I'm sympathetic to folks in rural or suburban settings who, for lack of money or wheels or some other key variable, end up isolated and vulnerable, living at the edge of oblivion. Reminds me a lot of my childhood and teen years. And because of the housing crisis so many people find themselves in precisely those circumstances now. We are raising a new generation of damaged kids - maybe the largest cohort of damaged kids, ever:
Once a sleepy farming town with a few hundred people in the middle of nowhere, Maricopa is now an exurb of about 40,000 people in the middle of nowhere. Surrounded by reservation land and desert scrub, it is an island of homes in an ocean of desert.
Set between Tucson and Phoenix, Pinal County has long been thought of as the place where the two cities would merge, the center of Arizona's coming "Sun Corridor."
When housing was hot, rows and rows of rooftops went up in places like Maricopa and unincorporated Queen Creek. But little else followed. No jobs or new roads. Little retail. Few services. Just homes.
...Like much of Pinal, foreclosures are king in Maricopa. Distressed homes made up 80 percent of sales there at the end of last year - and that's an improvement from when things were really bad. The median sales price has fallen from $260,000 in 2006 to about $110,000.
..."There's an identical model next door selling for half the value that I paid for this house," said Marvin Brown, a Maricopa city councilman who bought in Pulte Homes' Cactus at Senita subdivision for $325,000.
"Half the value. That's painful. That's like Mike Tyson hitting you in the jaw in his best days."
...Scenes like this have been playing out all over the country and the state, and in pockets in and around Tucson. Marana and Sahuarita, for example, are pocked by foreclosures, stalled projects and big homes in the middle of nowhere that people paid way too much for.
But what's striking about Pinal County is the sheer volume of the housing crisis. It's not just one neighborhood, one street, one failed subdivision; it's entire failed communities.
At its worst, Pinal is a lunar landscape of unfinished developments where streets dead-end at dirt, playgrounds were built for neighborhoods that don't exist and vacant model homes idle in the dust.
"This is totally uncharted territory. Probably the closest you could come to it is the Depression," said Jay Q. Butler, a real estate professor at Arizona State University.
...The downturn has been just as bad in Maricopa County, and pretty tough in Tucson, but at least those places have jobs and services.
Because jobs are scarce in Pinal County - there are only about 50,000 non-farm jobs there - residents battle slogging commutes to Phoenix on roads that turn into parking lots at rush hour. There is little to do and few places to buy stuff. Peak home values may never return, and Pinal's leaders have no clear vision for recovery other than more cheap houses and sunshine.
"A lot of communities in Pinal County don't have the basic fundamentals in place," Butler said. "Water is a key issue. They have to get an economic base. … They have to put in more streets, and in today's world that's very expensive and there's not a lot of money available."
...But now that growth has slowed, Maricopa has pinned its future on the proposed, and somewhat forgotten, Interstate 11 that would connect Phoenix to Las Vegas. The proposed route would go right by Maricopa and would attract the same type of development that has popped up alongside new freeways in the Phoenix area, Maricopa Mayor Anthony Smith said.
...While Ingram makes Interstate 11 sound like a done deal, Pinal County Supervisor Pete Rios said there is neither the political will nor the money to make it happen. "It's a pipe dream that some people are still talking about," he said. "It is dead in the water."
..."Arizona was always sort of built on the economic model of cheap land, cheap houses and sunshine. So the reassuring argument is we are back to having cheap houses, and the sunshine never went away," said Grady Gammage Jr., a zoning lawyer and senior fellow at ASU's Morrison Institute for Public Policy.
But "by having no dominant industry other than cheap houses and sunshine, we're highly at risk in a changed economy and changed world."
...A sad irony, of course, is that while growth might represent a bright future for Pinal, it does nothing to help the struggling residents there now: the people who bought into the bright future in the first place and have been marooned in the suburban desert.
"We bought here because it was a place that was affordable. We couldn't afford anything in Gilbert or Chandler or anywhere close to work," said Jon Cox, who lived in unincorporated Queen Creek for five years. "And we liked it out here at the time. It was new."
Cox made those comments in March when foreclosure was looming large. He lost his home in May, and has since put Pinal in his rearview mirror, moving his family to Gilbert, where he rents.
"For losing the house," he said, "I feel like I am a number."
And in Pinal County, the heart of Arizona's housing crisis, that's just what he was.
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