Scottsdale, Arizona is a city I visit frequently because I have family there. It is as different from Boston as a city can be.

Scottsdale’s population is about one-third the size of Boston’s. The city fits into a narrow north/south swath between Phoenix on the west and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community (locally called the Pima Indian Reservation) on the east until it expands to gobble up a wider section of desert in its northern reaches.

While Boston is muggy, rainy or freezing, Scottsdale is sunny, with balmy temperatures most of the time from October through April, after which the thermometer rises to 115 degrees and the place becomes unfit for human habitation until October. Scottsdale residents will tell you that the heat is tolerable because it is “dry” heat, but they lie.

Unlike Boston, Scottsdale is clean and pretty. You’ll find no litter, period. And the city’s plantsmen have lined the streets with bougainvillea, birds of paradise, oleander and various cacti and grasses. Something is in bloom every month of the year. The woodpeckers hammer into saguaro cactuses instead of maple trees. There is no Esplanade beside a river, but the banks of Scottsdale’s canals provide paths for biking and running. One does wonder, though, how anyone could take advantage of them during the summer months.

Boston’s private ways are open to those who want to walk or drive through, but Scottsdale is peppered with “gated communities” into which uninvited persons cannot enter. Scottsdale’s violent crime rate is just over 2 per 1,000 residents while Boston’s is more than 11. Its property crime comes in at about the same proportion. So why would Scottsdale residents feel so scared that they would hide themselves in gated communities while Boston residents face crime with open streets?

Silly me. It turns out that the residents of Scottsdale’s gated communities aren’t afraid of crime. They’re afraid they don’t measure up in social status. So they move to gated communities to try to bolster their standing, which makes them look as if they need bolstering, which ends up actually lowering their social status. It’s hard for a northerner to follow social anxiety in the Sun Belt these days.
The northern relatives tease the Arizona relatives by saying that they don’t have to do any heavy lifting—no snow shoveling, for example. Even if they did, they’d have someone to do it for them.  For if immigration officials were actually able to stop illegal aliens from entering Arizona, Scottsdale residents would face disaster, or at least an unkempt yard. Most of the people who trim the bushes, clean the houses and keep the pools in good shape are Mexican workers. You don’t ask, and you don’t tell. These workers, by the way, are allowed to go into the gated communities, although you wouldn’t be.

Street names are either romantic—Chaparral, Indian School—or nostalgic, such as Minnezona. That pleasant street must have been named by someone who was wondering how he got from the land of 10,000 lakes to one of the driest places on earth, and is torn about whether to stay.

Everyone in Scottsdale has a beautiful car—freshly washed, detailed, polished and kept out of the sun by either garages or canopies erected in parking lots. They need their cars because no one in Scottsdale walks except on treadmills at the gym or in Old Town, which looks as if it was built in 1972. While I was driving around in my sister-in-law’s spiffy SUV, I counted only five people walking on sidewalks and two of them were going from a parking lot into a building.

And at the time I noticed a pedestrian I also noticed the one thing in Scottsdale that is like Boston. Scottsdale also has push-buttons for pedestrians at every intersection.

Why? Because unlike Boston, Scottsdale traffic engineers are trying to be friendly to pedestrians. Every intersection has a walk signal that invites people to walk across the street at the same time vehicles are moving in the same direction. The push buttons give the one walker who shows up every three or four hours a little extra time to get across the street.

So. No need to push the button to get a walk signal, which is automatic and a button push that gives a pedestrian more time to cross. Now, why, in America’s Walking City, which has more pedestrians per square inch than almost any place in America, in this one way, couldn’t we be more like Scottsdale?