A round-number anniversary and a changing of the guard arrived together. Seventy years after the 1951 incorporation vote, architect David Ortega took office as mayor — the start of a term that would be consumed by questions nobody put on the 1951 ballot: apartment towers, drought triggers, and a tech campus by the freeway.
The louder story was the rebound. The visitor economy that had gone dark in March 2020 came back harder than anyone forecast: pent-up leisure travel found Scottsdale first, and by year’s end the resorts were posting record rates, with golf, events, and home prices climbing the same curve. The recovery’s side-effects were arriving just as fast — a short-term-rental boom in the neighborhoods and an affordability squeeze the old resort-town model had never had to price in — and they were already hardening into the decade’s defining local arguments.
Seventy years in, the pattern held: Scottsdale reinvents, profits, then argues about what the profits are doing to the place. How the argument escalated from here — a water cutoff heard around the world, a referendum war over a hometown giant — is in the 2020s chapter.