These census tracts had statistically significant high-hardship clustering in both 2013 and 2019. The pattern is not random: a Global Moran’s I of 0.683 confirms that hardship is spatially concentrated, not scattered. Tracts in this category share infrastructure deficits, limited employment access, and concentrated poverty that reinforce one another across neighborhood boundaries.

Implication: Individual-level interventions alone are unlikely to move the needle. Place-based, multi-sector investment is required.

There are two major corridors within Maricopa County where high-hardship tracts are clustered: Central Phoenix, extending northwest to Glendale, and Central Mesa, extending West to Northeastern Tempe.

These tracts were not significant hardship clusters in 2013 but became statistically significant by 2019, representing the spatial expansion of hardship beyond historically distressed cores. This is an early warning signal that hardship is spreading, not contained.

Displacement paradox: Some “improving” tracts nearby may be gentrifying, pushing lower-income households outward into these emerging clusters. Declining hardship scores do not necessarily mean existing residents are better off.

There are several emerging spots in Maricopa County. Other than one lone emerging hot spot in Avondale, most of the emerging hot spots are adjacent to persistent hot spots. The emerging areas include: Central Tempe, East Tempe / West Mesa, East Mesa,East Tolleson,and North Mountain.

Some of these emerging hot spots have specific reasons, such as the closing of the Metrocenter mall in North Mountain. Since many of the emerging tracts are adjacent to persistent hot spot clusters, this suggests spreading hardship. Some tracts may possibly have paradoxical reasons for appearing as hot spots. Lack of access to a vehicle was included in the index due to the fact that, throughout much of Arizona, public transit options are comparatively limited. With the expansion of the light rail network into Central Mesa, it has become possible to live in those neighborhoods without access to a car, so the emerging hot spots there may simply represent people living and functioning without vehicles. However, given their location proximate to the clusters in Central Tempe and Central Mesa, those emerging clusters are more likely to represent hardship from two persistent clusters spreading into the neighborhoods between them.

The majority of tracts improved over the decade-long window. However, aggregate improvement masks significant variation: 31.3% of tracts worsened over the same period. The data cannot distinguish genuine economic uplift from population turnover: a tract with a declining hardship index may simply have replaced lower-income residents with higher-income newcomers.

Data limitation: Before drawing conclusions from improving scores, ground-truth verification through community engagement and displacement tracking is essential.

There has been significant gentrification in both Downtown Phoenix and Tempe, particularly along the light rail corridor, resulting in lower-income households being priced out while higher-income households move in. There have also been specific regions of the county with uneven economic development, such as the growth of tech companies like Intel in the East Valley and logistics/shipping like the Amazon warehouses in Avondale and Glendale, while other regions like South Mountain have experienced less economic development. The county-wide improvement is overall positive, but it hides clusters of persistent hardship.

Target: 152 Persistent Hot Spot tracts (17.1% of all Maricopa tracts): spatially concentrated, entrenched hardship confirmed by a Global Moran’s I of 0.683.

West-Central Workforce Corridor Initiative: The geographic corridor in West and Central Phoenix, along the I-17 and US-60 features persistent hardship levels. For example, census tract 1125.25, along the I-10 in Tolleson, had an EHI of 0.601 in 2019 and census tract 1124.14, along the Salt River in Laveen, had an EHI of 0.06. These tracts, like many others in the West Valley, contain or are close to major warehouse and logistic centers. However, low incomes persist despite job growth here. This region is close to jobs, but there is a mismatch for locals due to limited skills and access to educational opportunities. This initiative proposes: 1) locating job training and educational centers nearby, 2) partnering with these major employers to create paid apprenticeships, allowing low-income employees to upskill and increase their wages. This initiative would require coordination by the Arizona Commerce Authority between the companies and an education provider (ideally, the Maricopa County Community College District, so that participants could work towards formal credentials).

Target: 24 Emerging Hot Spot tracts (2.7% of all Maricopa tracts), new high-hardship clusters not present in 2013, signaling spatial expansion.

Maricopa Early Warning and Stabilization System: The emerging hot spots are concentrated in the Southeast Valley extending from Mesa to Apache Junction, on the edges of the West Valley in Avondale and Glendale, and in smaller pockets on the fringes of the central urban core. As some portions of Central Phoenix improve “on paper”, in reality lower-income households are being displaced outward, creating new clusters of hardship in previously moderate neighborhoods.

To prevent emerging hot spots from turning into persistent hot spots, Maricopa County, in association with the cities of Mesa and Glendale, should create a system to track rent increases, eviction filings and in-county migration of cost burdened households at the tract level. This system would trigger preemptive interventions such as targeted rental assistance, preservation of existing affordable housing and promotion of beneficial zoning codes to help mitigate displacement pressures before they are in full force. If they intervene at an early stage, these cities can avoid the spread of displacement before the economic hardship becomes persistent.

Evidence base: 57.2% of tracts improved (2013→2023) but 31.3% worsened; Moran’s I = 0.683 confirms strong spatial clustering persists.

Economic Hardship Early Warning and Coordination System: During the period from 2013-2023, Maricopa County experienced dynamic but unequal mobility. Hardship is spatially clustered, with a Moran’s I of 0.683, showing that clusters persisted and expanded outward through displacement. The Sankey diagram shows strong persistence at the top (most Q5 stayed Q5) as well as both upward and downward mobility between quintiles. Since the Sankey shows movement in neighborhood economic outlook and the trajectory map shows disadvantage is not random, what is needed is not a one time intervention but a system of continuous, spatially-aware monitoring to better respond to changing patterns in real time.

Maricopa County should establish a countywide Economic Hardship Early Warning and Coordination System to track and respond to dynamic, spatially clustered changes to neighborhood conditions. The County, in collaboration with the Maricopa Association of Governments, should build a shared data system that collects and integrates regularly tract-level indicators such as rent growth, eviction filings, income changes and demographic changes. This system should automatically trigger information sharing and should initiate cross-sector responses when tracts show early signs of decline or displacement. By creating an institutional, proactive system of data sharing and agency coordination, the county can shift from reactive intervention in persistent hot spots to proactive stabilization in at-risk neighborhoods.

The baseline EHI consists of 3 measures: Poverty + Unemployment + -ncome (inv.)

Current index: 5-component EHI: Poverty + Unemployment + Income (inv.) + Low Ed. Attainment + Transp. Disadvantage

Q1: What changed spatially?
Compare Hot Spot tract counts and cluster map patterns between your expanded index and the 3-component baseline. Did adding Low Ed. Attainment + Transp. Disadvantage shift which tracts or corridors are flagged?

Expanding the hardship index to include low educational attainment and transportation disadvantage increased the number of hot spot tracts statewide from 201 to 252, a net gain of 51 tracts (+25%). This indicates that the expanded index produced a meaningful expansion of identified hardship across the state. In the baseline map of Maricopa County, most of the identified hot spots were concentrated in Central Phoenix, in a dense, contiguous cluster. After the new variables were added to the index, the hot spot pattern gets a lot more spread out, showing an important expansion into outer ring transitional areas, especially in the West Valley and the Southeast Valley.

The newly flagged tracts are less concentrated in the urban core and are more common in vehicle dependent outer areas of the valley, suggesting that transportation barriers and lower educational attainment are driving hardship in areas that would not be identified by normal measures of hardship alone. Overall, the expanded index shifts the spatial pattern from a core-centric one to a more regionally distributed one, highlighting suburban disadvantage and showing the importance of structural barriers like mobility and human capital in shaping how we consider the economic hardship of MAricopa County.

Q2: What stayed the same?
Which Persistent Hot Spot areas appear robustly across index specifications? What does consistency across different index compositions tell us about the reliability of hardship diagnoses in those tracts?

Despite the expansion of the index, the core, persistent hot spot in Central Phoenix that extends westward to Glendale remains flagged across both index specifications. This are continues to appear as a dense, contiguous cluster of HH->HH tracts in both the baseline and the expanded maps. There are also smaller stable pockets of persistent hardship in South Phoenix and West Valley, showing that they too are not just artifacts produced by a specific index composition.

The consistency of these corridors across different index compositions suggests that the hardship in these areas is structurally entrenched rather than measurement dependent. Regardless of whether hardship is defined narrowly, using just the original index, or more broadly, with the addition of low educational attainment and transportation access, these tracts remain among the most disadvantaged. This robustness increases our confidence in diagnosing the hardship of these tracts. These neighborhoods likely face overlapping barriers including low incomes, limited economic mobility, lower educational attainment and limited access to opportunity.

The consistency of the hardship diagnosis also implies that these areas are less sensitive to short-term economic improvements or population shifts. It reflects long term spatial inequality where disadvantage was reinforced over time.

Q3: Policy implications of index choice
If a policymaker targeted place-based investments using the baseline index versus your expanded index, would resource allocation differ? Name specific tracts or geographic corridors and argue which composition better captures the full burden of economic hardship for policy purposes.

Resource allocation would differ meaningfully based on whether policymakers used the baseline or expanded index. If you use the baseline index, investments would be focused on the Central Phoenix corridor, extending west toward Glendale, and on parts of South Phoenix, where persistent hot spots are the most visible. These hot spots are driven by traditional indicators like poverty, unemployment or income. While these areas do warrant some investment, this approach (and this index) would largely prioritize the historic urban core, risking overlooking areas of emerging need elsewhere.

In contrast, the expanded index adds the indicators of low educational attainment and transportation disadvantage. This index would result in shifted resource priorities toward outer, transitional areas, especially in the West Valley (Glendale/Avondale) and the Southeast VAlley (Mesa, extending towards Apache Junction). These areas only appear as hot spots once the index incorporates structural barriers related to access and human capital. This suggests that hardships in these tracts is less about extreme poverty and more about limited pathways to opportunity. As a result, the expanded index would be more useful for policy, given that it better captures the full burden of economic hardship, since it identifies both concentrated, persistent poverty along with areas where structural conditions limit upward mobility. By incorporating transportation and educational access, it reveals a broader geography of disadvantage and enables policymakers to shift from reactive targeting of entrenched poverty to proactive intervention of at risk communities.