Arizona has a reputation for being an affordable place to live. But that’s not the case anymore. Rent prices in the Phoenix area are rising about twice as fast as the national average. And with around 200 people moving to Maricopa County every day, demand for housing keeps rising. In this podcast we explore the obstacles that are making the cost of housing in Phoenix harder and harder for many residents to afford.
Katherine Davis-Young reported, wrote, produced and hosts (Un)Affordable for Hear Arizona/ KJZZ.
The border town of Nogales is sometimes referred to as “ambos Nogales” or both Nogales. That’s because part of the community is in Arizona, and part is in Sonora, Mexico. The twin towns are divided by a metal wall, nearly two stories high, and a few months ago, U.S. military troops deployed to the border added half-a-dozen rows of razor wire to the barrier.
A high wall covered in razor wire divides the towns of Nogales, Ariz. and Nogales, Mexico. The Nogales, Ariz. City Council has asked the U.S. federal government to remove the razor wire.
It doesn’t look like a tourist attraction, but this is where most tours with the Border Community Alliance begin. The tour groups meet up on the US side, then it’s just a short walk through a metal detector, then a gate, and into Mexico. No one checks your ID, no one asks questions.
“We want to show that there’s so much more going on and very positive,” said Alex La Pierre, program director for Border Community Alliance. The goal of the cross-border tours, he said, is “citizen-level diplomacy, bringing people to Mexico to make up their own minds.”
La Pierre guides these tours, taking hundreds of Americans each year to see what’s really on the other side of the border. The Arizona-based nonprofit offers multiple travel itineraries, including overnight tours and day-trips, all of them meant to counteract fears about the border region. Some tours highlight local businesses or area history, but this tour was all about Sonoran cuisine.
“The act of sitting at a table and breaking bread with someone is almost ritualistic in promoting good relations. And what’s not to like about food?” La Pierre said.
A group of 15 Americans were on this Gastronomic Nogales day-trip, and one of the day’s highlights was a meal at La Llorona, a cozy restaurant with star-shaped lanterns twinkling from the ceiling, a hand-drawn chalkboard menu and, most importantly, really tasty food.
“I had birria, which is a soup that’s complex with chiles and delicious beef. I could eat this probably every day,” said Quince Affolter, a visitor from Portland, Oregon.
The upscale menu at La Llorona is not the cheese-covered fare standard at many Mexican restaurants in the US. This meal, and all of the stops on this tour, were focused on challenging stereotypes about Mexico.
As it happens, these Americans walked over the border for this tour the day after US President Donald Trump declared a national emergency to build a border wall.
Affolter said, it doesn’t feel to her like there’s an emergency, “Certainly my experience in being here, everything is easy and very normal. It’s fun to see the streets so alive.”
This border community isn’t totally free of crime, though. Last month, US Customs and Border Protection made their largest seizure ever of the drug fentanyl in Nogales. Trump tweeted his thanks to the border agents who made the drug bust, while critics pointed out that the bust happened at a legal point of entry, and a border wall couldn’t have stopped that.
Alex La Pierre stops on a sidewalk in Nogales, Mexico to tell American tourists about some of the area’s history.
But La Pierre said, when debates over drugs and violence dominate the news about the border, Americans only hear a tiny part of a much bigger story.
“We really see this work as being on the front trenches of changing minds about the border region,” he said.
Most people who come on Border Community Alliance tours are Arizona “snowbirds,” retirees from colder parts of the country, who spend winter months in the Southwest. La Pierre said that puts his organization in a unique position to be able to spread good news about the borderlands across the US.
“We basically charge them with the homework that you’re now a goodwill ambassador for Mexico because you’ve had a firsthand experience,” he said. “So go back to Minnesota or go back to New Hampshire, wherever you live, half of the year, and please share with your neighbors.”
Some Nogalenses wish that message would reach more Americans too. Alma Grijalva runs a casual fish taco shop called El Pescadito, the first stop on this gastronomic tour. She said she gets a lot of American diners, especially on the weekends. She’s happy to serve them, she said, but wishes relations between Americans and Mexicans weren’t so politically uncomfortable right now.
“We’re neighbors, we’re almost brothers, we should be fine,” she said in Spanish.
From El Pescadito, the tour group rode in a van through Nogales, all the while hearing the history of the area from La Pierre. The tour passed busy shopping areas, sports arenas and schools — signs of a city whose population has exploded since the 1990s. That’s due, in large part, to manufacturing jobs and an economy built around cross-border trade.
Later in the afternoon, the tour stopped at Cerveceria Argova, a new craft brewery. Andres Vega, the 20-something Nogalense entrepreneur who started the business, said he wants Americans to see that his hometown is a great place to visit.
Andres Vega pours beer for American visitors on a gastronomic tour of Nogales with the Arizona nonprofit, Border Community Alliance.
“We need to change that perspective from the USA that Mexico is so different and difficult, right? But you can come, and get really good food and really good beer,” he said.
The trip across the border wasn’t completely hassle-free. To get back into the US, the American visitors waited in line, presented their passports and answered a custom agent’s questions before crossing back through that razor wire-covered gate.
This month, the city council of Nogales, Arizona passed a resolution demanding the federal government remove the razor wire, saying their city isn’t a war zone or a prison.
That’s something that’s become clear to border tourist Peg Wickliffe. After a day of tacos, craft beer and history lessons, she said all of the anxiety surrounding the border feels misplaced to her.
“It’s just like going down the road — it is going down the road. I mean, they’re our neighbors, this is our neighborhood, if there wasn’t a wall,” she said.
After all, Wickliffe said, it’s pretty hard to feel scared of someone once you’ve sat down for a meal with them.
The backlog of applications from legal residents waiting to become U.S. citizens has skyrocketed, and immigration rights groups are demanding answers, saying the delays are of special concern in an election year.
More than 14,000 Arizonans are legal permanent residents who qualify to become U.S. citizens but are waiting for their applications to be processed, according to the
National Partnership for New Americans.
Ben Monterroso, executive director of the civic engagement group Mi Familia Vota, says the approval process used to take just a few months, but now, some applicants wait nearly two years.
“They’re going to continue paying taxes and obeying the law, but they will not be able to participate in the democracy of this country – meaning not eligible to vote – and a lot of people are looking to express their voice at the ballot box,” he states.
Monterroso’s organization is one of several that this week, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to find out why U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services operations have slowed so dramatically.
The application backlog has grown by nearly 90 percent since 2016. In Arizona, the rate of increase has been even higher.
Monterroso says more than 700,000 legal permanent residents across the country have gone through a lengthy process and paid hundreds of dollars in application fees, with little response from the government.
“They already have legal, permanent residence for more than five years, and filled out all the paperwork that’s required to become a citizen, and have shown that they are eligible,” he points out. “So, we need to figure out what is taking so long.”
Mayors of 46 U.S. cities and 50 members of Congress have written to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to demand action on the backlog. That list includes Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, and Reps. Ruben Gallego and Raul Grijalva of Arizona.
The Verde River, which flows through central Arizona, is a critical source of water in this arid state. So, The Nature Conservancy in Arizona looked for a strategy to reduce demand on the river, especially in low-flowing summer months.
The answer is beer – or at least, the barley that goes into making beer. Barley is planted in winter, then harvested in June, so it doesn’t require as much water during Arizona’s driest months.
But Kim Schonek, Verde River Program director for The Nature Conservancy says barley isn’t a very high-value crop.
“A farmer isn’t going to make the choice to grow a crop that pays less just because it uses less water, as long as that water is available to them,” she explains.
So, The Nature Conservancy worked with a local entrepreneur to open Arizona’s first malt house. Malting is the process that gets barley ready to be made into beer, and barley used for beer sells at higher prices. Schonek hopes having a malt house right in the Verde Valley will give farmers an incentive to grow more of the water-wise crop.
Schonek says several of Arizona’s craft breweries have already expressed interest in buying barley that’s locally grown and malted. And two farms in the Verde Valley have already started growing the grain.
Schonek estimates if 10 percent of Verde Valley farmland was converted to barley from other crops like corn that demand more water, that would keep about 200 million gallons of water in the Verde River during the summer months.
“This is an opportunity for us as Arizonans to step up and manage a water supply in a way that’s beneficial for us, as the people that live in the watershed and the people downstream that benefit from it,” she says.
The malt house started operations this spring, and Schonek says the first batch of Arizona-malted barley should be finished at the end of this week.
New condo and apartment complexes under construction are a common sight in downtown Phoenix, but the project known as First Place AZ is different.
The $15.3 million apartment building, which will open this summer, is designed for adults with autism. The plan includes numerous safety features, as well as design elements such as quiet appliances to minimize sensory overload.
“First Place represents an innovative approach to housing for special populations,” said Denise Resnik, founder and president of First Place AZ, “and our bold vision is to ensure that housing and community options are as bountiful for people with autism and other neural diversities as they are for everyone else.”
Resnik said the apartment community is the result of nearly 20 years of research and planning by the nonprofit Southwest Autism Research and Resource Center. She hopes Phoenix can be a leader for other cities in accommodating people with autism.
Location was key to the design, she said. The apartments are convenient to medical facilities, community colleges and public transportation.
“Several people with autism and with other different abilities don’t drive,” she said, “and so, how do you get from your home to your big life? Transportation is very important, especially when mom and dad are no longer your wheels.”
First Place isn’t meant to be a group home or medical-care facility, but an apartment community that celebrates neurological diversity, Resnik said. Rent will start at $3,600 a month for a one-bedroom unit. Resnik acknowledged that it’s expensive, but the cost includes a number of in-house services. The building will have 24-hour support staff, and residents will have access to cooking classes, group activities and some health services.
“I think it’s going to be so cool, just being part of a greater community that’s very autism friendly,” said Lindsey Eaton, 24, who will be one of its first residents.
First Place is taking reservations for its 55 units. Doors are set to open in July.
Hate groups are on the rise in the U.S. and they increasingly see college campuses as prime recruiting ground.
UMass Amherst and Holyoke Community College are just two of dozens of college campuses to have been targeted by white nationalist propaganda in recent months. But finding the right way to respond to these groups can present a challenge to college administrators.
The fliers that appeared recently in a parking lot at UMass Amherst and on bulletin boards at Holyoke Community College showed black and white photos of European statues — like Michelangelo’s David — with slogans like “let’s become great again” and “protect your heritage.”
It’s the white nationalist group behind the fliers that has the schools concerned. They call themselves Identity Evropa, require members to be of European, “non-semitic” heritage. They take extreme views on immigration and promote pseudo-scientific theories about differences between races.
“Many of these groups are feeling emboldened by the current political climate and they are using the environment as a way to attempt to recruit college students,” said Robert Trestan, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.
The organization recently issued a report showing white nationalist groups have scaled up their recruiting efforts at colleges and universities. Racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim fliers have been found on more than 100 campuses across the country since last fall.
“It’s important for leadership on campuses to make it very, very clear that their campuses do not represent these views, and these kinds of views are not welcome on their campus,” Trestan said.
But how schools choose to respond can raise concerns too, according to Azhar Majeed, with FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free speech watchdog group.
“What I hope not to see on college campuses, is for universities to respond by saying certain types of speech, even though they’re protected by the First Amendment, will be subject to censorship or punishment,” Majeed said.
Finding a balance between rejecting discrimination while allowing for free speech is exactly what Holyoke Community College faced when fliers appeared on its campus this month.
“Some students are very concerned about how safe this campus is for them, especially students who belong to underrepresented group that are being targeted by these organizations,” said Yanina Vargas-Arriaga, the college’s vice president for student affairs. “And other students are concerned about whether we’re going to be taking an approach where we’re going to be silencing ideas.”
Ultimately, Holyoke Community College decided to address the incident with a school-wide email from the college president, which outlined a commitment to diversity and respectful exchange of ideas. Vargas-Arriaga said HCC also plans to host events on campus to reiterate those messages.
And colleges around the country facing these situations have had a range of reactions.
When white supremacist fliers were left outside the offices of African American faculty at Indiana University, the school notified the FBI. The president of UT Austin hosted a town hall meeting in response to anti-Muslim fliers that appeared at that school.
At UMass Amherst, the student affairs office reached out privately to multicultural groups on campus. UMass spokesman Ed Blaguszewski said university leadership considered the group that left the fliers probably wanted to get attention and create controversy.
“There is a balancing act,” he said. “You want to denounce — absolutely — the message, but you don’t want to create so much public notice that you’re advancing that agenda.”
At both UMass and Holyoke Community College, most of the fliers were left in places where fliers aren’t allowed to be posted, regardless of content, so they were quickly removed. Neither school knows who posted them, either.
And Vargas-Arriaga said there’s a big difference between that kind of messaging, and students backing up their own ideas and presenting them respectfully.
“Anonymous speech has no standing in our community, but when you stand behind your thoughts and your ideas, then we will sit down and engage,” she said.
Exchanging ideas, Vargas-Arriaga said, is what college is all about.
Enrollment matters a lot for a school like Hampshire College, with just about 1400 students and a relatively small endowment. So Hampshire had some budget problems this year, when the student body came up about 60 students short.
“We under-enrolled,” said Meredith Twombly, dean of enrollment and retention at Hampshire. “We missed when we guessed what our yield was going to be.”
Twombly said the 51-year-old college changed its admissions process over the last few years, trying to become more selective.
“These are just things that happen when you make a dramatic shift in your strategy,” she said. “It takes a while for things to get predictable.”.
At the time, the school also cited campus protests over racism as a potential factor in the decline. Fewer applicants chose to attend, and more students than expected decided not to return.
This year, Twombly and her team changed their strategy again. They made more conservative estimates and hoped to see enrollment pick back up next fall.
But right as application season kicked off, Hampshire College was all over cable news.
A few days after the election, the American flag at the center of campus was burned. The school president later had the flag taken down, saying it was distracting from a larger conversation about the school’s values.
Veterans protested, politicians complained, the flag went back up and the situation drew a lot of attention to the small college.
Discussing the situation on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly made this prediction:
“Well, they’re done. The college is done,” O’Reilly said. “It’s a laughing stock.”
But could a controversy like this actually have an impact on Hampshire’s enrollment?
Jonathan Smith is an assistant professor of economics at Georgia State University. He’s the co-author of a new research paper that measures how a scandal on a college campus can impact applications to the school.
“Students certainly do respond to scandals negatively,” Smith said.
Smith’s research shows that just one negative mention of a college in the New York Times can reduce applications 5 percent. A long-form article can cause a decline of 10 percent.
“So there’s sort of this increasing relationship where you see the more media attention there was around a particular scandal, the fewer applications the school would get the following year,” he said.
But they key word in Smith’s research is “scandal.” He’s focused on serious crimes like sexual assault or violent hazing. The situation at Hampshire, though controversial, doesn’t quite fit the bill.
“I think what happened at Hampshire College has the potential to attract some applicants, but also deter some applicants, so it’s not exactly obvious what’s going to happen on net,” Smith said.
It’s an out-of-the-ordinary situation and Hampshire is an out-of-the-ordinary college. The school has no majors, no letter grades and it was founded on a philosophy of alternative education.
Adam Metsch is president of a private college advising company called College Advisor of New England. He’s helped students and families through the process of picking colleges for more than 20 years. Metsch said a school’s atmosphere is one of the most important things for applicants to consider.
“It’s not about elite kids getting into elite schools; it’s about understanding what the dominant culture of a school is,” he said. “Not just size, location, major, but political climate, for example.”
Metsch said Hampshire College is not the kind of school just any student would want to apply to, and those who do apply are probably expecting something a little different.
Dana Maple Feeney is a third-year at Hampshire and the unique atmosphere is exactly why she decided to enroll.
“I showed up and I just felt so much different than I felt anywhere else — just hearing people talk about what they were studying,” Feeney said. “And I don’t think anything really would have changed that feeling.”
Feeney said her younger brother is looking at colleges right now and she’s encouraging him to consider Hampshire.
Meanwhile, Twombly hopes that — for new applicants — Hampshire’s distinctive campus culture will outweigh recent criticisms of the school.
Hampshire’s first two admissions deadlines, for early decision and early action candidates, have already passed. Twombly said so far, those show about a 5 percent increase in applications over last year.
“That was my first indicator that, you know, this might not have a big impact,” she said.
The protests at Hampshire have dispersed. The news trucks have left. Pundits have moved onto the next subject.
And, Twombly said she feels optimistic looking ahead to the college’s biggest application deadline in mid-January.
Easthampton, Massachusetts, was a thriving mill town during the industrial revolution, but when manufacturing left the city, its industrial landscape remained. In recent years, Easthampton’s old mill buildings have been turned into loft-style apartments and art galleries. And now, an indoor park.
Mill180 Park is inside one of Easthampton’s old mill buildings. Owner Michael Sundel chose Easthampton for his first indoor park partly because of the city’s industrial real estate.
At the east end of the Pleasant Street mill district in Easthampton, there’s an imposing, red brick, factory building. But walk through the doors, into Mill 180 Park and you feel the crunch of artificial turf under your feet, you hear kids playing, you see natural light streaming through the windows.
The whole thing has visitors like Patrick Sullivan feeling a little surprised.
“You don’t expect to see this when you walk in a mill building,” Sullivan said.
His friend, Mark Plazcek, agreed.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “I was impressed when we came up here and walked in, it’s beautiful.”
The 14,000-square-foot space opened its doors in early September. In the middle, a cafe serves snacks and small plates along with beer and wine. Hydroponic planters throughout the room grow vegetables for the restaurant. Visitors can sit at picnic tables, stretch out or play lawn games.
Michael Sundel is the owner of Mill180 Park. He has a background in software design and has always had a fascination with parks, so he decided to combine his interests to create a technology-driven indoor park.
“It’s a metaphoric outside park, so even though you know you’re inside there’s enough detail and features to make you slowly forget that,” said Michael Sundel, the owner and creator of the park.
Sundel lives in Virginia, where he runs a software company. But he’s always had a fascination with city parks. About two years ago, he had an idea to try to combine his interests to create a futuristic public space that would be usable year-round, regardless of weather.
“So I thought…obviously we don’t have thousands of acres, but if we use technology and good design, we can possibly put it in a building and it would be as useful as a large park,” he said.
Sundel became familiar with Easthampton when his daughter was going to boarding school nearby. He said he specifically chose the city for its perfect combination of empty industrial space and a population that has a history of supporting community projects and the arts.
“Even around here there are cities with huge empty mills and they don’t have the population to fill it. I think Easthampton is fortunate in that respect,” Sundel said.
Sundel and his wife have invested more than $2 million in the project so far. That has gone toward things like custom-designed furniture and high-end hydroponic gardening systems — everything designed to make the space feel bigger and more outdoorsy.
“We weren’t trying to rush it,” he said. “We were trying to get it right.”
Anyone can come spend the day at Mill 180 Park, use the free Wi-Fi or lie on the turf, and no one has to buy anything. There is the cafe, but Sundel isn’t counting on much revenue from food and drink sales.
“Running a restaurant is horrible, I’ll be blunt,” Sundel said, with a laugh.
That’s especially true in comparison to the highly efficient world of software that he’s used to, he said. And software is more what Sundel expects to keep the park open. He’s designing a program to manage his employees along with the indoor gardening equipment and the restaurant inventory. He hopes to turn a profit selling that software.
He’s also hoping the park’s hydroponic planters might inspire visitors to try indoor gardening, in which case, he could market some of that equipment.
But Sundel emphasized his main goal is to keep the space feeling like a public park and encouraging visitors to relax and interact. So far, that seems to be happening.
“I think it’s serving it’s purpose as an indoor park,” said visitor Samantha Battaglia. “There are people here lounging on the turf as though it’s a grassy lawn outside.”
Battaglia stopped by for a cup of coffee recently with her friend Caitlin Dwyer-Huppert, who said they’d likely be back.
“There’s potential for how we could use this, you know, coming and playing games to blow off steam,” Dwyer-Huppert said .
Michael Sundel said whether the business model will work or not is still an “open question.” But if it does, he hopes to bring more indoor parks to other cities around the U.S. in the near future.
New England has long held a reputation as a hub for higher education. Just in Massachusetts, colleges and universities employ more than 120,000 people.
The experience of working at a college can vary greatly campus-to-campus, and that includes employee benefits like parental leave for staff and faculty. One college in the Pioneer Valley is trying to set a new standard.
“This is my first child and it’s been a roller coaster ride,” Amanda Huntleigh said with a laugh.
Huntleigh works as a choral director and lecturer works as a choral director and lecturer in the music department at Smith College. But since August, she’s been focused on her new son, Aramis.
“He’s only at the point developmentally right now where he can sometimes be away from me,” she said last month at her home in Northampton. “And the thought of having to drop him off for 40 hours a week is horrifying.”
But Aramis isn’t headed to daycare just yet. Huntleigh is one of the first Smith College employees to take advantage of the school’s new parental leave policy.
This summer, Huntleigh was pregnant when the private women’s college announced it would extend paid leave for a child’s primary caregiver. Staff, who had eight weeks paid leave before, now get 12 weeks paid. And faculty who previously had been relieved of teaching for a semester, now get a break from administrative duties, too.
The policy also extends leave times and reduces teaching loads for non-primary caregivers.
“My first thought was, ‘This was awesome before and now it’s even better,’” Huntleigh said.
As of 2015, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 14 percent of university, college and junior college employees had access to paid family leave. That’s slightly higher than the U.S. workforce as a whole.
And that number has an impact on the profession, according to Mary Ann Mason. She’s a law professor at UC berkeley and co-author of the book, Do Babies Matter: Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower.
“The baby issue is the main reason why academics drop out of the pipeline,” Mason said. “Often at the graduate school level.”
In the last decade, Mason said, she’s seen more universities catch onto the trend of increasing family leave time, which she said is important for keeping women in academia. But she said traditionally, in this competitive profession, women have been expected to keep up with male colleagues at any cost.
Kathleen McCartney, president of Smith College, knows that first-hand.
When I was an assistant professor, there was no parental leave policy,” she said. “I did ask for a course reduction, and I was told it would not be fair to the men in my department.”
Kathleen McCartney, president of Smith College sits in her office. McCartney decided to expand the parental leave policies at the college after writing an op-ed in the Boston Globe on the issue.
In the three decades since, McCartney said, not enough has changed. That concerns her not just as a mother and grandmother, but as a researcher. She’s spent the bulk of her career as a psychologist studying early childhood development.
“In the United States, there is really no guarantee of paid parental leave…although some businesses do offer it, but not enough and not for long enough,” she said.
In 2015, McCartney published an opinion piece in the Boston Globe arguing just that, and that op-ed prompted her to reconsider Smith’s policies. Now, she said, she hopes Smith’s change might lead the way for other schools.
Among the Five Colleges — Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith and UMass — family leave policies vary widely school-to-school, from a few weeks to whole semesters, unpaid to fully paid, and with different benefits for faculty or staff.
Amherst College, for example, offers staff four weeks of paid leave for the birth or adoption of a child. Staff could get to 12 weeks at full pay, but they would need to combine benefits such as the school’s short-term disability program, sick time or vacation days.
Mason said there are plenty of reasons why institutions are hesitant to adopt lengthier leave policies.
“It is expensive for universities to offer lavish absences,” Mason said. “It does slow projects down. There’s no easy way to say that everything’s going to be the same when someone’s out for six months or six weeks.”
That’s especially true in higher education, where there’s already pressure to keep research output high and tuition prices low. But McCartney said she’s optimistic Smith’s new policy will accommodate new parents without too much disruption to the classroom — or the budget.
“In most cases, we’re not replacing faculty and staff, instead other people are taking on other responsibilities,” she said.
Amanda Huntleigh said she is grateful for that flexibility.
“Planning to have a baby rarely fits in with the academic career path, so we finally just decided we were doing it whether it made the most sense or not,” Huntleigh said.
Huntleigh is 35, and she and her husband waited a few years to have a child. She said it’s just a coincidence that Aramis arrived right in time for Smith’s policy change.
“Having never done this any other way,” she said, “I don’t know how people who don’t have this time manage it.”
