At a glance: Every fast-growing western city eventually watches development march up its signature mountains. Scottsdale is the rare one that stopped it — not with zoning that a future council could undo, but with cash. In 1994 and 1995 voters created and funded the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, beginning the largest municipal land-buying campaign in American history, even while the city itself grew by 70,000 people.
The rooftops reach the bajada
By 1990 Scottsdale stretched 185 square miles and the growth machine was working through the northern foothills annexed under Drinkwater. Graded pads appeared higher on the McDowells each season. The range wasn’t parkland or forest — it was a checkerboard of private holdings and Arizona State Trust land, which by law had to be sold or leased for the benefit of schools, generally to the highest bidder. Absent intervention, the mountains’ fate was luxury lots with a view of each other.
In 1991, a band of residents — hikers, scientists, retirees with stubborn streaks — founded the McDowell Sonoran Land Trust with a preposterous mission: persuade a tax-averse boomtown to buy a mountain range at retail.
1994–1995: the votes
It turned out the town wasn’t tax-averse about this. The Trust’s campaign reframed the mountains as infrastructure — the city’s skyline, watershed, wildlife corridor, and the scenery underwriting every resort rate and home price. In 1994 voters approved creating the McDowell Sonoran Preserve; in 1995 they approved a dedicated 0.2% sales tax to buy land for it. (A second tax, 0.15% in 2004, would extend the buying power; a 2018 initiative, Prop 420, later locked the Preserve against development by requiring a public vote for any change.)
The purchases were real market transactions, not condemnations — ranch parcels, failed subdivisions, and at state auctions, trust sections bid away from developers. Acre by acre through the late 1990s and 2000s, the Preserve grew past 10,000, then 20,000, ultimately beyond 30,000 acres — about one-third of the entire city — managed with an army of volunteer stewards descended from the original Trust. It remains the largest urban preserve in the country, and the decision Scottsdale residents most consistently tell pollsters they’re proudest of.
Meanwhile, the boom rolled on
Preservation didn’t slow the growth machine — it steered it. The 1990s added 70,000+ residents (202,705 by 2000), concentrated along the coming Loop 101 corridor and the Airpark, now maturing into a white-collar jobs engine of thousands of businesses.
Retail power tilted decisively north. Scottsdale Fashion Square’s 1992-onward expansions — adding anchors, a bridge over Camelback Road, and eventually the Southwest’s densest concentration of luxury brands — made it the region’s dominant mall, while 1969-vintage Los Arcos in the south emptied toward demolition. South Scottsdale’s redevelopment struggle (an arena fight, then the SkySong solution) became the city’s next-generation planning debate. Downtown, mercifully, had its arts economy: galleries, ArtWalk, and in 1999 the striking new Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in a converted cinema.
The decade also collected trophies — the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ “Most Livable City” (1993) chief among them — and a changing of the guard: Sam Kathryn Campana succeeded the retiring Herb Drinkwater in 1996, the first new mayor in sixteen years.
Why the 1990s matter most
Ask a planner which Scottsdale decade mattered most and you’ll usually get this one. The 1950s invented the brand and the 1970s proved the city could out-design a flood, but the 1990s decided, permanently, what Scottsdale would not become: a city that built to its horizon. Everything since — the trail economy, the tourism pitch, the 2018 Prop 420 fight, the premium on every north Scottsdale rooftop — rests on the purchase the voters started here. The 2000s would test the rest of the formula with a skyscraping boom and the hardest crash since 1920.