The decade went out at full volume. The WM Phoenix Open cemented its standing as golf’s biggest-attended event, the cranes were back over Old Town — every proposed hotel and condo tower re-fighting the western-character-versus-urban-future question block by block — and the economy had finished its transformation, with medicine, tech, finance, and hospitality all pulling at once as the city closed the decade at roughly 241,361 residents.
In hindsight the year reads like a held breath. The recovery decade had delivered what it promised — a museum, an aquarium, diversified payrolls, a constitutionally protected Preserve — and the arguments left standing, from tower heights to short-term rentals to water, were queued up for the next one. Nobody knew the pandemic was months away from rewriting the terms of every question. That story begins in the 2020s chapter.