This just in:

The Phoenix City Council yielded to pressure from residents Wednesday and decided to reverse its decision to allow more high-rises in the upscale Camelback Corridor.

The action effectively kills several projects, most notably the $200 million condominium/hotel development proposed by Donald Trump and development partner Bayrock Group near 26th Street and Camelback Road and sends them all back to the drawing board.

This is the last, best hope for Phoenix to have something like a Downtown--a Central Business District, composed mostly of actual free-market businesses--within the borders of Phoenix.

Of course, the City Council will continue to push for its dream of a fake Downtown--composed almost entirely of tax-payer funded structures--further south. This was the reason for their voting against the planned towers after they had already voted for them: The alternative was to have the issue as a ballot question at the same time Phoenix voters will be asked to saddle themselves with nearly a billion dollars of new debt to build a redundant campus for ASU and a redundant medical school for UA in the all-new fake Downtown. If you're wondering why the City's tax-payers should pay for State universities, the City Council doesn't want you to vote--no matter where you stand on the Biltmore towers.

In any case, the real action will move east, to Downtown Tempe. This is already as close as The Valley of the Sun gets to a Downtown out-of-towners can understand. Tempe has been land-locked for years, so its politicians, marginally less venal, understand that the only way the city can grow is up.

It still won't be a Central Business District--the Biltmore site was the only hope for that--but it will be alive and vibrant and dynamic, where Downtown Phoenix will always be just one Grand Tax-payer Boondoggle after another--all of them failures, all of them declaimed as great successes, the hails of elaborate praise echoing through the canyons of perpetually empty streets.