Arizona is growing rapidly. How are cities preparing for the heat of the future?Arizona’s heat and housing crisis:Statewide | Metro Phoenix (coming soon) | Farmworker housing (coming soon) | Building on the reservation (coming soon) | Solutions (coming soon)Warm and steady, Arizona is famous for its climate.Here, blazing blue skies, statuesque saguaros and temperatures that much of the year feel like the embrace of a heated blanket combine with business-friendly politics, swanky golf destinations and the second-most popular U.S. national park to fuel a blistering population growth rate of 13% since 2010. The state boasts four of the top 10 sunniest cities in America and five of its fastest-growing. Many of the 1 million new residents hail it all as a cause for celebration.But the state’s popularity isn’t all that is blistering. In summer, that blanket’s embrace tightens amid temperatures that can exceed 120 degrees. Increasingly, new and longtime residents find themselves woefully unprepared.As home to America’s hottest big city, many of its highest temperature records and a July 2023 heat wave that made international headlines — leading some to question when Phoenix will become unlivable — the Grand Canyon State is on the domestic frontlines of the climate crisis.With a shortage of 270,000 housing units according to the latest estimate from the Arizona Department of Housing, it is also a front-runner in the nationwide housing crisis.Combined, these two crises are lethal. In 2022, 425 people died from heat-related illness in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous central area. An estimated 42% of them were unhoused, some newly so, forced by rising rents and competition for shelter to endure summer temperatures that often fail to drop below 90 degrees at night. Others, many of them poor or elderly, succumb to heat each year while inside homes with insufficient cooling.Solutions to these dual crises exist but are typically considered separately. The officials designing shade structures and community heat relief programs are not often in the same rooms as those signing deals for new residential developments.Geography is also a concern. While construction sprawls across metro Phoenix, housing projects are lacking in some outlying parts of Arizona with the greatest vulnerability. In Yuma near the border with Mexico, many farmworkers labor outdoors in extreme heat only to return t …
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