High Economic Hardship Clusters (HH) — Hot Spot Tracts Statewide:
253
Low Economic Hardship Clusters (LL) — Cold Spot Tracts Statewide:
293
Tracts Improved (2013→2023)
58.4%
Tracts Worsened (2013→2023)
30.2%
Persistently High Hardship (2013–2023)
16.7%
Emerging Hot Spots (2013–2023)
2.7%
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 0.697 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.
In Maricopa County, the tracts around Midway, south of Goodyear, are nearly all persistent hot spots. The metropolitan area around South Phoenix also has clusters of hot spots. Either of these would be a good spot to focus place-based intervention.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.
One cluster of emerging hot spots is in northern Mesa. This increase in hardship could be due to population growth as Phoenix expands and people look to Mesa for cheaper or more available resources. Rising costs also mean that old residents might be being priced out of staying in the area.The majority of tracts improved over the decade-long window. However, aggregate improvement masks significant variation: 30.2% 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.
This distinction is important for Maricopa County, where fast population growth, rising housing demand, and expanding development in areas like Mesa, Phoenix, and Tempe can drive both revitalization and displacement. Improvements in EHI scores in these areas may reflect increased investment and economic opportunity, but they may also indicate that long-time residents are being priced out as housing costs rise.Target: 149 Persistent Hot Spot tracts (16.7% of all Maricopa tracts): spatially concentrated, entrenched hardship confirmed by a Global Moran’s I of 0.697.
TODO: Write your first recommendation. Name the specific geographic corridor, cite the hardship index values, and propose a concrete place-based intervention with a named responsible entity.
A large amount of the 149 persistent hot spot tracts in Maricopa County are clustered in the west Phoenix–Maryvale area along I-10 in Phoenix. Neighborhoods here have consistently high Economic Hardship Index (EHI) values and long-term economic challenges (Global Moran’s I = 0.697 shows this clustering is strong). A practical approach would be to focus on keeping housing affordable and helping current residents stay in place. Two actions that could help are creating a community land trust and a fund to preserve lower-cost housing. This could be led by the City of Phoenix Housing Department working with local nonprofits to make sure improvements benefit the people who already live there.Target: 23 Emerging Hot Spot tracts (2.7% of all Maricopa tracts), new high-hardship clusters not present in 2013, signaling spatial expansion.
TODO: Reference the displacement paradox, identify where these clusters are forming, and propose an early-intervention or monitoring strategy.
The 23 emerging hot spot tracts in Maricopa County are new areas of high hardship that weren’t present in 2013, which suggests that economic stress is starting to spread into new neighborhoods rather than going away. This fits the “displacement paradox,” where growth and rising housing demand in one area can push lower-income residents into nearby communities instead of improving conditions overall. These new clusters are mostly forming on the edges of the Phoenix metro area, where development and population growth are expanding quickly. A good response would be to closely track changes in rent, evictions, and population shifts in these tracts. Then an entity like the Maricopa Association of Governments can step in with supports like rental assistance or affordable housing protections.Evidence base: 58.4% of tracts improved (2013→2023) but 30.2% worsened; Moran’s I = 0.697 confirms strong spatial clustering persists.
TODO: Using the trajectory map and mobility Sankey, make a forward-looking data-monitoring or cross-sector coordination argument.
Even though 58.4% of tracts in Maricopa County improved from 2013 to 2023, 30.2% got worse, and the high Moran’s I value (0.697) shows that hardship is still strongly clustered in specific areas. The trajectory map and mobility Sankey results suggest that neighborhood change isn’t uniform. Some places are improving while others are declining or staying stuck, which may mean that gains in one area are connected to pressure or displacement in another. Because of this, it’s important to keep monitoring changes over time instead of only looking at overall averages. A better approach would be for housing, transportation, and economic agencies to work together to track these shifts early and respond quickly when areas start showing signs of decline or displacement.The baseline EHI consists of 3 measures: Poverty + Unemployment + Income (inv.)
Current index: 5-component EHI: Poverty + Unemployment + Income (inv.) + Low Ed. Attainment + Food Insecurity (SNAP)
After adding your extra component(s), answer the following (minimum 2 sentences each):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 + Food Insecurity (SNAP) shift which tracts or corridors are flagged?
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?
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.