The record is quiet for 2002, but the city was busy absorbing what 2001 had built. The newly completed Loop 101 was doing exactly what freeways do: collapsing distances, raising traffic counts, and pulling jobs and rooftops toward its ramps. The Airpark and north Scottsdale, minutes from the metro for the first time, were filling in fast.
Meanwhile the slower machinery ground on. The McDowell Sonoran Preserve, created and first funded by the votes of the 1990s, kept buying mountain land — a campaign that would ask voters for a second tax in 2004 and get it. Downtown, the faded Valley Ho still awaited its rescue, and the Los Arcos site still sat empty on McDowell Road. The decade’s signature projects were all in the pipeline; 2002 was the pipeline.