Arizona — for all the scorn heaped upon it by, ahem, car-despising coastal elites in professions like journalism — is actually a magnet for housing innovation. Like the rest of the West, the state boomed after World War II, attracting residents and industries as white Americans suburbanized and the baby boom commenced.
In the dominant Phoenix region, which accounts for about two-thirds of the state’s population, growth was steered by a cabal of civic boosters and Chamber of Commerce men, who courted out-of-state employers by hoovering up federal infrastructure dollars and fostering a good “business climate” — that is, they kept unions weak, taxes low and regulation minimal.
The mix of fast growth and low-key rules has given Phoenix a reputation for being “the petri dish for housing experiments.” It’s a great place to build because people are constantly showing up. And because so many houses look the same — terra-cotta roof, rock lawn by the driveway, and exteriors in your choice of tan, tan or tan — the region emerged from the housing bust with a reputation for being one of the easiest places in America to gauge the price of a home.
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, when investors built single-family-home empires from the wreckage of a mortgage crisis, the Phoenix region was one of the first markets where institutional buyers started amassing foreclosed properties. More recently, Phoenix also became a test market for an emerging class of “iBuying” (short for instant buying) companies, including Redfin, Zillow, Offerpad and Opendoor, which hope to upset the traditional broker model by offering home sellers quick cash offers, then flipping the properties back on the market.
Arizona is so encouraging of new real estate schemes that its Commerce Authority has a program, Property Technology Sandbox, in which companies can apply to test new ideas to buy, sell and develop without having to get the usual licenses. It’s a place that attracts builders because the local attitude seems to be “Eh, give it a try.”
Unlike so many other Arizonans, Mr. Johnson is actually from here. He grew up in Phoenix and was one of those kids who spent hours building rail networks and skyscrapers in SimCity. Being a good student and interested in software and public transit, Mr. Johnson expected that he would attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or some other elite university in a dense, Eastern city.
Instead, he went to the University of Arizona with a full-ride scholarship plus $50,000. This came from the Flinn Foundation, whose Flinn Scholars program aims to keep smart locals from leaving the state.