Orienting Ourselves
The Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project (PCRP) covered 80 acres, from two blocks north of Congress Street south to Fourteenth Street, from Granada and (beyond) El Paso Avenues on the west to Church and Stone Avenues on the east. As mentioned before, voters approved the PCRP in March of 1966. However, Urban Renewal in Tucson began more than a decade earlier, and its impacts were already being felt on the landscape inside these boundaries and in the surrounding areas before the vote.
The first report generated by the mayor’s office about this neighborhood came in 1954. Within four years, the city had received federal funds to begin surveys and planning for redevelopment downtown. Many of the city’s urban renewal efforts over the next decade met with mixed responses from the public. In an effort to gain local support and to secure federal funding, city officials focused on the issue of housing quality, declaring parts of the area and its surroundings slums that needed to be cleared. Interestingly, the city had no housing code or inspector until 1957; there was one housing inspector for the whole of the city until 1962 when a second was hired.
In the intervening years, the city demolished housing units in the areas while denying permits for new construction and renovation – the city was holding out for large-scale redevelopment, but the first urban renewal proposal was turned down by the voters in 1962. Though the PCRP passed in 1966, it’s important to be aware of certain details. Voters were actually not voting on the PRCP as a whole; only the bond for acquisition of the land was on the ballot, meaning the vote authorized the city to purchase the land, displace the residents, and even begin demolition, but not to begin construction of the full “civic center” they were planning. For this reason, the land saw empty longer than necessary. Demolition began in May 1967, but it would be another two years before the city secured funding for the Tucson Convention Center and finally broke ground in May 1969.
(For a thorough coverage of this time period, see Lydia Otero’s La Calle: Spatial Conflicts and Urban Renewal in a Southwest City.)