Researchers presented a rosy outlook for Scottsdale’s affordable housing situation at last week’s city council meeting. They identified a “surplus” of moderately-priced apartments, for example, and found that Scottsdale had relatively more units available for newcomers than similar cities such as Tempe and Pasadena, California.
It’s not just newcomers whose earnings can't pass muster in Scottsdale's out-of-whack housing market, either. “When you cut off economic development, young folks, families with young children and workforce talent, you are going to have to either increase taxes or decrease services,” Councilmember Tammy Caputi said. “ you push all of that away then we're going to have to change the way the city generates revenue. We're going to pay for everything somehow.
"If we don't take into account the pipeline when we're approving apartments, then you create an opposite and equally bad problem where you have too many units," Councilmember Solange Whitehead said."And there are a lot of real estate economists out there saying we're going to have a big oversupply of houses because once the baby boomers sell their houses, that's a lot of houses.
“The rest of them are all just planned. Those are just working through the zoning process the design process,” said Danny Court, who analyzed the pipeline as part of an earlier housing study commissioned by the pro-development group Home Arizona. “Just because they're in the pipeline doesn't mean that they are going to be coming online any time soon. They could take years.”
I moved from N Phoenix to E Scottsdale 4 years ago. This is the result of pure NIMBYism from people who *say* they don't want the traffic, we don't have the water, etc but it really comes down to the disgraceful fact that they don't want lower or middle income people living here.
Just all the Californians turning AZ into California. Everyone literally saw this coming for over a decade.