevents county officials from clamping down on wildcat growth.

Six miles southwest of Tucson, the Taylor Lane neighborhood is a scrappy 640-acre expanse. Most of the lots are crowded along the main road, some with chickens and horses milling about and others with trash burning in open barrels. In places, junked autos rest like prized sculptures in yards, typically accented with small cacti and patches of brown grass.

As residents of an unincorporated part of Pima county, Taylor Lane homeowners pay property taxes at the standard rate. They lack roads and sewers but receive minimal county services, such as health care and law enforcement, and can send their children to nearby public schools. Even then, sheriff's deputies and ambulance crews struggle to find addresses on unmarked roads. Frank Peres, the fire chief from the nearby Three Points fire district, says his trucks typically must slow to five miles an hour as they lurch through washboardlike ruts on their way to blazing houses.

Wildcat areas are a symptom of the most vexing challenge facing the West: explosive population growth. Arizona expanded by 40% in the last decade, according to the 2000 census, making it the second-fastest-growing state in the nation, behind only Nevada. Southern Arizona leads the nation in sunny days, and its mild winters and desert vistas are a consistent draw. Cheap land, close to jobs in the city but far away enough to be called rural, makes the wildcat areas a tantalizing prospect for many.

Pima, the state's largest urban county, has been adding an average of about 17,000 new residents yearly since 1970, and topped 20,000 last year. County officials here say that continuing to house arrivals at that rate would require 70 additional square miles of development over the next 20 years -- a crushing footprint on a fragile desert ecosystem. The Tucson region already draws twice as much water from its ground aquifers as nature replenishes and relies on daily rations from the Colorado River, 360 miles away.

For Mrs. Eby, the crowding of Taylor Lane has meant traffic, noise and, above all, the road dust that hangs continually in the air. It leaves a thin coating on her furniture if she leaves her windows open. "I have watched this place deteriorate," she says.

In Pima County, an area the size of Vermont, four out of 10 new homes in 1999 were built on wildcat lots. The same scattershot communities haunt Pinal County to the north, Yuma to the west and Santa Cruz to the south. The result is a crazy quilt of dusty, mostly shabby neighborhoods amid well-maintained, conventionally developed subdivisions.

But this isn't a typical tale of suburban sprawl, with big builders squaring off against environmental groups. Wildcat areas, for the most part, reflect haphazard development without large developers.

The spread of these areas, and the government's failure to respond, reflect an ideological debate as old as the West. At its core, the issue pits the freedom of landowners against the duties and authority of government. At stake, say wildcat advocates, is nothing less than a person's right to buy a plot of land and settle it, a ritual once encouraged by the government, on this very ground, under the Homestead Act of 1862.

Fueling the repeated splitting and selling off of unincorporated lots are real-estate brokers, who profit from the deals. They also provide vocal, well-funded opposition to any proposed wildcat regulation.

Even among wildcat residents, opinions have polarized on the issue. Some have surprisingly little sympathy for unhappy land owners such as Mrs. Eby. They argue that people shouldn't move to wildcat terrain if they can't accept the inevitable hardships of living in a largely ungoverned rural area.

" 'Every form of refuge has its price' -- that's from the Eagles," says Russell "Rusty" Bowers, a painter and sculptor who is also a state senator. Some wildcat areas, including the one near Phoenix where Mr. Bowers lives in a two-story adobe-style house, have asphalt roads and a more middle-class feel. "I have no more moral authority than the man in the moon to complain to the county about the dust," says the Republican legislator. He lived on a dirt road for 20 years, until a neighbor recently paid to pave it. "OK, no road signs. Why is it a problem?" Mr. Bowers adds. "Some people choose to live there."

Mr. Bowers and his allies vehemently object to the commonly used term "wildcat" as a pejorative allusion to wildcat strikers or oil speculators. They prefer "lot-split" neighborhood.

Arizona law, like that of many states, allows a landowner to divide a rural lot and sell the pieces, without meeting local requirements for sidewalks, roads and other improvements. Such laws allow an individual to split and sell land to relatives or friends without following costly and time-consuming regulations.

In most states, though, county officials have some legal authority to control the land-splitting process. Arizona state law specifically denies this authority to county officials. As a result, splitting of lots in unincorporated areas outside of Tucson and Phoenix has accelerated without meaningful oversight.

Officials in Pima and other counties have tried to work around this obstacle, in hopes of curbing lot-splitting, but generally they have been blocked by the state legislature. In 1994, the legislature did give counties authority to review proposed lot-splits before they were executed -- but not to do anything about them. And at the same time, the legislature increased the number of splits allowed in a single transaction to five, from three, making it even easier for more people to crowd into wildcat areas more quickly.

State Treasurer Carol Springer, a former state senator who helped push this legislation, says lawmakers were simply promoting the Arizona dream: "You can buy a couple of acres out here and live your life." She acknowledges that on a grittier political level, real-estate brokers lobbied the legislature and gave campaign contributions with the aim of protecting the trade in splitting and selling wildcat lots.

A former broker herself, Ms. Springer prefers to stress the steady popular support for unfettered wildcat development. Her evidence: the 40% of new homes in Pima and other counties that are being built in the unregulated subdivisions.

The state last year enacted a law requiring sellers of wildcat lots to disclose the lack of government services. As long as that happens, buyers have no basis for complaint, says Ms. Springer. Once, during her eight years in the senate, she recalls, a constituent called to carp about an ambulance having trouble finding him in a wildcat area. Ms. Springer's answer was, "Move where you can receive that service quickly."

Many people can't readily pack up and move. Mrs. Eby, who works at a trap-and-skeet range, and her husband, John, a welder, wouldn't want to pull their two kids out of local schools. And land prices elsewhere in the region are soaring.

The average value of a home on an acre of unregulated land in Pima is $14,839, compared with $193,458 in a nearby conventional subdivision with sidewalks and streets. Mrs. Eby says that when she considered buying a wildcat lot in the mid-1970s, no one warned her that so many others could move in, too, and she didn't think to ask.

The Decline of Picture Rocks

When Darrell and Nancy Jo Ayers bought a one-acre lot in the Picture Rocks neighborhood 16 years ago, only a couple of dozen homes sat along the two-mile main drag. The Ayerses settled in a white mobile home with light green trim. "We were young," says Mr. Ayers. "Not a lot of money and looking for an easygoing country lifestyle."

Today, life in Picture Rocks, west of Tucson, is far from easygoing. Almost every one-acre lot has a mobile home planted on it -- hundreds in all. "It's not like it used to be, all calm," says Mr. Ayers, a 46-year-old construction worker. "Kids and gangs run the street all hours of the night now. In the last five years, it just turned into Boom City."

Mr. Ayers got so fed up with speeding cars, unchecked by police, he says he started chasing down reckless drivers himself, in his four-wheel-drive truck. "I'd give them or their parents a talk," he says. "It worked, for the few I could catch."

Mr. Ayers recently erected a 6-foot-high fence of hay bales around his property, which his wife now refers to as "the Alamo." It blocks out some of the noise but not the dust, which he says has given his son, 20, breathing problems.

After going to numerous community meetings, Mr. Ayers remains pessimistic about changes. Gatherings on how to improve roads tend to break down when one or more residents refuse to pay higher taxes or give up a slice of their property to allow an easement, he says. Even if a majority of residents wants to take action, they lack governmental authority to acquire private property over the objection of a holdout owner.

In the late 1990s, Mrs. Eby of Taylor Lane collected 124 signatures requesting road maintenance there. She sent the petition, along with a letter, video and photos, to Gov. Jane Dee Hull, a number of state legislators and the five members of the Pima County Board of Supervisors. State officials wrote back that the county bore responsibility for the problem. County officials responded that while they empathized, state-level legislation would be needed to curb lot-splitting.

"What else can we do?" asks Mrs. Eby.

Mr. Huckleberry's Frustration

Frustrated county officials are asking the same question. For years, the county has unsuccessfully sought changes in state law that would give it more control over wildcat areas. The county's main lobbyist is now scouting for a senator to sponsor the latest version of legislation limiting lot splits.

The 10th-floor Tucson office of Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckleberry is littered with studies showing the burdens of providing even limited services to wildcat areas. In reports to the county board, Mr. Huckleberry has referred to the troubled areas as "rural slums."

The 27-year veteran of local politics explains that while wildcat residents pay the same property tax rate as others in the county, the per-capita revenue from wildcat areas is far lower. That's because the value of wildcat lots is much less, and the mobile homes that are ubiquitous in these areas are worth a lot less than typical Tucson houses. Mobile homes also depreciate over time, unlike many houses.

One of Mr. Huckleberry's recent reports concludes that 1999 tax revenue from a square-mile chunk of Taylor Lane wasn't enough to pay for even one type of government service -- calls by the sheriff's department. The taxes came to $43,108, compared with total costs of $62,790 for 299 calls, according to Mr. Huckleberry's report. And that doesn't count related costs for operating jails, courts and hospitals, he says.

Bringing wildcat subdivisions up to code, including land surveys, roads, sewers and all the rest, could cost as much as $55 million a year, Mr. Huckleberry adds, and that's money the county doesn't have.

Going Dry in Arivaca

Not all wildcat neighborhoods are plagued by the same problems. Arivaca, one of the first wildcat areas, is located in a picturesque valley near the Mexican border. Francine Pierce moved 22 years ago from Tucson to the eclectic community of farmers, artists, academics and tradesmen. Arivaca offered cheap land, broad skies framed by the Sierrita Mountains and a place apart from the "nine-to-five rat race," she says.

Today, the 54-year-old former philosophy professor lives on 10 acres, in a sand-colored adobe home her two sons helped her build. She grows organic miniature vegetables and sells them to fancy restaurants in Tucson.

But even green, attractive Arivaca hasn't escaped the strains of growth. The valley's watershed only barely fills the current needs of humans, plants and animals. If more people continue to arrive, Ms. Pierce worries, "some of us literally one day will turn on the tap, and [find] there ain't no water."

Hope and a Tiny Owl

Many Pima County residents appear to have grown weary of the perennial debate over the wildcat issue. Last November, voters here snubbed two local growth-control ballot initiatives that would have imposed limits on wildcat expansion.

What could be the best hope for cracking the problem came courtesy of a tiny brown-and-white bird found in southern Arizona. In 1997, the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl was put on the federal endangered-species list. In response, Pima County officials and environmentalists drafted separate plans for protecting the owl and reining in growth. Eventually, the two sides collaborated and won additional support from developers, bankers, scientists, and even some wildcat owners.

Hopes are high for the so-called Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan because of its pragmatism and flexibility. Moreover, it could be put in place by county-level legislation, without state approval.

For owners of wildcat lots, the plan offers such things as seed money for "improvement districts" -- areas in which neighbors can tax themselves to maintain roads and storm sewers. Wildcat-lot owners also would be offered local tax breaks, in exchange for a legally binding promise not to split or further develop their land.

But seasoned advocates of wildcat regulation aren't declaring victory yet. The Pima County board isn't expected to vote on the plan until next year, and opposition is sure to materialize. "It's a step in the right direction," says Ann Day, a county supervisor and former state senator, "if we can pull it off."

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