No single milestone marks 2003, which is fitting for a year the city spent mostly in escrow. Metro Phoenix was building one of America’s most leveraged housing economies, and Scottsdale rode the front of it — construction and finance payrolls quietly growing as important as tourism, values climbing, everything for sale and everything selling.
The counterweight was also gathering. Preserve advocates were preparing to go back to the voters, and in 2004 they would win an additional 0.15 percent sales tax to accelerate McDowell Sonoran Preserve purchases — the same electorate funding both the boom and the permanent refuge from it. That double instinct, buy the land and save the mountains, is the whole era in miniature; see the resort metropolis for the long version.