What it means
The West Valley is the half of metropolitan Phoenix on the far side of Interstate 17: Glendale, Peoria, Surprise, Goodyear, Avondale, Buckeye, Litchfield Park, Tolleson, El Mirage, Youngtown and, up the Grand Avenue corridor, Wickenburg, plus the retirement cities of Sun City and Sun City West. Phoenix’s own Maryvale neighborhood usually gets lumped in. The name is a mirror of the East Valley, and the two halves are joined mostly by freeways and mutual indifference.
You will hear it in Scottsdale in a particular tone. “They moved to the West Valley” carries the faint implication of a different country, and “I’m not driving to the West Valley” is a complete sentence. The reason is geography, not snobbery, or at least not only snobbery: Scottsdale is the northeast corner of the Valley, so the West Valley is as far from here as the metro gets. A Cardinals game in Glendale is a 30-mile drive on the 101.
Where you’ll meet it
Sports schedules and spring training, mostly. State Farm Stadium and the Westgate district are in Glendale; the Cactus League’s western ballparks are in Glendale, Peoria, Surprise and Goodyear, and the spring training guide covers the drives. You will also meet it in the weather report, where “West Valley” storms often arrive an hour before they reach Scottsdale, and in the housing conversation, where it is the answer to “where can anyone still afford a house.”
Where the word came from
Nobody coined it. The Salt River Valley has been divided into an east and a west in ordinary speech for as long as Phoenix has had suburbs on both sides, and the words follow the compass. What gave “West Valley” an official edge was the formation of regional lobbying groups. WESTMARC, the Western Maricopa Coalition, counts 15 member communities and speaks for them in Phoenix and at the Legislature; Leadership West trains their civic class. Both define the territory the same way: Maricopa County west of Interstate 17.
That line matters. The East Valley has no equivalent freeway boundary, so its edges are argued about; the West Valley’s are not. Wikipedia’s summary of common usage adds the other three sides, Buckeye on the west, the Sierra Estrella on the south and Anthem on the north, and lists 11 incorporated municipalities and six unincorporated communities inside them.
The identity hardened in the 2000s, when Glendale built the Westgate entertainment district with the Cardinals’ stadium and the arena (2006), and the Loop 303 stitched the far-west suburbs to I-10 and I-17. The pitch WESTMARC makes today is about scale: more than 1.7 million residents, major employers from Luke Air Force Base to the TSMC semiconductor plant, and a projection that 43 percent of Maricopa County’s growth over the next quarter century will happen out there. From Scottsdale, where growth is a dirty word, that sounds like someone else’s problem, which is exactly how the West Valley likes it.
What it is not
It is not “West Phoenix” or “the west side,” which Phoenix people use for their own neighborhoods west of Central Avenue, inside the city. It is also not the Northwest Valley in the narrow sense, which realtors use for Peoria, Surprise and the Sun Cities specifically. And it is not where the Diamondbacks or Suns play; those are downtown.
The fine print
The I-17 definition is the regional coalitions’ definition, and it has one awkward consequence: a large piece of the City of Phoenix lies west of I-17, so by the strict line, Maryvale, Deer Valley and the north Phoenix suburbs around the Carefree Highway are West Valley. In practice people mean the separate municipalities and talk about Phoenix neighborhoods by name.
The population figure needs a footnote too. “More than 1.7 million” is the coalition’s count across its 15 communities, which include unincorporated places and, on WESTMARC’s own roster, Gila Bend and the City of Phoenix itself as a partner. Census counts for the 11 incorporated West Valley cities run lower. Nobody is lying; they are counting different things.
The Scottsdale habit of treating the West Valley as remote is arithmetic as much as attitude. The two halves share no surface street that a sane person would drive end to end, so every trip is a freeway trip, and the Loop 101 bends through north Phoenix on its way west, which turns a 25-mile straight line into a 35-mile drive. On a Cardinals Sunday the game, the Westgate bars and the Peoria ballpark traffic all merge onto the same four lanes. Leave early, or watch it on television like everyone else east of the 51.