The housing crisis (still loading)
The housing homework is overdue … Cursing in text … And a big sign for Biggs.
With all this talk about Arizona’s affordable housing crisis, wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly how many homes we need to build to solve it?
State lawmakers thought so, too.
Last year, the Legislature passed a law mandating cities and towns to issue detailed reports on their housing stock, including stats like how many houses they have, how many they need and how many they're building.
But seven months after the deadline, that data still hasn’t materialized.
Instead, the statewide roundup of all that housing data is stuck in bureaucratic limbo.
SB1162, which lawmakers approved and Gov. Katie Hobbs signed last year, was designed to make municipalities speed up their zoning processes. But lawmakers also thought it’d be a good idea to get a better scope of the problem, so they included a provision requiring cities and towns with populations of at least 30,000 to publish a “Housing Needs Assessment” by Jan. 1, 2025.
Of the 30 municipalities subject to the law, we found 14 that published their own assessments, and the remaining submitted their data as part of a shared report.
The law clearly outlines the data that municipalities “shall publish” starting in 2025, and every five years after. Each assessment must detail five years of population and job growth, the amount of land zoned for single- and multifamily housing and how much housing is needed based on projected population and job growth.
That data is supposed to give Arizona policymakers a clearer picture of how much housing its biggest cities will need over the next five years, and whether they have the capacity to build it.
But nearly seven months after cities scrambled to comply, Hobbs' Department of Housing still hasn't compiled them into a statewide report that would actually show the scope of the problem.
And doing so may be very difficult.
In her second executive order as governor, Hobbs called Arizona's housing crisis “among the most pressing issues currently facing the State.”
And at the Capitol, the need for housing reform has been one of the rare points of bipartisan consensus.
But consensus on the problem doesn't mean consensus on the solution.
For years, proposals have been mired in tension between state lawmakers and local governments that want to keep control over zoning. Last year, some compromise emerged and lawmakers passed a slate of new housing laws, including the mandate for cities to conduct housing needs assessments.
But the urgency of the rhetoric around housing doesn’t seem to meet the follow-through. The state has yet to release the combined findings from the local housing reports, so the data is disjointed, spread out across more than a dozen websites and difficult to digest. Policymakers still have no idea how many homes Arizona as a whole needs.
Municipalities hired different consultants who used different methodologies to put together their assessments, and individual reports don’t tell us much about Arizona’s overall housing need until they’re analyzed together.
That’s the Arizona Department of Housing’s job.
We’ve been asking ADOH for the assessments since Jan. 14. At first, the department said a final report was coming out at the end of January. In February, the report was done and the Governor’s Office was reviewing it, per the housing department’s public information officer Dave Cherry.
After several more months of back-and-forth, we got tired of waiting.
So we tracked down every city that had to file an assessment and found 14 cities each did it their own way, and another 17 handed the responsibility off to the Arizona League of Cities and Towns, the powerful lobbying arm for municipalities at the Capitol, which compiled the reports in a standard format.
The League’s first housing needs assessment came out on Dec. 27 as three headache-inducing data tables.
On Monday, the League dropped an updated report for those 17 municipalities, which includes a more comprehensive version of the data and detailed methodology for obtaining it.
Rene Guillen, the League’s deputy director, said they were waiting on some key demographic data before issuing the comprehensive version of the housing needs assessments.
The final report uses updated population, employment and vacancy data. Compared to the League’s December version, the report published Monday shows the number of houses cities will need by 2029 has increased in most cities.
That means the League’s report likely used more recent data than what other cities had access to when they submitted their housing needs assessments on time. And that means the statewide numbers will be tough to compare.
The new League report recommends moving the assessments’ due date to later in the year so municipalities have time to process data that drops at the end of each calendar year.
In the meantime, more than half of Arizona's cities used a different data set to contribute to some sort of unified report outlining the state’s housing needs. And not only has the state housing department not yet issued that report, but they’ll probably have a hard time compiling it.
On the bright side, having 17 cities’ data compiled by the same consultant is handy. It’s all standardized and in one place, which makes it easy to compare.
When we started searching through the other 14 municipalities’ reports, we suddenly felt a little sympathy for the state housing department for having to aggregate all that disjointed data.
For example, Goodyear hired a Scottsdale real estate consultant to craft a housing assessment that reads like a master class in municipal planning. It breaks down projected job growth by employment sector, charts seven years of real estate listings and tacks on a demographic data addendum for good measure.
Flagstaff, on the other hand, slapped its logo on a one-page PDF file with links to preexisting reports and called it a day.
The affordable housing advocacy group Tempe YIMBY started looking into the assessments in January. The group flagged inconsistencies and omissions that aren’t obvious without a close look.
For example, Scottsdale used different population growth estimates than most other Maricopa County cities, which downplays their overall housing need, Tempe YIMBY found. And the group had the same problem in January as we did in August: The reports are not only hard to find, but it’s often unclear whether they were created to meet the new state law or are recycled housing studies that only check a few of the boxes.
Best-case scenario, the housing department figures out how to standardize the data and publicly releases a digestible report on the state’s housing stock.
Until then, cities just spent a lot of time compiling reports for a data disaster.
You can find all 30 municipalities’ reports here.
(Expletive) politicians: Former Maricopa County assessor Paul Petersen is back in Arizona after serving a federal prison sentence for operating a fraudulent adoption ring using immigrant mothers, writes Arizona Republic reporter Ronald Hansen. But don’t worry — he’s still in jail, now serving time on state-level crimes. Meanwhile, rookie Scottsdale council member Adam Kwasman has put himself in the hot seat after sending furious, profanity-laced texts about Mayor Lisa Borowsky, to her chief of staff. Kwasman was enraged over the mayor’s stance on Axon, but doesn’t believe he has anything to apologize for, Tom Scanlon reports in the Scottsdale Progress.
Proof bullying works: Secretary of State Adrian Fontes is backing down on election rules that he said would better protect voters after Republicans challenged them in court, Jen Fifield reports for Votebeat. Fontes released the latest draft of the 2026 Election Procedures Manual on Friday, without the examples of what constitutes illegal voter intimidation that the 2023 edition contained and were challenged in court. He also cut a paragraph that said the secretary of state could finalize the state’s election results without a particular county’s results, if that county’s officials missed the deadline to finalize them.
Foreclosures up and down Sesame Street: After the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced last week that it will shut down, Arizona PBS has begun exploring other funding options to fill the roughly 13% gap of the station’s budget, senior director of brand engagement and marketing Jeremy Cauthen told the Republic’s Helen Rummel.
"The loss of that funding will impact programming and station services, but it's really too soon to know what those exact impacts will be," Cauthen wrote in an email to the Republic. "For example, we're not sure how this clawback of funding will affect other public media stations nationwide — and specifically their ability to continue producing programs broadcast and streamed here at Arizona PBS.”
Luckily, the Agenda doesn’t receive government funding, so Congress can’t kill us. However, you can still kill us slowly by not clicking this button.
Kim Jong Uh-Oh: New details have been released after a West Valley woman was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in February for stealing millions of dollars to fund North Korea's nuclear program, Taylor Wirtz reports for Fox10. For three years starting in 2020, Christina Chapman was allegedly aiding North Korean IT workers in securing stolen identities of U.S. citizens and residents so North Korean workers could get remote jobs with U.S. companies — including some Fortune 500s.
A Tale of Arizona Cities: Voters will be able to more easily challenge and block local government projects thanks to a new Arizona Supreme Court decision, Bob Christie writes for Capitol Media Services. Officials in Page had shot down a referendum against a road-widening project by arguing the project was administrative and not subject to a “citizen’s veto.” But the Supreme Court said voters can propose their own laws at the local level (or oppose laws via a referendum) even if elected officials have a redevelopment plan in place. Meanwhile, local governments are seeing an influx of hyper-partisan elected officials, which could start making it harder to accomplish routine city functions. Arizona Republic reporters Shawn Raymundo, Lauren De Young and Maritza Dominguez, identified ideology-driven changes in cities from Scottsdale, Mesa and Fountain Hills to Avondale and Peoria.
“The problem with the nationalization of local politics is that it can distract from the important jobs of local governments to actually serve their citizens,” Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, a professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, said. “You're distracting from the business of actually running a government and making local policy that's important for cities.”
Cloudy with a chance of drugs: U.S. Army officials have found drones carrying drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border. The use of drones, which are equipped to carry between 50 and 100 pounds, by Mexican cartels is the latest daily threat soldiers and Border Patrol face, Lyda Longa reports for the Herald Review.
Arizona U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs started Monday by wishing a happy birthday to the U.S. Coast Guard.
But over in Mesa, his critics had other messages in mind. They hoisted giant block-letter signs on a freeway overpass that spelled out: “BIGGS PROTECTS PEDOS.”
In case you missed it, Biggs was one of two Republicans on the House Oversight Committee to vote against subpoenaing the Epstein files.
It probably wasn’t the birthday surprise the Coast Guard had in mind, but Arizona politics is all about range.
And for good measure, here’s the wildest headline of the day.
Thanks for keeping an eye on this. Housing, like water, isn't sexy as an issue but it is critically important to the state's future.
I was in real estate and development for many years in rural Arizona. I retired before the Airbnb laws went into effect but when it comes to housing policy, cost and consumption go hand in hand. A home is worth what someone will pay for that property. When you change/rezone the usage of that property the price changes. When a buyer purchases a home with a residential price tag and uses it for commercial purposes with no ability for the local jurisdiction to control that usage, I personally, have no idea how that can be effectively analyzed. Are the buyers going to live there full time or use it like a hotel? More to the point how do you know how many more houses to build when you don’t know the usage? Or the cost for that matter. Mortgage companies could help but those pesky cash offers throw in a monkey wrench. We definitely need workforce housing that’s affordable but what does that look like?