H ousing in the Valley is booming, not that most of the people who live here are benefiting from it. Phoenix-area residents don’t have to travel far to catch the telltale signs of home construction. Throughout the Valley, glitzy new apartment complexes are going up on what used to be empty lots. On the ever-expanding fringes of Maricopa County’s urban sprawl — Goodyear and Buckeye to the west, Gilbert to the east, everything above State Route 101 to the north — civilization is arriving in the form of new developments filled with large, spacious single-family homes. Arizona has a major housing shortage — we’re shy at least 120,000 units, per the Common Sense Institute — but surely the ubiquitous sight of cranes and cement trucks represents a turning of the tide. Indeed, the Valley is building with relative abandon. A January study by the Georgetown University Center on Poverty and Inequality found that new housing units (specifically, those built from 2010 to 2023) represent nearly 15% of the housing stock in the Phoenix metropol- itan area. For the U.S. as a whole, that average is 11.4%. The housing is being built. So why is it so damn hard to find an affordable place to live? That’s the question the Georgetown study set out to answer. The study, titled “Abundance for Who?” — ahem, whom — looked at six major metropolitan areas that have produced more new housing than the national average since 2010. Phoenix made the list, along with Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. The Georgetown analysis found that while those cities are producing plenty of new housing, that housing seems geared toward a certain well-heeled slice of the income spectrum. In the 1980s, two-thirds of new “owner- occupied units” — read: single-family homes — had three or fewer bedrooms. From 2010 to 2023, however, more than 58% of new homes had four bedrooms or more. The inverse has been happening in the rental market. From 2000 to 2009, nearly 72% of new apartments had two or more bedrooms. Since 2010, 44.3% of new apartments were one-bedrooms or studios. If you’re a family looking for a home, the market is serving up two unworkable options. You can choose a huge, fancy house that is out of your price range. Or you can cram into a tiny new apartment aimed not at families but at young, professional (and childless) renters. “New houses for ownership keep getting bigger,” said Liz Hipple, the managing director of policy and research for the Georgetown Center. “It also suggests that there’s going to be a mismatch between the supply and families’ needs. A small studio in an apartment building may be the right thing for you earlier in your life, but if you want to have a family, you’re going to need more space.” That’s certainly the case in Phoenix, with its booming suburbs and its glut of new apartment construction. Very little of the new housing is actually serving the large segment of the population that is getting pinched by the affordability crisis. When the Georgetown study looked at trends in rent increases in Phoenix, it found that rent for moderate-, middle- and high- income renters went down 5.3% since 2015. But for extremely low-income renters, rent spiked by 26.7%. According to a study by Construction Coverage, the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Phoenix is $2,004 in 2026. The median household income in Phoenix at just north of $81,000 in 2024, per U.S. Census Bureau data, meaning a family making that much would spend roughly 30% of its income just on rent. The average rent for a three-bedroom apartment in Phoenix — $2,672 — would eat up nearly 40% of what the median-earning family would make in a year. No wonder Maricopa County has seen its most eviction filings ever in the past two years. The problem Why is the market churning out housing that doesn’t actually meet the demands of the market? You might be tempted to blame the builders. But you’d be wrong, says Nicole Newhouse, the executive director of the Arizona Housing Coalition. “It’s easy to say it’s the greed of the builders, but it really isn’t,” Newhouse said. “It’s about construction math.” When the market is left to work on its own, she said, it builds big houses and big complexes with tiny apartments. When building a house, it doesn’t cost all that much more in materials and labor to add an extra 2,000 square feet, but those larger homes can sell for way more. As for apart- ment complexes, developers have little incentive to build affordable units when higher-end apartments will generate more revenue. After all, the cost of building them is pretty much the same either way. In Phoenix, the market is so unbalanced that new, high-priced housing keeps coming online, even though there aren’t enough people to buy or rent it. The Georgetown study found that 9.4% of housing units built in Phoenix since 2010 are sitting vacant, a higher rate than for older homes. In fact, Phoenix had the highest new-unit vacancy rate among the cities the study examined. Builders would rather wait for deep-pock- eted renters or homebuyers than build homes for families on tighter budgets. “A lot of them end up sitting empty because the landlords would rather rent for an extremely high price than lower it to an actual market-clearing price,” Hipple said. Who that housing is serving, Newhouse says, is often not Arizonans. The Phoenix area continues to be a draw for people moving from higher-cost states like California and Illinois. For them, Arizona is an affordable paradise, where their Southern California home equity can buy a huge home in the suburbs. Lots of housing is being built in Phoenix — but only for BY ZACH BUCHANAN (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
