At a glance: The 2020s put every Scottsdale trade-off on trial at once. A pandemic stress-tested the tourism economy (it passed, violently, in both directions); the Colorado River crisis turned a neighboring community’s taps into a global story; and a hometown tech giant’s expansion sparked a referendum war that reached the state legislature. Through it all, the voters kept doing what Scottsdale voters do: showing up angry and deciding things.
2020–2021: empty patios, record rebound
COVID-19 hit the visitor economy like a switch flipped off: resorts furloughed, spring training stopped mid-game in March 2020, and Old Town’s entertainment district went from too loud to silent (and then became the metro’s noisiest argument about reopening). The 2020 census still recorded 241,361 residents — growth, but the slowest rate since the farm decades.
The whiplash recovery said more about the city than the shutdown did. Pent-up leisure travel found Scottsdale first: by 2021–22, resort rates and bed-tax receipts set records, golf and event attendance surged past 2019, and home prices leapt to all-time highs — dragging with them the decade’s defining side-effects, a short-term-rental boom in the neighborhoods (constrained by state law, managed since with licensing rules) and an affordability squeeze the old resort-town model never had to price in.
City government marked its 70th birthday (2021) with a changing of the guard — architect David Ortega became mayor — and a renovated Civic Center reopened in 2023, giving Bennie Gonzales’ 1968 masterpiece its first major refresh as an events venue.
2023: the year of water
Scottsdale’s long water discipline — CAP diversification, banked supplies, reclaimed-water golf — met its test when Colorado River shortages triggered the city’s Drought Management Plan. The plan’s sharpest edge landed outside city limits: on January 1, 2023 Scottsdale stopped selling hauled water to Rio Verde Foothills, the unincorporated community whose 500-plus homes had built themselves on trucked Scottsdale water with no utility of their own.
Dry taps a golf-cart ride from emerald fairways proved irresistible to every news desk on earth, and for months “Rio Verde” was shorthand for the Southwest’s reckoning. The resolution was very Arizona: a negotiated standpipe deal restored deliveries through Scottsdale’s system while Rio Verde stood up a longer-term supplier, and the episode hardened a citywide consensus that growth must be priced in acre-feet. Within city limits, the system held — Scottsdale cut usage and kept every commitment, quiet vindication of forty years of water hedging.
2024–2025: the Axon war and a new mayor
The decade’s growth politics condensed into one parcel. Axon — the Scottsdale-grown Taser and police-tech company, the Airpark’s marquee employer — secured council approval in late 2024 for a vastly expanded headquarters campus near Loop 101, including nearly 2,000 apartments and a hotel. Neighbors who read the area’s plans as promising exactly-not-that forced a referendum, delivering more than 20,000 signatures; Axon canceled its groundbreaking, floated leaving Arizona, and in 2025 the state legislature stepped in with a law that let the project proceed without the city vote. Whatever one’s side, the fight redrew the map of who actually governs Scottsdale growth — council, citizens, or the Capitol.
The same argument decided the mayor’s office. In November 2024, attorney and former councilwoman Lisa Borowsky unseated Ortega with about 54%, campaigning squarely against high-rise apartment growth; she took office in January 2025 as the city’s third mayor of the decade-so-far, promising a slower, lower Scottsdale.
140 years in
Stand at Brown and Main today and the whole story is within a half-mile: the canal that started it, the schoolhouse the settlers built, the mission the parishioners raised, the stage-set storefronts of the brand era, the galleries and museum that outgrew the souvenir racks — and on the horizon, mountains that stay empty because the voters keep insisting. A quarter-million people, arguing constructively about the next chapter. Winfield Scott, chief promoter, would recognize the energy immediately.
That’s the story so far. For where to eat, hike, and wander in the city all this history built, start with our local spots and valley notes.