Mid-boom years like 1977 left few individual headlines because the news was cumulative: another year of rooftops at McCormick Ranch — and, on 36 acres of its land along Scottsdale Road, the opening of the Registry Resort — another stretch of Indian Bend Wash regraded from hazard into parkland, another season of visitors working their way along a resort corridor that grew a little longer annually.
By now the pattern set earlier in the decade was simply executing. The Greenbelt gamble, placed in 1973, was being paid off in turf and lakes; the East Shea annexation of 1975 was turning from a line on the map into neighborhoods; and the population was climbing from the 78,000 of the 1975 special census toward the 88,412 the 1980 count would record. Quiet years built the city as surely as famous ones — the difference is only who got the plaque.
The year’s lasting political act came late. On November 15 the council adopted a Hillside ordinance that drew a no-development line across the McDowell Mountain slopes. A landowner sued, and in 1985 the Arizona Court of Appeals voided it as a taking of property without compensation; the city’s answer, in the end, was to buy the mountains. Earlier in the year the Court of Appeals upheld the city’s development fee against the home builders, and voters approved a bed tax on hotel stays, by Joan Fudala’s account. The politics are in the 1970s politics chapter.