The year split in two on a Thursday in March. Before it: a normal Scottsdale high season — spring training filling Scottsdale Stadium and Salt River Fields, resorts at peak, the Parada del Sol on the calendar. After it: silence. MLB suspended spring training on March 12, and within days the resorts furloughed, the events went dark, and Old Town’s entertainment district — the loudest few blocks in the metro — went quiet, then became the metro’s noisiest argument about reopening rules. For a city whose March is its economic Christmas, the pandemic arrived in a single afternoon; the day page tells that story in full.
The census, taken that same strange spring, was the year’s other verdict: 241,361 residents. Still growth, but the slowest rate since the farm decades — and that had nothing to do with the virus. With the Preserve locked away and the flat land long since built, Scottsdale’s growth had shifted from new desert to redevelopment, which is exactly where the decade’s loudest arguments would live.
What nobody guessed while the patios sat empty was how violent the rebound would be. Pent-up leisure travel found Scottsdale first, and within two years resort rates and home prices were breaking records — dragging along a short-term-rental boom and an affordability squeeze the old resort-town model had never priced in. The whole whiplash arc is in the 2020s chapter.