The census takers arrived and confirmed what the traffic already knew: 202,705 residents, more than 55 percent growth in a single decade — once again among the fastest rates of any large American city. Scottsdale had spent the 1990s buying mountains, building Fashion Square into a retail giant, and watching Los Arcos die; now it entered the new century as a genuine mid-sized city with a small town’s self-image still stubbornly attached.
The number was less a milestone than a starting gun. The decade ahead would give the city things it had never had — a completed freeway, a skyline, waterfront property in the Sonoran Desert — and the growth machine that produced 202,705 was about to shift into a higher, more leveraged gear. Condos, canals, and eventually a crash: the whole arc is in the 2000s chapter.