Housing shortage quantified

Tucson counts missing houses … Elections never stop … And “Mexican America” has a nice ring to it.

The housing shortage in Tucson just got a little clearer.

Although the shortage has made headlines for years, particularly since the onset of the COVID pandemic, it’s rare that the public gets a sense of how much housing is actually needed.

News reports will tell you that Arizona is 270,000 housing units short, but that stat comes from a 2022 Department of Housing report that doesn’t explain its methodology.

In truth, nobody really knows how many houses Arizona needs to meet demand.

That was one of the problems state lawmakers faced last summer when they tried to hammer out a bipartisan package of bills to deal with the housing shortage.

In the end, lawmakers passed SB1162, which says municipalities must conduct a housing needs assessment, with the first report due last week and subsequent reports due every five years.

Now, every municipality in Arizona has to figure out how much housing they need. So don’t be surprised if you start seeing these types of news stories popping up around the state.

Tucson needs about 13,000 more housing units right away and another 22,600 by 2033, according to the city’s legally required analysis.

Now, at least, we have a clearer view of the problem.

---

Clarity! That’s what we strive for every day at the Tucson Agenda. If you like getting a clear view of what’s happening around you, then smash that button and subscribe!

---

Officials have been wrestling with the housing crisis for quite some time, and they’ve adopted a more nuanced view of the problem than just “we need more housing.” Instead, they talk about it as a continuum that runs from emergency shelter all the way to encouraging homeownership.

Overall, the city needs about 4,700 housing units to alleviate homelessness and another 8,000 to make up for underproduction by the housing industry in recent years.

The Tucson City Council also got an update on city efforts to deal with the shortage through city-owned affordable housing projects like Milagro on Stone, which houses older adults, or Sugar Hill on Stone, for families.

In all, the city has 1,200 units of affordable housing in development.

Beyond funding affordable housing, the city also is revamping its zoning code to encourage more housing.

Just like the housing assessment, new state laws forced the city to change its zoning code, and not always how city officials would like. For example, city officials had to allow more casitas, AKA accessory dwelling units, than they wanted.

Coming up, they have to satisfy a state law passed last year designed to encourage more “middle housing,” AKA duplexes and triplexes, by the end of 2025.

Also on the horizon, city officials are trying to get voters to approve Proposition 414, the half-cent sales tax that would put $2 million every year toward gap financing for housing projects, among many other initiatives, like beefing up the police budget.

There is a blessing and curse that comes with serving in a deliberative elected office — you have to choose someone within your organization to run the meetings.

That person is usually called the “chairman.”

Of course, running the meeting as a chair comes with a lot of power, as Pima County Supervisor Steve Christy was reminded earlier this week when Chairwoman Adelita Grijalva shot down his request to have a contract read into the public record.

Here’s a quick list of recent chairman appointments:

• Supervisor Rex Scott will take over as the chair of the Pima County Board of Supervisors.

• The Tucson City Council picked Lane Santa Cruz for vice mayor on Tuesday night, marking her second term in what is usually a rotating, honorary chairman position on the council.¹

• The Arizona State Senate Democrats elected Tucson Sen. Priya Sundareshan as their new caucus leader and made Tucson Sen. Rosanna Gabaldón their minority whip (the whip is in charge of rounding up votes).

• Pima County Republican Party elected Kathleen Winn, a radio show host who recently challenged U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani in the Republican primary, as its chairman.

• And Local Democrats gave Eric Robbins another two years as chairman of the Pima County Democratic Party.

  • But the bigger news out of the Pima County Democratic Party is that it hired a new executive director: Alex Kack — better known on the internet as “Green Shirt Guy” — who most recently helped run Pima County Attorney Laura Conover’s re-election campaign.

At every council meeting, residents get three uninterrupted minutes to tell their elected officials what’s on their minds.

Here’s a sample of what Tucson residents had to say at the call to the public on Tuesday:

• A woman opposed to Proposition 414 told the Council it would not allocate enough resources to social safety net services and would put too much into the Tucson Police Department’s budget.

• Another woman complained that a 911 operator had admonished her and accused the city employee of taking sides when she recently called the police about a thief in her back yard. The man started throwing heavy brass fuses at her. Armed with a firearm and on the phone with 911, the woman said she had warned the thief not to come any closer or she’d shoot them.

• The owner of a hookah lounge in midtown said the new citywide ordinance passed in November limiting the hours of operation for such businesses may force him to close. The ordinance was passed following a violent shooting at an Arizona Hookah Lounge a month earlier, when four people were shot and police estimated 180 shots were fired. City Attorney Mike Rankin said he couldn’t comment, stating the owner’s attorney had contacted him about possible legal action against the city. He confirmed the man speaking was the owner of the Arizona Hookah Lounge.

A taste of home: Now that Eegee’s has filed for bankruptcy and started closing locations (thanks to some unwise corporate decisions), the Arizona Daily Star’s Cathalena Burch sat down with KJZZ’s Mark Brodie to talk about what it means for Tucsonans.

“Eegee's is iconic here. It goes back to the 1970s and it's one of those places where, people who grew up with it and it was a regular part of their life, they will leave Tucson and they will literally have Eegee's, which is the frozen fruit drink, they will literally have it sent to them,” Burch said.

Strange bedfellows: Tucsonans have a lot of elections coming this year (no rest for the weary, right?) and the Arizona Luminaria’s Yana Kunichoff has a rundown of the first one coming up. Proposition 414, the “Safe and Vibrant City” ballot measure, which would raise Tucson’s sales tax by a half-cent and bring in $80 million per year, is up for a vote in March. City officials see it as a way to support both housing and first responders like police and firefighters. But Republicans and the Tucson Metro Chamber don’t like it because it increases taxes, and progressive and mutual aid groups don’t like it because twice as much money goes to public safety projects as “community resiliency” projects.

Not just yet: In a loss to environmentalists, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney rejected a filing designed to regulate groundwater pumping along the San Pedro River, the Star’s Tony Davis reports. The lawsuit, filed by the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity and other groups, sought to include the Upper San Pedro River Basin as an Active Management Area under state control. If the group had succeeded, the Arizona Department of Water Resources would have had to make plans to reduce groundwater pumping out of the San Pedro River Basin.

Sticking around: Patrick Robles, who most recently served as the Southern Arizona Political Director for the Harris-Walz campaign and has a long history of working for elected Democrats in southern Arizona, recently announced on Facebook he has a new gig here in the Old Pueblo. Describing himself as a “working class kid from the Southside of Tucson,” the University of Arizona graduate is now the Southern Arizona Director for Sen. Ruben Gallego.

After President-elect Donald Trump declared he would rename the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of America,” Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum clapped back with her own proposed renaming.

Standing in front of a 418-year-old map world map, Sheinbaum noted that the cartographers had correctly labeled the oceanic basin the “Gulf of Mexico.”

They also had a name for the western United States at the time: Mexican America.

“Why don’t we call it Mexican America? It sounds pretty, no?” Sheinbaum told reporters.

Personally, we’re still partial to Baja Arizona.

1. Correction: We updated this post to reflect this isn’t Lane Santa Cruz’s second consecutive term as Vice Mayor. While she has served in the past, she is taking over the position from Councilman Kevin Dahl.