Arizona faces housing crisis and has three thousand evictions per month | World and Science

With a bulletproof vest and gun on his belt, Lennie McCloskey opens his briefcase and analyzes the court orders: one, two… eleven evictions to be carried out. “It’s a slow day,” says the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona.

With rent prices soaring due to the Covid-19 pandemic and an inflated housing market, there is no shortage of work for officers like McCloskey in this southern state.

“I typically do 19 to 25 evictions a day,” said McCloskey, one of 26 sheriffs in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous with 4.5 million residents.

The monthly average is 3,000 evictions in Maricopa, where the city of Phoenix is ​​located, one of the fastest growing in the United States and a location considered fundamental to the electoral dispute between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the November presidential elections.

Rising prices, falling purchasing power and population growth create a problematic situation.

“What’s particularly dramatic about Phoenix is ​​how expensive it has become and how quickly it has happened,” said Glenn Farley, director of the Common Sense Institute, which conducts economic research.

To pay a mortgage in metro Phoenix, you have to work about 68 hours a week, Farley explains, compared to 40 hours in 2019. “That’s more than a 50% increase,” he emphasizes.

“I can not afford”

In 19 years of executing eviction orders, McCloskey has seen just about everything: houses turned into drug depots, people subletting to others or leaving minors alone to avoid being evicted, baseball players abandoning all their belongings on site.

But what the sheriff has encountered most in recent years are people who can’t pay a month’s rent, reason enough to be the target of an eviction order.

“I have seen people who work, who, in order to try to support themselves, have two jobs, or several families who share the same apartment… their salaries do not keep up with the rent”, describes McCloskey, 68 years old.

Farley puts numbers to this perception. “Salaries increased a lot, between 20% and 30%. The problem is that only inflation absorbed this increase and housing costs increased between 40 and 60%.”

Alex, a mechanic in his 30s who McCloskey had to evict due to a two-month delay in paying his rent, suffers this reality firsthand.

“I have two jobs and that’s not enough,” he told AFP, as he unpacked his things from the two-bedroom house where he lived with his wife, daughter and dog Chester.

“Endless Problem”

Arizona is in the sights of Biden and Trump in the race for the White House. The Democratic president won by around 10,000 votes in 2020 in this state which, with a strong Republican presence, promises to be the scene of a political battle.

Issues such as abortion and migration have an impact on the population, as does the economic situation.

“We have the highest housing costs in the history of the state. Rent is down a little, but it’s still historically very high, and a third factor is the homelessness crisis,” Farley summarized.

The economist believes that the increase in the number of homeless people, which reaches thousands in Phoenix, is not an exclusive consequence of the real estate situation and requires multidisciplinary solutions.

But it is undeniable that there is a housing crisis, caused in part by the displacement during the pandemic of thousands of people from states with a higher cost of living, such as neighboring California, who were looking for more space at a lower price.

The shutdown of activities affected construction, a sector that currently records a deficit of around 65 thousand units, according to economist estimates.

“We have an increase in demand, an increase in population and a collapse in supply. The result was this rapid increase in prices”, he explains.

The local legal situation governing the real estate sector, as well as rising raw material prices, Farley adds, have slowed the construction of affordable housing.

The paradox, he says, is that the state needs to attract migrants to boost its economic growth, something he considers unfeasible as Phoenix loses its reputation as an economic destination.

“It makes everything harder for people,” McCloskey says. “It seems like a never-ending problem.”