By Gary Nelson | The Arizona Republic
Back in the last century, when suburban sprawl was chewing up an acre of desert every hour in the metro area, Mesa was the life of the party.
In a span of 50 years, the city morphed from a sleepy burg with fewer than 34,000 residents to a rambling string of trailer parks, subdivisions and strip malls with 13 times the 1960 population.
It made for a lot of impressive statistics for those who like growth for its own sake, but it also turned Mesa into something resembling Swiss cheese.
Even in older parts of town, vacant parcels lie next to tracts that were developed years ago. Some projects that didn’t stand the test of time now stand empty or nearly so, begging for redevelopment.
Mesa planners noticed something else as they launched the city’s next major visioning exercise: a sense of disconnectedness, a feeling among people that it wasn’t easy to get from one neighborhood to the next, or even to gather with people on their own block.
