By 1978 the decade’s verdicts were mostly in. The Greenbelt was demonstrably working — floods passed through on schedule and the parks went back to being parks — and engineers from other cities had begun making pilgrimages to study flood control you could picnic in. McCormick Ranch had proven a master-planned community could sell in the desert, lakes and all. The question hanging over the late seventies was no longer whether Scottsdale’s wagers would pay, but at what scale.
The answer was already assembling: a resort corridor reaching north along Scottsdale Road, an airpark on its way to becoming a jobs engine, a population somewhere on the climb between the 78,000 of 1975 and the 88,412 the 1980 census would find. Scottsdale closed 1978 one census away from the next boom.