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 0.684 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.

Maricopa context: The 158 Persistent Hot Spot tracts cluster along three overlapping corridors — the South Phoenix–Central Avenue spine running south of the Salt River from downtown to Baseline Road and South Mountain (the 69-square-mile, 359,000-resident persistent-poverty area documented by the Economic Innovation Group, 2023, with a 31% poverty rate), the Maryvale–West Phoenix belt along Indian School and Thomas Roads (which absorbed roughly 5,000 displaced Hispanic families when the Golden Gate Barrio was razed for Sky Harbor expansion in the 1970s), and the East Buckeye Road industrial-residential belt between downtown and the airport. These corridors share documented infrastructure deficits — insufficient sidewalks, missing shade tree canopy, pre-1970 housing stock at roughly 53% of units, and bus routes that fail to connect residents to job centers — confirming that the index is detecting structurally embedded, not transient, disadvantage.

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.

Maricopa context: The 24 emerging clusters concentrate in two suggestive places — the outer-ring exurbs of West Maricopa (Avondale, Goodyear, Buckeye, far-west Glendale) where rapidly built low-income rental stock houses households priced out of the urban core, and the west Mesa–Apache Junction edge to the east. The displacement signal is strongest when these new clusters are traced back to nearby “improving” tracts in central Phoenix (Garfield, Eastlake Park, Roosevelt Row), where the Maricopa Association of Governments reports median home prices climbed 29% from 2020 to 2021 to over $398,000 and average rents have risen roughly 28% since 2019 — the fifth-fastest rate among major U.S. metros. The South Central Light Rail Extension (completed 2024) has accelerated speculative pressure along Central Avenue, and the no-vehicle and transportation-disadvantage indicators in this expanded index are precisely what light up red in the auto-dependent peripheral tracts where displaced households relocate.

The majority of tracts improved over the decade-long window. However, aggregate improvement masks significant variation: 31.1% 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.

Maricopa context: The county’s 53.7% improvement rate must be read against its defining demographic event of the past decade — Phoenix grew by more than 11% from 2010 to 2020 while the metro added roughly 820,000 residents against only 220,000 new housing units (City of Phoenix Housing Plan, 2020), forcing extreme price competition on existing stock. Aggregate tract-level improvement under these conditions can mean simply that prior residents were replaced by higher-income newcomers. The 17.8% of tracts in persistent hardship and the 31.1% that worsened tell the more important story: Maricopa is splitting into tracts where capital concentrates and tracts where it is being pulled out. Before any tract’s improvement is treated as policy success, the City of Phoenix and Maricopa Association of Governments should ground-truth through CDFI partners (Chicanos Por La Causa, Trellis) and community-based displacement tracking against rent-burden trajectories in the same tracts.

Target: 158 Persistent Hot Spot tracts (17.8% of all Maricopa tracts): spatially concentrated, entrenched hardship confirmed by a Global Moran’s I of 0.684.

Direct a coordinated $25–40 million, five-year investment of CDBG, CDFI Financial Assistance, and Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) dollars into the persistent-hardship corridor running from the South Central Light Rail Extension (Central Avenue and Baseline Road) through the South Phoenix Village and Estrella areas, with a parallel allocation along the Maryvale–West Phoenix belt (Indian School and Thomas Roads west of I-17). The City of Phoenix should serve as the CDBG entitlement lead in formal partnership with Chicanos Por La Causa (CPLC) — the largest CDFI in metropolitan Phoenix and the second-largest landholder in South Phoenix — and Trellis (formerly Neighborhood Housing Services Phoenix), channeling Section 4 capacity-building funds via LISC into community-controlled affordable housing on existing CPLC and city-owned parcels along the transit corridor, with a target of 800 deeply affordable units (≤ 60% AMI) anchored by community land trust deed restrictions. Layer this with HUD Thriving Communities technical assistance and Justice40-eligible federal heat-resilience infrastructure (shade canopy, cool roofs, transit-stop shelters), conditioned on binding clawback provisions if a tract-level rent-burden monitor shows displacement exceeding 15% over baseline within five years.

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

The 24 emerging clusters forming in West Maricopa’s exurban ring (Avondale–Goodyear–Buckeye and far-west Glendale) are the spatial echo of central-city gentrification: as rents in Garfield, Roosevelt Row, and South Phoenix climb roughly 28% since 2019, low-income households relocate to cheaper, auto-dependent peripheral tracts where the no-vehicle and SNAP indicators in the expanded index now register acutely. The Maricopa Association of Governments (MAG), as the federally recognized regional Metropolitan Planning Organization, should establish an Early-Warning Displacement Monitor that tracks year-over-year change in median rent, eviction filings, school-mobility rates, and ACS rent-burden in this emerging-cluster ring on a quarterly cadence — enabling targeted intervention before any new tract crosses the LISA significance threshold. Pair the monitor with a cross-jurisdictional Right-of-First-Refusal pilot in West Valley cities (negotiated through the West Valley Mayors Coalition) giving qualified nonprofits — Local First Arizona’s Fuerza Local accelerator, Trellis, and CPLC — first opportunity to acquire naturally-occurring affordable housing (NOAH) properties before market-rate conversion, financed by a regional preservation fund seeded with Arizona Department of Housing CDBG-DR allocations and Treasury State Small Business Credit Initiative dollars.

Evidence base: 53.7% of tracts improved (2013→2023) but 31.1% worsened; Moran’s I = 0.684 confirms strong spatial clustering persists.

The combination of 53.7% of tracts improving while 31.1% worsened — with Moran’s I rising from 0.624 in the 3-variable baseline to 0.684 in this 7-variable specification — indicates that hardship is becoming both more spatially concentrated and more multidimensionally correlated than a single-axis poverty lens detects. The City of Phoenix, Maricopa County, and MAG should formally adopt this multi-dimensional EHI dashboard as the official screening layer for all federal pass-through dollars (CDBG, HOME, ESG, ARPA, IIJA Justice40 set-asides), publishing annually-refreshed tract-level scores alongside the trajectory Sankey to make displacement-versus-improvement transparent to community stakeholders. To operationalize this, stand up a permanent Maricopa Hardship Coordination Table chaired by the Greater Phoenix Economic Council (GPEC) that brings the City of Phoenix Community & Economic Development department, MAG, Valley Metro, CPLC, Local First Arizona, Wildfire Arizona, Trellis, and the Salt River Pima–Maricopa Indian Community to a single quarterly forum where the dashboard data drives shared resource-allocation decisions — replacing the fragmented, single-organization grantmaking pattern that the Economic Innovation Group’s 2023 case study identifies as a primary barrier to revitalization in South Phoenix.

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

Current index: 7-component EHI: Poverty + Unemployment + Income (inv.) + Renter Burden + Low Ed. Attainment + Food Insecurity (SNAP) + 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 Renter Burden + Low Ed. Attainment + Food Insecurity (SNAP) + Transp. Disadvantage shift which tracts or corridors are flagged?

Adding Renter Burden, Low Educational Attainment, Food Insecurity (SNAP), and Transportation Disadvantage to the baseline produced clear and substantively important shifts. Statewide, High-Hardship LISA hot spots rose from 201 in the instructor’s 3-variable baseline to 267 in the 7-variable specification — a 33% increase, meaning 66 additional Arizona census tracts crossed the statistical threshold for clustered hardship that the baseline missed. Within Maricopa, Persistent Hot Spots increased from 150 to 158 (+8 tracts; 17.0% to 17.8% of all county tracts), and global Moran’s I rose from 0.624 to 0.684 — roughly a 10% increase in spatial concentration, indicating that when hardship is measured multidimensionally it clusters more tightly, not more diffusely. The newly-flagged tracts cluster predictably in two geographic patterns: the Maryvale–West Phoenix belt, where high renter rates and elevated SNAP receipt expose hardship that moderate measured incomes mask (driven in part by informal-sector earnings and immigrant-household income undercount), and the outer west-valley auto-dependent ring through Avondale, Goodyear, and Buckeye, where the no-vehicle and transportation-disadvantage indicator catches isolation from job centers that an income-only index cannot see. The aggregate improvement narrative also weakens materially: tracts improving 2013→2023 fall from 63.9% in the baseline to 53.7% in the expanded index, while worsening tracts rise from 29.4% to 31.1% — a 10.2-percentage-point swing suggesting that roughly one-third of the apparent decade-long progress was an artifact of measuring only income, poverty, and unemployment rather than genuine multidimensional uplift.

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?

Several corridors remain flagged as high-hardship hot spots regardless of whether the index is 3-variable or 7-variable: the South Phoenix Central Avenue–Baseline Road spine, the Maryvale core along Indian School and Thomas Roads west of I-17, the East Buckeye Road industrial-residential belt between downtown and Sky Harbor, and the Salt River Pima–Maricopa reservation–adjacent tracts on the eastern county edge. This robustness is the most analytically important signal in the entire sensitivity exercise: when hardship persists across radically different specifications of the measurement instrument, the diagnosis is no longer dependent on any one researcher’s normative judgment about which dimension of disadvantage matters. Following Amartya Sen’s argument in Development as Freedom (1999) and Martha Nussbaum’s capability framework, multidimensional disadvantage is real precisely when income deprivation, capability deprivation, and relational deprivation co-locate; the persistence of these specific corridors across both indices is empirical confirmation that those deprivations co-locate in exactly these tracts rather than being a measurement artifact. For policy this is a green light — place-based investment targeted at the robustly-flagged tracts is defensible against the standard methodological critique that “the result depends on how you built the index,” because under both compositions tested here, these tracts come out red.

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 differs materially under the two specifications. A policymaker using the 3-variable baseline to direct, for example, a $50 million CDBG allocation across Maricopa would distribute it across 150 Persistent Hot Spots at roughly $333,000 per tract; using the 7-variable expanded index, the same dollars would spread across 158 tracts at roughly $316,000 each — but eight tracts that the baseline missed entirely would receive non-zero investment for the first time. More consequentially, the targeting profile shifts: the expanded index pulls weight toward Maryvale (low education + high SNAP + renter burden) and the western exurbs (no-vehicle + transportation disadvantage) and away from a small set of tracts whose 3-variable scores were elevated almost entirely by unemployment alone. The expanded composition is more appropriate for federal program design for three reasons. First, it directly mirrors the multidimensional methodology of the federal Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool that operationalizes Justice40, which combines environmental, transportation, housing-burden, and workforce indicators against a 65th-percentile poverty floor — meaning a Maricopa screening layer built on this composition will align cleanly with the federal disadvantaged-community designation that gates billions in IIJA, IRA, and CHIPS Act dollars. Second, it captures dimensions of disadvantage that the federal poverty line systematically undercounts — particularly working renters, immigrant households, and rural-edge auto-dependent populations — consistent with Sen’s and Nussbaum’s capability framework that disadvantage is not reducible to income shortfall alone. Third, it is more resistant to Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction critique of single-axis composite scores, because no single dimension can dominate the index and drive Goodhart’s-law optimization in which actors game the measured variable while neglecting the unmeasured ones. The cost of the expanded index is modestly more data infrastructure to maintain and a harder communication challenge to lay stakeholders; the City of Phoenix and MAG should mitigate this by publishing the LISA cluster map alongside a one-page non-technical narrative summary of which tracts are flagged and why.

• Economic Innovation Group (2023). Advancing Economic Development in Persistent-Poverty Communities: South Phoenix, AZ. Case study commissioned under EDA award ED21HDQ3120059.
• Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press.
• Nussbaum, M. (2011). Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Harvard University Press.
• O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Crown.
• Council on Environmental Quality. Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) Methodology, Version 1. (formerly screeningtool.geoplatform.gov).
• City of Phoenix (2020). Housing Plan. City of Phoenix Housing Department.
• City of Phoenix (2022). South Central Transit Oriented Development Community Plan.
• Maricopa Association of Governments. Housing Data Explorer. (azmag.gov)
• CDFI Fund, U.S. Department of the Treasury. Native Initiatives Program / NACA Fact Sheet.
• Anselin, L. (1995). “Local Indicators of Spatial Association — LISA.” Geographical Analysis 27(2): 93–115.
• Bolin, B., Grineski, S., & Collins, T. (2005). “The Geography of Despair: Environmental Racism and the Making of South Phoenix, Arizona, USA.” Research in Human Ecology 12(2): 156–168.