Somewhere to live

CHANDLER and Maricopa are typical of the youthful, sprawling cities on the southern edge of Phoenix, Arizona. The thousands of stucco-walled houses with tiled roofs in Chandler’s palm-tree-lined streets could have been stamped out by a machine that then moved on to produce the same sort of houses in Maricopa 17 miles to the south-west. Yet the two cities’ economic fortunes have followed quite different paths. In 2000 Maricopa was just a dusty crossroads with 329 homes. The housing boom was its making. As in countless “exurbs” across America, lower-income families drove ever farther afield to find a house they could afford. Maricopa soon grew to over 15,000 homes. But when America’s housing market collapsed, so did Maricopa’s. Over a quarter of its houses have received a foreclosure notice, says RealtyTrac, a property consultancy. Howard Weinstein, a local landbroker, waves at a patch of lots in the desert which the bank seized from someone who bought them for $30,000 each: “At current house prices no builder would pay anything for these lots.”

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