Can Tucson catch a break? Last week this region made it on another list of “affordale places” for retirement.

The account in U.S. News & World Report makes Tucson out to be a combination of unhip and extraordinarily cheap — translation: a lack of economic vitality. Verbiage is devoted to bird watching and visiting the Air Force’s “boneyard” at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, where bus tours cost just $20.

If you’re 62 or over, the article goes on to extol that a National Parks Lifetime Senior Pass can be had for just $10 and it’s good in any national park, including Saguaro National Park. And did you know you can pick up a used mobile home for as little as $15,000? If you’re willing to go for a fixer-upper in Tucson, you can snatch one of those for as little as $6,000.

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Oh but there is that triple digit heat in the summer, which could be “a deal-breaker for some,” they say.

Don’t get me wrong. Retirees are fine. I look forward to the day I can be one. But, as Inside Tucson Business has noted in a previous editorial, Tucson needs to get off this merry go-round. This kind of publicity hurts economic development when nothing else is noted.

I noticed on U.S. News & World Report’s website that a month ago they had a list of the best places to find a job. Tucson wasn’t on that one. In July the publication did a report on the 10 best places to look for creative jobs. Tucson wasn’t on that list either.

Almost as if to intentionally further rub salt in the wound, the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 30 did a report on the cities that are your magnets likely to emerge from the recession as meccas for young, vibrant work forces. They were mostly large metro areas but they did include Austin, Texas, and Portland, Ore., which aren’t that much bigger than Tucson. And Portland made it despite an unemployment rate of 11.6 percent compared to Tucson’s 8 percent.

It’s anyone’s guess as to which cities really will turn out to be “youth magnets,” but it would be nice to get noticed.

Tucson is already getting older as I noted in this space last week using data from the Census Bureau, which has come out with even more data showing the region isn’t gaining ground on per capita income, which as of 2008 stood at a paltry $25,064, and the percentage of people now falling below federal proverty standards is up to 15.6 percent, 1 point above the statewide average and 2 points above the national average.

This all leads me to wonder. What is it that Tucson is doing wrong? I’m serious. What can we in the region do to develop a more vibrant economy? Or am I off base here? Are we happy being a retirement community? Do we just need better PR?

If you’ve got an idea, I’d like to hear it. Please drop me an e-mail — the address is at the bottom of the column. We’ll use ideas to develop reports in Inside Tucson Business that will hopefully prod economic development. We need something.

Contact David Hatfield at dhatfield@azbiz.com or

(520) 295-4237.