In 1987, a prominent urban affairs journalist named Neal Peirce came to Phoenix with a team of colleagues to examine the regional issues facing the Valley of the Sun. 

At the time, about 1.7 million people lived in the Valley — more than half of them in the city of Phoenix. The region had experienced uninterrupted growth for decades, increasing its population tenfold since World War II. 

Laid out as a 16-page broadsheet in The Arizona Republic and Phoenix Gazette, the “Peirce Report” highlighted the Valley’s successes and challenges. Topics included education, growth and development, regional governance, efforts to rejuvenate the Rio Salado and the Valley’s civic culture.

The Peirce Report kicked off serious regional discussions among elected officials, business and community leaders about what the young metro wanted to be when it grew up — a dialogue that extended well into the 1990s, setting the table for the next generation of growth and change.

When Greater Phoenix Leadership — known in Peirce’s time as the “Phoenix 40” — began to plan for its 50th anniversary in 2025, the organization commissioned an independent update of the Peirce Report.

Though Peirce passed away in 2019, the Neal Peirce Foundation was tasked with revisiting the issues of the ‘80s and how the region responded, while looking ahead to future challenges and identifying the questions and opportunities of today.

The Neal Peirce Foundation team reviewed decades of information and data, interviewed more than 30 Valley-area business, government and civic leaders, and leveraged extensive public opinion survey research and “progress meter” data from Center for the Future of Arizona.

In many ways, the metro region resembles what Neal Peirce saw in 1987. It’s still a fiercely independent and optimistic place, propelled by a constant influx of people from elsewhere — “a civilization of newcomers,” as Peirce put it.

Yet, in other ways, it has transformed.

Phoenix has become America’s fifth-largest city. A growing number of second- and third-generation people born or raised in the Valley either stayed or boomeranged back to make a life here.

A range of community, academic and philanthropic institutions have grown up alongside a stronger public voice, building the bones of a civic culture that Peirce had found missing in 1987.

As Phoenix’s economic development director Christine Mackey observed, Phoenix was like an adolescent in 1987,........

© Arizona Republic