What it means
Paradise Valley is the small town that sits between Phoenix and Scottsdale around Camelback Mountain and Mummy Mountain: big lots, long walls, mountain views and some of the most expensive houses in Arizona. It has a town hall, a police department and a famously strict attitude toward commerce, and very little else you would call a town center. Locals call it PV.
The word causes trouble because it means two places. One is the town. The other is the old name for the broad valley north of the Phoenix Mountains, which Phoenix kept using after the town took the name, so a mall, a school district, a high school and a community college all say Paradise Valley while sitting in Phoenix, miles from the town line. “We live in PV” from someone on Mockingbird Lane is a statement about money; from someone near Tatum and Cactus it is a statement about a Phoenix neighborhood.
For the resorts, read their guides, starting with Camelback Inn and Sanctuary, and the Camelback Corridor guide for the surrounding area.
Where you’ll meet it
Resort addresses, Lincoln Drive traffic, Camelback trailhead parking rules, real estate listings in ZIP code 85253, and any conversation about where a celebrity bought a house.
Where the word came from
The town’s own history traces the name to 1889, when three surveyors for the Rio Verde Canal Company came through to plan a canal and were so taken with the landscape that they called it Paradise Valley. Wikipedia adds that wildflowers and palo verde trees may have inspired it; nobody left a note. The canal was never built, but the name stuck to the whole basin north of Camelback.
Settlement came late, mostly after World War II, as people built ranch houses and estates on big desert lots. By the late 1950s Phoenix and Scottsdale were both annexing aggressively, and residents feared, in the town’s words, that subdivisions, shopping centers, new zoning laws and property taxes would follow. They formed a citizens’ committee with three goals: one house per acre, an entirely residential town and minimal government. Incorporation was granted on May 24, 1961, with roughly 2,000 people.
The new town claimed the name for itself, but it never got exclusive use. Phoenix’s growth carried the older name north, onto Paradise Valley Mall, Paradise Valley Unified School District, Paradise Valley High School and Paradise Valley Community College, all well outside the town.
What it is not
It is not part of Scottsdale or Phoenix, though most mail says one or the other. It is not Arcadia, the citrus-grove neighborhood of Phoenix on Camelback’s south side, though the two are often lumped together, and it is not the Phoenix area called Paradise Valley up near the mall.
The fine print
The resorts make the math work. The town’s 2019 financial report says flatly that it has no town property tax; its largest revenue sources are the sales tax and the bed tax, and its list of destinations reads like a resort directory: El Chorro, the DoubleTree Paradise Valley, the Hermosa Inn, the Andaz, Camelback Inn, Mountain Shadows, Omni Montelucia, the Scottsdale Plaza, Sanctuary, Smoke Tree and, then coming soon, a Ritz-Carlton. Several were grandfathered in when the town incorporated, so a town built to keep commerce out lives largely on hotel guests. The same report notes that in audit year 2017 the town collected about $3.7 million in bed taxes.
The numbers otherwise stay small. The 2020 census counted 12,658 residents on 15.41 square miles, and private estimates put the median home value above $3 million. Residents have included Barry Goldwater, Sandra Day O’Connor and Dan Quayle.
One quirk worth knowing: Camelback Inn (1936) and El Chorro (1937) are older than the town by a generation, and guidebooks routinely file them under Scottsdale. That is not wrong as geography. It is wrong as government.