The 28-year-old has been living full-time in Flagstaff since moving to the city for university in 2017. Since getting married in 2019, she has moved with her husband and two children through three apartment complexes and is on the search for a fourth she can reasonably afford. She describes her current living situation as a positive anomaly for the region but a financially precarious one nonetheless.

“Gross, I think we’re making about $3,200 a month, and then we pay $1,800 in rent, and of course, that excludes the utilities,” Coleman said. “I know it’s really expensive for our income bracket, but that’s actually cheap for Flagstaff for two bedrooms. If it’s affordable, then it’s kind of your option.”

The mountain town Coleman lives in wears many metaphorical trapper hats. It is the governmental seat of Arizona’s Coconino County, the discovery site of the dwarf planet Pluto and one of the highest-elevated cities in the nation, all factoids government officials highlight in Flagstaff’s regional plan.

Equally as defining, yet incapable of fitting neatly on a road sign beckoning cars down the I-17, is the city’s climbing housing prices.

In 2024, the Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce reported that the local cost of housing was 57% higher than the national average. City wages, conversely, are thousands of dollars below national and statewide averages and are not keeping up with growth trends.

The median family income in the city rose 17% from December 2011 to December 2025, adjusting U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data for inflation. Likewise adjusted, the Northern Arizona Association of Realtors reports the median sales price for a Flagstaff home rose 109% within this same time frame.

Dozens of intersecting factors have influenced the local state of supply and demand to create more than 50 years of a documented housing need, city officials say.

Compiled data points on this need led to city council formally declaring a state of housing crisis five years ago and prepared a 10-year plan to halve Flagstaff’s housing needs by 2031.

As of December 2025, the plan’s soft halfway point, its metrics report it is one third of the way toward reaching this lofty goal through down payment assistance, market unit creation and affordable unit preservation.

Locals like Coleman must make up for the short-term difference with creative downsizing, hopes that they’ll find an understanding landlord and one eye kept on the market at all times for the few existing units in their price range.

One such unit for Coleman lies within The Arbors complex on University Avenue.

Nineteen postcard-ready condominium complexes cluster along a pentagonal roadway. Drivers catch glimpses of their honey-gold porch lights and towering fog-gray finishes through a cage of spindly pine trees. Coleman’s family is tucked within a two-bedroom unit at the complex’s center, one they’ve called home for almost one year.

The bedrooms belong to Coleman’s two children, both under 5 years old. She and her husband sleep on a fold-out bed in the living room that doubles as a TV stand during the day.

Before that, the Colemans lived in a one-bedroom apartment across the street for about $800 less a month. Those $800 made a world of difference for Coleman, who had to budget for a hungry newborn on her husband’s salary as a senior bus driver for Northern Arizona University. When she realized she had to turn to formula due to health complications, she said she credited her survival to her landlady for setting the rent far below market price.

“I did everything on the planet,” Coleman said. “I pumped 12 times per day. I saw a lactation consultant. It’s like $30 for a little can like this, and my kid is drinking five of them. What can you do about that? You just buy formula. My landlady supported us through that. The cheaper rent for us was what allowed me to feed my kid.”

In 2025, her landlady sold the unit, and the resulting blow to Coleman’s finances at having to move is one she is still trying to recover from.

Coleman has been out of the job market for seven years, being a full-time caregiver for her children and homeschooling her oldest son.

Now, she is on the search for night jobs that can fit her schedule and is considering uprooting her life to pursue a graduate degree, all to afford Flagstaff’s cost of living.

All the while, she said she obeys what her homeowner’s association tells her to the letter because she cannot afford the toll of eviction.

“I don’t think we have any more things to throw out,” Coleman said. “We’re kind of at the point where it’s just rent, utilities, groceries and kids clothes. Ever since we moved, whatever expenses come in have to get paid, and we’re always running on a deficit. Diapers are such a terrible expense, too. They’re awful. I think we got like $200 off the month my oldest finally potty trained.”

Coleman, like many Flagstaff residents, uses the phrase “we’re looking to buy” as a punchline. The Flagstaff metropolitan area has the lowest percentage of owner-occupied housing units in the state at 62.8%, indicating a pervasive renters market for those who cannot afford to save for a mortgage.

Her only hope for finding a permanent home, Coleman said, lies with the Flagstaff Affordable Homeownership Program.

Through a community land trust model, the program allows low-income homebuyers to purchase homes at a reduced price while the city maintains ownership of the land beneath the unit. Homeowners pay the city a monthly $50 fee through a 99-year, renewable ground lease for an affordable price below market rate. In exchange, the resale price of the unit is capped, keeping the equity accrued within the home as a public investment.

“That’s just affordable, just affordable for us, if we could get one,” Coleman said. “Outside of that, everything in Flagstaff is like $400,000 and above. It’s just completely unrealistic. There is no way. We’ve been talking to them for a minute. I think it’s probably been a year, maybe a year and a half, that we’ve been on the program just waiting.”

As of March 2026, there are 43 community land trust units in the city’s inventory, ones that were gradually added and sold to homeowners since 2006.

While this places the program at an average of about two units a year, Flagstaff housing planner Sullivan Moore said the rate of added homes entirely depends on developers being interested in setting aside housing that can be sold below the median $600,000 rate.

Arizona law prohibits municipal governments from requiring developers set aside units for low-income individuals. Instead, Flagstaff implements an Incentive Policy for Affordable Housing (IPAH), which waives fees, expedites planning review and offers parking perks to developers who designate units for individuals who make below a certain amount.

Some years, the city has seen multiple housing units grouped into its land trust based on these perks. Others, none at all.

“That’s kind of been an issue we’ve had recently,” Moore said. “We’ve been told by multiple developers that the affordable homeownership programs, they just don’t pencil. It’s probably part of why this program has been more of a background thing because it just doesn’t seem to work in the building market right now. We’ve been talking about trying to figure out how we can incentivize that more because we’re just not seeing it, really.”

The city’s housing department reports that the two most recent properties included in the land trust — condos in the Woodshire on Butler condominium — sold in December 2025 for about $370,000 each.

Coleman’s family is only approved for $240,000 based on their income.

From January 2025-2026, 22 households were determined income eligible for Flagstaff’s Affordable Homeownership Program. Once determined eligible, these individuals are added to a mailing list and are all notified whenever a property they qualify for is on the market. Ten would be notified if a unit became available today, according to city housing planners.

Coleman said her household identified one viable property based on her income bracket over the year-long span of their involvement in the program, but their offer was beaten out.

“If one or two show up on the market and we have a wait list, 20 people apply for it, it’s clear that there is a desire for things to be a little cheaper and an ownership property,” Moore said. “We’re just not seeing it come on its own, whether that is developers actually not being able to make it work or if we need to change what we’re incentivizing.”

Reclined on a wicker chair beside her community clubhouse’s unlit fireplace, bare feet tapping impatiently against the plush carpet and fingers clinging to her hard-won keys, Coleman laments the fact that every unit in Flagstaff can’t be a community land trust property. High demand and low supply means she and thousands of others must wait for their forever home like one waits to catch lightning in a bottle.

She envisions a Flagstaff without the million-dollar condos she scrolls past on Zillow every week. Coleman closes her eyes and sees rows upon rows of the houses she grew up in as a kid. Ones with little bedrooms, a little kitchen, a little living room—“normal” houses, she said. Affordable houses.

That is easier said than done, however.

The city’s own housing plan survey indicates residents in favor of designated affordable housing complexes would be less likely to support them if they were built in their own neighborhoods.

“There’s a reason you don’t want me in your backyard,” Coleman said. “It’s because I’m poor. When somebody tells me, ‘I don’t want affordable housing near me,’ I always think, you have money and I shouldn’t talk to you because you might hire a lawyer. You’re taking me out with the HOA rules. I just regularly say, ‘I’m so sorry. I will try and keep a better handle on my kids. Please do not do anything to me because I cannot afford to move.’”

Part Two

Tyler Denham, filled with what he would later describe as a “righteous outrage” is about to log onto a Zoom call.

He’s dialing in from his studio apartment, one near the Bashas on the west side of Flagstaff, that he passively recalls as little more than serviceable. The 28-year-old is in the process of paying off his student loans and saving up to buy his first home, so he cannot afford provisional extravagance. A 5 p.m. sunset washes over his bare-bones decor, and Denham unmutes his microphone.

Since moving to Flagstaff in 2018 to work as an engineer for W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc., Denham has watched people he cares about—his younger brother, his workplace colleagues, his best friend since childhood—all move out of the city at the hands of missing affordable housing units.

Census estimates from 2015-2019 indicated that 57% of renters and 27% of homeowners were housing cost burned in Flagstaff, meaning they spent more than 30% of their income on housing.

It was time, Denham said, for the local government to do something about it.

“This kept happening over and over and over, and I started putting together thoughts, and it was like, ‘Man, why is housing so awful?’ Denham would say five years later. “It sucks. I’m losing all my friends. It turned out to be the world’s longest rabbit hole, one that I’m still falling down.”

This would be a defining moment, Denham’s white rabbit.

Dec. 1, 2020, would be the day the city of Flagstaff formally declared a state of housing emergency.

“Fundamentally, this is about how the city council values the majority of Flagstaff’s residents, who are non-homeowners,” Denham said to a screen of static profile pictures during the city council’s virtual meeting. “These residents are struggling to stay in Flagstaff as housing costs creep upward year after year, locked out of homeownership themselves by exorbitant prices. If the city council values these residents, it should act now to bring down housing costs.”

The motion passed 5-2.

Resolution No. 2020‐66, in declaring a state of housing emergency, demanded the city’s housing section and newly formed housing commission create a 10-year plan for housing development within nine months. The resulting 60-page document was unanimously approved by the city council in February 2022 and included 13 housing policy initiatives to be explored in the following decade.

The third policy initiative created Proposition 442, which allocated $20 million in general obligation bond funds to Flagstaff’s long-term housing projects.

The fund was split across four programs that would form in the three following years: improvements to the first-time homebuyers program, which provides down payment support to low-income residents and includes Flagstaff’s community land trust; a rental incentive program that awards funding to market-rate developers who include income-restricted units in their properties; a rehabilitation program for the city’s public housing units; and an adaptive reuse program to repurpose underutilized buildings, often motels, into rental units.

City voters approved the housing bond in November 2022.

As of March, 14%, or about $2.8 million, of the housing bond has been spent. An additional 20%, or about $4 million, has been reserved for four in-progress affordable rental projects, which will potentially create 246 affordable units should the final two be approved by city council.

Housing Program Manager Adriana Fisher said the rest of the funding will most likely be quickly spent in the coming years. The HUD-sponsored public housing redevelopment program is gaining momentum after the city finalized a consultant services agreement in January, and the updated Community Homebuyer Assistance Program (CHAP) opened its $50,000 down payment assistance loans to the public in August 2025.

“CHAP increased its down payment assistance from $15,000 to $50,000 because $15,000 is really not doing much for a community, especially with prices as high as $600,000,” Fisher said. “Only about 25% of our stock of homeownership units actually fall under $500,000, which is really heartbreaking.”

The language in most of the bond’s programs set up the funding as a revolving door of low-interest loans. However, the potential for loan forgiveness and specific use delegations in the ballot language indicate the bond is best understood as a one-time infusion.

Flagstaff’s official 10-Year Housing Plan defines its own success with two long term goals: to impact at least 6,000 low-to-moderate income Flagstaff residents through subsidy provision and create 8,000 housing units, with 10% being affordable by HUD standards, by 2031.

As of December 2025, the city is 23% and 32% of the way toward hitting these respective goals.

Flagstaff’s housing department also estimates having a housing deficiency of almost 11,500 units as of this same month, needing an additional 734 units by 2029 to meet the future population’s housing needs.

Fisher said she believes these numbers represent substantial progress, but it remains far too early to confirm if local renters will be able to find and afford a home in the near future.

“Not one entity, not one problem, is really the reason for this happening,” Fisher said. “There are a lot of factors. The biggest one is supply and demand, which the 10-Year Housing Plan is trying to take care of, not in a way that it’s going to solve the housing issue altogether, but to make progress. I don’t know that this can be resolved, to be quite honest.”

Housing is a culture-defining issue in Flagstaff.

One can hardly whisper the words “affordable housing” in the city common ground without meeting rolling eyes, heavy sighs and any number of verbal displeasures. The frustration for climbing costs of living permeated the local zeitgeist to the point of legend, until Flagstaff became as recognizable for the moniker “poverty with a view” as it was for its misty mountain range, swaths of ponderosa pine forests and avalanches of seasonal tourists.

“I don’t ever dare go to a social event and say, ‘I work for housing at the city of Flagstaff,’ because we get so much heat for it already,” Fisher said. “There’s a big misunderstanding in the community that the city can fix all the problems. We hear it all the time.”

In reality, she said, the city is limited in how it can approach its housing crisis. Remedies to competitive pricing or second-home supply draining, like rent caps and restrictions on short-term rentals, are prohibited at a state level.

Flagstaff’s city government only owns 1.8% of the land within the greater Flagstaff region. Of said buildable land, only about 37 acres are set aside for future housing projects, but limited funding indicates projects on this land require private partners to come to fruition. Federal agencies own 78.3% of regional land — for conservation, natural resource management and military operations — which limits developmental sprawl, all according to the city’s most recent regional plan drafts.

Federal programs provide minimal relief. Fisher said the wait list to obtain a Section 8 voucher, which allows low-income families to obtain monthly rental assistance from the city’s housing authority, sits at about one and a half years. The wait for a one-bedroom unit in either of Flagstaff’s two public housing complexes can be four years or longer.

“There are people who want to move here for the views and because of desirable neighborhoods and they will never be able to do that through public housing because we just don’t have the housing stock,” Fisher said.

Additionally, the city government’s housing section is eight people strong, not including the HUD-governed housing authority that manages public housing and Section 8 vouchers. It recruits nonprofit organizations like Housing Solutions of Northern Arizona and NAU students participating in public inquiry programs to manage its affordable housing projects and conduct stakeholder research.

Just as there is no singular cause to widespread housing insecurity, Fisher said there will never be one perfect resolution.

“We are leveraging resources between all these entities because there is not one entity that has $20 million to build a brand-new development that’s going to fix all of Flagstaff’s problems,” she said. “Even something as simple as educating people so that they don’t see the city as being the problem, but as part of the solution, and I say part of the solution lightly. We are part of the solution, but we cannot be the whole solution because we don’t even know if there is a solution to this.”

Housing education is what motivated 15 individuals to visit Flagstaff’s Murdoch Center on March 19. Framed by lilac brick walls and clustered together in a formation of hastily set fold-out chairs, their eyes are glued to the flurry of zoning maps, pie charts and shots of model dwellings that flash across a flat-screen TV.

The executive director of a new nonprofit, one aptly named Flagstaff for Affordable Housing, flicks through a presentation summarizing the quarter’s housing updates for his audience of residents, fellow nonprofit leaders and retired city representatives. His hair is a bit shaggier and time has cooled the edges of outrage in his voice when publicly speaking on housing, but the now-34-year-old’s spot stuck in the proverbial rabbit hole signals very little has changed for Denham’s interest in housing.

In the time since 2020, Denham purchased a house, though not his ideal one.

He was looking for, at most, a two bedroom home that was biking distance from his work and downtown Flagstaff. An incredibly limited market meant the only thing he could find within his preferences had four bedrooms.

“I had to compensate by just renting out some of the extra bedrooms to help out the mortgage,” Denham said. “I’m currently renting out to an NAU grad student. He is a really cool guy, but I’m not the world’s greatest landlord. I hate making the posters and then screening people, and it all just seems like a lot of work. I definitely would have to make a lot more financial sacrifices, though. It’s the difference of like $1,000, $1,500 a month.”

Flagstaff, like the rest of the nation, has seen a distinct lack of middle housing since 2008, according to the National Association of Home Builders. This means most housing units tend to be single-family homes or high-rise apartment buildings with no duplexes, triplexes or fourplexes in between.

Denham kept this need in mind as he became a community representative on Flagstaff’s housing commission in 2021 and the president of the policy-focused Arizona Neighborhood Project in 2023.

It was the realization that the city was conducting a zoning code analysis project (CAP) in 2024, however, that pushed him to leave his engineering job and pursue housing full time.

“There’s been lots of individual reforms that people have been asking the city for over the years, and the city’s response has always been, ‘We don’t have the capacity to do that,’’ he said. “The city is resource constrained in a lot of ways, but this project was going to be the moment where they finally addressed all of those different suggestions and potential reforms together. If there was a moment to accomplish a lot of this stuff, it was going to be through the CAP.”

Denham applied for Welcoming Neighbors Network grant funding, built an executive board of housing commission alumni and set forth on a mission to advocate for the more technical forms of housing reform in 2025. The first victory on his list, he said, was Flagstaff’s compliance with Arizona’s middle housing bill.

For a developer to build housing on a designated plot of land — whether it be for single-family, multi-family or mixed-use complexes — the land must be zoned appropriately. The process of getting land rezoned for housing, Denham said, is especially complex and can drive developers away.

Before rezoning is considered, developers must compile multiple meticulously detailed maps, site analyses and descriptions of how public services will be provided in an application that can cost thousands of dollars in consultation fees to produce. If the rezone is not approved, Denham said, the developers must resubmit all carefully created documents, causing all parties involved to waste valuable time and money.

City council has discussed decoupling the site plan approval and rezoning processes, a conversation Denham was present for, but the exact details of doing so remain under consideration.

In 2024, Gov. Katie Hobbs signed House Bill 2721 which eliminated the need for middle housing rezoning in specific instances. It required all cities with at least 75,000 residents to change their zoning regulations by January 2026 to allow duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and townhomes on land zoned for single-family units within one mile of the city’s central business district.

Flagstaff does not have a designated central business district, so instead, the city council voted unanimously in December 2025 to allow middle housing types on all zones where single-family homes are permitted, not just within a one-mile radius of a single complex.

Flagstaff for Affordable Housing was one of many Arizona housing initiatives to advocate for this change, but Denham said it will take years before the zoning updates ripple into tangible improvements.

“A lot of developers know how to build a single family home,” Denham said. “They’re comfortable building a single family home. They know exactly what the process looks like. It’s just, like, this inertia. They’ll keep building that single family home. It takes that information a long time, and then development itself, like building a house, takes like a year, two years or more, if rezonings are involved. It just takes a while for things to happen.”

The same is true for Denham’s plan to introduce a permanent housing trust fund to the city’s toolbox. While Prop 442 was a one-time community investment, a designated housing fund would replenish annually and would have flexibility for use beyond four specific programs.

Finding examples of modern housing trust funds was simple, since the state of Arizona has operated one since 1988.

Deciding how Flagstaff would fund one will not be.

“The difficult part of it will be, where does the money come from?” Denham said. “You’re either taking existing money away from another group in order to use it for housing, which sets up a fight with whatever group you’re taking that money away from, or you’re having to create a new source of taxation. That should be discussed by the city within the next few months. I expect it will be a very difficult conversation, though.”

These are two or more years of waiting that Flagstaff locals may not have.

The estimates for percentages of housing cost burdened Flagstaff residents have changed in the years that followed the city’s December video call, but only marginally.

Now, according to census data from 2020-2024, 58% of renters and 29% of homeowners pay more than 30% of their income on rent.

“All of the people who impact your life in one way or another, are probably struggling,” Fisher said. “Let’s be real. That’s the data our 10-Year Housing Plan mentions. I would be willing to bet money that it’s just gotten worse. We’re losing nurses, doctors, baristas, our working class but also people who are not willing to spend more money when they can make more money elsewhere.”

Part Three

The last thing she wants to do with her time off is scour online marketplaces and social media groups for apartment listings in her income bracket. Unfortunately, she said, living in Flagstaff means she spends more time thinking about housing than almost anything else.

“I’m basically always looking for the better, cheaper situation,” Lavis said. “Most of the people I know in general, but teachers also, every year they’re like, ‘I might have to leave,’ ‘I might have to quit’ and ‘I can’t afford to live here.’ Unless you are from generational wealth or you bought your house 20 years ago, we are all just skating by.”

The 32-year-old has taught at DeMiguel Elementary School within the Flagstaff Unified School District (FUSD) for three years. She lived in the mountain town in 2016 while studying at Northern Arizona University, but the visit was short-lived due to limited teaching jobs and a high cost of living.

In 2023, she made the trek back to Flagstaff once a friend informed her of an FUSD job opening. Lavis scheduled an interview, got the job and drove back into the city without knowing where she would stay.

Her eyes caught on a deal she believed was too good to be true while scrolling through Craigslist.

“It legitimately looked very real, and I had sent it to people and they said it looked like a good deal,” Lavis said. She rolls her eyes, scoffing with the disbelief of hindsight. “Not crazy good, but it was just this house that was somewhat affordable. I did make a deposit of $800, and I showed up to view it and get the keys. It was kind of a crunch for time, and I think, because the cost of living here is in such a crisis, scam people prey on it.”

To Lavis’ dismay, someone was living in the house she had believed she was renting. The background check, application and, worst of all, the down payment were all very real. The listing, conversely, was not. Someone had used an existing property to generate a fake advertisement.

Since 2020, individuals have reported nearly 65,000 rental scams to the Federal Trade Commission, ones that led to an estimated $65 million in total losses. About 16% of those fake listing scams came from Craigslist ads, just like the one Lavis found.

She drove from apartment complex to apartment complex with her work start date steadily approaching, explaining her situation to dozens of front desk employees and hoping upon hope that there would be something available for her.

The only thing she could find was a two bedroom apartment for about $2,300. She could afford to stay for three months before packing up and moving to the next place. Rental attainability surveys indicate the monthly rent for a market rate two bedroom apartment went up about $600 in the time Lavis spent away from Flagstaff.

“When I lived here in 2016, they would call it ‘poverty with a view,’ and it was much more affordable,” Lavis said. “Like, how insulting.”

Lavis has moved four times since 2023. In June, she moved into Elara at the Sawmill, one of 12 developments in the city to include affordable housing from 2020 to early 2026. Because the development earned incentives through IPAH, 10% of the complex’s units must be reserved for households making 80% of the area median income or under.

Nonetheless, the apartment complex markets itself as luxury university housing first and foremost, one of many in the city to lease by the bed instead of the unit.

Dozens of Lavis’ kaleidoscopic, multimedium paintings make the walls of the studio look like a curated art exhibit. The rest of the space is reserved for her dual-use couch and bedspread, a writing desk, a knee-high coffee table and the piles upon piles of thrifted books placed on the few remaining open surfaces.

When Lavis has company, she offers them the room’s only chair and sits cross-legged in the divots between her pieces of furniture. Nova, the resident milk-white pitbull terrier who owns the rest of the squeaky miscellany littering the apartment, curls beside Autumn’s feet. Her pointed whines intensify until she catches Lavis’ eye.

“You’re fine,” Lavis coos absentmindedly, busied by the budgeting documents on her laptop. “You don’t even pay taxes.”

Rent for her 308-square-foot studio apartment typically starts at $1,625. Because of the affordability designation, about $1,300, or 38% of Lavis’ pay, goes to rent.

“It’s the most money I’ve ever made in my life, but with the cost of living, I’m the poorest I’ve been,” Lavis said.

While it varies annually, Lavis makes about $3,400 for 10 months out of the year. She chooses to receive slightly larger paychecks for the 10-month time frame instead of smaller ones throughout the year to make sure she has enough for her monthly expenses.

During the summer months, she has to work a second job.

“One of my friends, a third grade teacher, he and his partner own a yogurt shop downtown,” Lavis said. “I work there, and I’m happy to have that as a safety net and to support them. They’re a mom and pop, but it’s kind of embarrassing to have students come in asking, ‘What are you doing here?’ or to see students at the food bank. What kid is going to want to be a teacher if they’re like, ‘Oh, they can’t afford food and things, either?’”

Survey results included in the 10-Year Housing Plan indicate Lavis’ experiences with housing are prevalent across multiple workforces, but recent data suggests teachers especially feel the burden of high-cost housing.

In April 2025, NAU’s Economic Policy Institute conducted a housing attainability survey for faculty and staff members within FUSD. The results showed that 48% of surveyed employees were either considering or planning to leave Flagstaff because they were struggling to afford housing.

An additional 49% stated that while they were not planning to leave the city, they still found that finding and keeping local housing was challenging.

To make matters worse, Arizona Auditor General data compiled in FY2025 indicates the average FUSD makes $5,149 less annually than the state average, despite Flagstaff housing costs being considerably higher.

This data was presented to the FUSD school board and its year-old housing task force, which Lavis serves on.

“When I heard them go over that statistic, the results of the survey, everyone in the room, like the superintendent, the city, HR, they gasped,” Lavis said. “I was like, ‘Yeah. I know.’ We’re boots on the ground. We live this every day. I’ve got a cozy little place, but it feels like a rug’s going to get ripped out from underneath me at any moment.”

The FUSD housing task force used the data to recommend the district use one of its owned parcels to meet its employees’ housing needs.

As of November, FUSD conveyed about 18.8 acres of district-owned land near Sinagua Middle School to the city for the express purpose of building 40 to 48 affordable housing units, though the units would not be limited to FUSD employees due to fair housing laws.

The choice represents a step in the right direction for including employers in the affordable housing conversation, Lavis said, but the long-term nature of FUSD’s solution leaves her with little hope.

“That’s years and years away,” she said. “They have to build and put everything together, and so right now, there’s really not a lot of things available for retaining teachers and lower income people. I just think that’s going to create a really big class division.”

In the present, Lavis is drowning in bills.

She has car payments and student loans that she hasn’t touched, not to mention the veterinary bills for the dog she lovingly labels as her whole world. Lavis covets the quiet life the mountain town provides, but when these numbers coalesce, she is unpleasantly reminded of the chaotic, violent lifestyle that raised her.

Lavis grew up homeless.

She said her parents’ reliance on alcohol and other addictive substances carried her family through at least five states and countless HUD programs in attempts to find stable jobs and housing. Lavis relied on free school lunches for regular meals and the kindness of Missouri churchgoers to buy her winter clothes.

“I’ve moved over 60 times in my life,” Lavis said. “I kind of lost count. I put myself through school as a way out, to break the cycle of poverty, make something of myself and to not go down that route. I’m in this supposedly respected career, and I love it. There’s so much joy in it, but I am still so close.”

After being placed in state custody and dedicating her life to being the first person in her family to pursue higher education, she looked to Flagstaff as an opportunity to lay down roots for the first time in her life.

Instead, after almost 10 years since setting foot in Flagstaff, she’s considering leaving affordable housing complexes entirely. She’s looking into a life on wheels within a refurbished school bus.

As of March 19, she is looking for local plots of land to park said shuttle while studying how to equip a livable vehicle with working electricity.

“It’s a beautiful place,” Lavis said. “I’ve never loved living anywhere more in my life, and I’ve never really felt a sense of home anywhere, but I’m not under the illusion that I will ever own a home. I don’t know if that will ever happen.”

Part Four

Flagstaff postcards depict the Western Hills Motel as a slice of 1950s history.

Its parking lots are filled with drive-in-ready Beetles and sleek silver Buicks. Accompanying blurbs advertise piped-in music and an owner-operated coffee shop, all bathed in the neon lights streaming in from its wagon wheel signage.

Signed and sealed with a postage stamp, these images advertised Western Hills as a prime rest stop for mountain town tourists, ones trekking across the Mother Road in search of cold air or the Grand Canyon.

About 70 years later, the property’s new owners have an updated vision for Western Hills Motel—one that removes the word “motel” from its name entirely.

A fresh coat of cobalt blue will transform the parcel into the Western Hills Apartments, an affordable housing complex designed for households making less than 80% of the Flagstaff median income, or about $61,100 for a single person in 2025.

The project is one of three using Flagstaff housing bond funding for adaptive reuse construction, defined as the repurposing of underutilized buildings to circumvent development costs, limit construction waste and potentially open rental units to applicants faster.

Adaptive reuse is broadly considered an innovative, sustainable alternative to building a housing project from scratch, especially when the U.S. is seeing fewer privately owned residential units being constructed in 2026 than during similar months in 2024 and 2025.

Even so, making affordable housing units in Flagstaff is never an easy feat, regardless of the property type. The question on the tip of countless tongues—why Flagstaff cannot simply build more affordable units to keep up with demand—encompasses Devonna McLaughlin’s career.

She scans her newly purchased, work-in-progress motel through browline glasses, bathed in the highway heat rising up from Western Hills’ now empty parking lot. The wind smells distinctly like cilantro and sizzling chorizo.

It’s fitting, since a Mexican restaurant replaced the motel’s attached cafe in 2014. It is far from the last piece of its postcard history to be renovated.

On McLaughlin’s left, Jermaine Barkley parses through an overflowing key ring until he finds the one for Room 2104, one of the first motel rooms he took the lead in redesigning. Aged red quilts and pine-framed doorways have since made way for sleek white cubbies, fully functional kitchenettes and modernized air conditioning—signs incomers will be residents instead of temporary visitors.

The pair turn their gaze to Barkley’s truck, which is dwarfed by the five cardboard-packaged refrigerators resting within its trunk. Each appliance must be installed in a motel room as soon as humanely possible.

The duo plan to open up Western Hills applications to renters in just one week.

“A lot of the time, you’ll hear communities say we just need to build more housing, and we do, but that’s so much easier said than done,” Barkley says as he and McLaughlin plod across wooden flooring where there once was carpet. “The prospect of Flagstaff getting out in quick order is dubious.”

McLaughlin is the CEO of Housing Solutions of Northern Arizona (HSNAZ), a housing development nonprofit that formed as a community coalition in 1990. Barkley, likewise, has spent the last two years with the nonprofit and now serves as the group’s chief operating officer.

Today, HSNAZ owns and operates more than 160 affordable rental units in the northern Arizona region. By December 2026, HSNAZ leadership hopes to bring that number closer to 180.

Its previous complexes were designed for individuals experiencing homelessness or domestic abuse, but the Western Hills Apartments will be HSNAZ’s first time employing adaptive reuse tactics to create workforce housing with no eligibility requirements outside of income.

When housing instability is pervasive across all income levels, as it is within Flagstaff, it creates an urgent need for units across the housing continuum.

It was this mindset that motivated a 73-signature-strong citizen’s petition Flagstaff City Council received on Oct. 13, 2020, the one that demanded the city declare a housing crisis and paved the way for the adoption of the housing plan the city uses to this day.

McLaughlin submitted that petition.

Half a decade later, she is using the bond funding her petition indirectly created to bring 29 more affordable rental units to the market.

“Folks still struggle with housing, and I think the reason we can call it a crisis is that a larger segment of our population struggles with housing,” McLaughlin said. “It’s not just an issue for low-income folks. It’s not just an issue for folks on fixed incomes. It’s not just an issue for folks experiencing homelessness. It’s pervasive. It is the thing that impacts more families in Flagstaff than any other topic.”

A lot of things have to go right to bring an affordable housing complex to fruition, McLaughlin said. The first, and most obvious, of these factors is money.

Developers building affordable housing units, like HSNAZ, are often required to serve households making a certain amount based on the preferences of the programs providing them funding. In this instance, the city required Western Hills Motel to serve households making just below median income.

When setting their rents, developers thus have to complete a harrowing balancing act—They cannot charge so much that their target populations cannot afford rent, but they likewise cannot afford to venture too far below market rate without defaulting on the project’s many loans.

Cities like Flagstaff offer incentives for affordable housing development, but considering the revenue developers lose when rents are lowered, some believe the numbers do not add up.

“If I’m charging $1,100 instead of $1,500, I’m losing revenue,” McLaughlin said. “Now, I can’t pay as much for a mortgage, which means I can’t borrow as much to have bought the property. So then, how can I get a subsidy to fill in that gap to have a mortgage be low enough that I can afford it based on lower rents and still be able to be financially responsible as a company?”

Last year’s estimates for fair market rates in Coconino County suggest these transformed motel rooms open with starting rents between about $300 and $500 below market rate, depending on the number of bedrooms.

Unlike in other housing projects, HSNAZ did not have to pay construction costs for the Western Hills Motel, spending that has nationally skyrocketed for residential complexes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The previous owner of the Western Hills Motel took the liberty of transforming its units into studio, one bedroom and two bedroom apartments before contacting McLaughlin with a sales offer in January 2025.

Still, finding a way to cover the building’s purchasing price with a single loan was practically impossible. McLaughlin had to find the proper funding in waves—applying for a mortgage, earning private foundation grants and pulling in HSNAZ equity. Piecing it together took time.

County records indicate the HSNAZ bought the Western Hills Motel alone for $6.5 million, and closing costs and loan fees contributed an additional $50,000 to the price.

“We have five layers of money making this work,” McLaughlin said. “It’s not easy, even when you don’t have to build it. This is just me trying to buy it. Nothing about housing is easy, and nothing about housing is fast, and nothing about housing is inexpensive. When you add together expensive, time consuming and hard, there’s a reason we don’t have it.”

The segment of Flagstaff’s bond funding reserved for adaptive reuse projects only provides up to $40,000 per affordable unit, but all projects must provide evidence of additional funding beyond what the city can provide. At 29 units, HSNAZ qualified for $1.16 million.

McLaughlin was initially told the motel’s construction would be finished in the summer, leaving her without the housing bond funding she needed to make the purchase. Those funds would not be available until the fall.

“I was the one saying, ‘When’s it coming? You said it was coming. Why isn’t it out yet?’” McLaughlin said. “You can only push so hard, and I can’t make them award funds. This was off my radar in July. We were not going to buy this property.”

Summertime came around, and to McLaughlin’s delight, delays in the motel’s reconstruction actually worked in her favor. The time to receive enough bond funding to purchase the finished product had been extended just enough for McLaughlin to reconsider.

She was officially handed the deed to her new project in September 2025.

This time, she said, the project worked out. But with competitive funding, development complications and matters like the housing bond that rely on a public vote, it doesn’t always.

“That bond was the voters of Flagstaff saying it’s a crisis, enough so that we’re going to put taxpayer dollars toward solving that crisis for others,” McLaughlin said. “That’s not always a given. Voters didn’t have to approve it.”

In fact, they didn’t. Not at first.

In 2018, Flagstaff citizens voted against an earlier edition of the proposition, one proposing $25 million in general obligation funds for construction, redevelopment and land acquisition. Dissenters disapproved of the ballot initiative’s vague language, arguing there was no guarantee the units created with the funding would be permanently affordable.

In 2026, now that a revised version of the housing bond has been up and running for four years, using it as a resource for adaptive reuse projects is no longer an option. The $3 million set aside for this purpose has been entirely spent or otherwise reserved.

The developed units cannot quite keep pace with demand.

The first project to use adaptive reuse funding was The Lantern, a 103-unit noncongregate shelter built from the bones of a Motel 6. Owned and operated by Flagstaff Shelter Services, the building officially opened in December 2025 after two years of construction hiccups.

The shelter’s first hotel-to-housing project, The Crown, has operated at full capacity since its opening in 2022. Facing a daunting wait list for its 58 units, the organization jumped at the opportunity to add to its bed count with another subsidy-assisted project.

As of March, Flagstaff Shelter Services staff members report its wait list for The Lantern is 129 people long. A second identical facility would not be large enough to house every applicant.

Executive Director Ross Schaefer said she has noticed affordable housing opportunities growing fewer and farther between since 2020. The shelter works alongside a network of landlords to help locals transition from homelessness to homeownership. Rising housing costs and the desirability of market-rate profits, she said, have caused her three shelter locations to be consistently at capacity.

“We don’t have the housing unit capacity to keep up with that demand,” Schaefer said. “Units have come out of the system because of the rising costs here. You slap a coat of paint on it and charge a student $1,000 a month to live with 10 other students, but those units used to be units people would rent to people who didn’t have the best credit. We need options and ways we can think creatively about existing spaces like hotels.”

As of April, six of the Western Hills Apartments units have been leased and an additional 13 have been reserved.

Outside of its affordable rentals, HSNAZ operates various forms of prepurchase assistance. It offers counseling services for first-time homebuyers, ones unfamiliar with the complicated processes at play, and it manages the down payment assistance portion of Flagstaff’s Community Homebuyer Assistance Program (CHAP).

CHAP provides up to $50,000 in deferred loans to households that are mortgage-eligible based on credit and employment but lack the cash for down payment and closing costs.

The program applies to households making below 150% of the area median income, about $118,860 for a household of one. Recent memory indicates workforce members from teachers and professors to city employees to private employees at W.L. Gore and Northern Arizona Healthcare are equally likely to request assistance.

However, Barkley says the team typically serves individuals in the 80%-100% area median income range, which by definition, excludes at least 40% of the population.

“We try to find folks money they can stack on top of these funds to get them over the hump to bring that mortgage payment down,” Barkley said, “but even then, the thing that is a hindrance is that the home prices are high and interest rates are tough for folks. We’re getting folks that are applying. We’re getting folks that are getting through the process. It just certainly is not geared towards lower income populations at all.”

After hitting unprecedented lows of 2.7% in 2020, the average national interest rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage has rocketed to between 6% and 8% since late 2022. The most recent Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking indicates nearly half of renters in 2024 identified an inability to afford a mortgage as the reason they rent.

Rather than a fool-proof solution to housing insecurity, Barkley said he looks at the program as a means of moving those with the means of becoming homeowners out of rental units that could serve lower-income households.

“We’re setting up our homeowners who are able to have a permanent place to free up a rental unit for someone else in the community that’s just getting started,” Barkley said.

The team expects to have helped 502 individuals buy a house to date using its various forms of down payment assistance since HSNAZ’s formation in 1990. Demand for help, just like the demand for housing itself, is showing no signs of slowing.

The city’s 2045 regional plan argues its emphasis on creating more and smaller units through high-density middle housing could result in a 20% reduction in housing costs—with the caveat, of course, that the existing barriers to creating new housing units that McLaughlin knows well are eliminated. A feat easier said than done.

While broaching the legitimacy of this claim and the regional plan revisions, McLaughlin starts to speak before quickly biting her tongue.

“Where is this going, when you write whatever you are going to write?”

She is referring to the physical location of this article, to which she receives confirmation her comments are on the record and will be published.

McLaughlin steals her expression. After a moment’s consideration, she only curtly adds: “I think it will have a limited impact.”

Part Five

The housing problem does not impact every community equally.

Flagstaff utilizes funding from the HUD-administered Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which provides annual grants to states, cities and counties to be used for housing development and public infrastructure improvements, particularly in low- and moderate-income communities.

Municipalities within the program often identify certain neighborhoods as targets for project funding if their residents are disproportionately vulnerable to poverty, aging infrastructure and systemic oppression.

Flagstaff states in every CDBG report that while it strives to use its funding to benefit these communities, its ability to do so entirely depends on the number and type of project proposals it receives. Citywide projects are more common than ones specific to these populations as a result.

Flagstaff’s target neighborhoods, ones identified due to their below-average median incomes and high percentages of minority residents, include Pine Knoll, Southside, Sunnyside and one of the oldest settlements in the city: La Plaza Vieja.

La Plaza Vieja encompasses more than 100 acres of western Flagstaff land, with Route 66 sprawling on one side and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway extending on the other. Its history is one intertwined with Flagstaff’s development.

Census data included in Flagstaff’s La Plaza Vieja neighborhood plan states about 30% of the city’s 784 families were Hispanic in 1920, primarily traveling from New Mexico for employment at nearby lumber mills and as sheep herders. All but two of these families resided in Southside or La Plaza Vieja.

In the 21st century, Flagstaff’s 2021-2025 CDBG Consolidated Plan indicates the neighborhood is more well-known for its abysmal 4-to-1 renter to homeowner ratio.

The neighborhood still houses a disproportionately high number of Hispanic and Latine families, but much of the existing housing stock is well over 50 years old and passed down generationally.

When new housing is built, the city notes these units are often not for sale but are rental units tailored to university students in the area.

The neighborhood’s below-average household income is simultaneously attributed to the volume of 20- to 24-year old residents, undoubtedly since the neighborhood is a brisk 20-minute walk away from Northern Arizona University’s Flagstaff mountain campus, and the handful of retirees living on fixed incomes who reminisce on what the neighborhood used to be.

Jose Jesus “Jesse” Dominguez, 76, grew up on La Plaza Vieja’s Tucson Avenue, right behind where the local breakfast joint Mike and Ronda’s now sits.

His father came to Flagstaff in 1917, being one of many Mexican lumber mill workers to move into the Los Chantes — or Shantytown — settlement. Growing up, he remembers playing baseball on unpaved gravel roads and tailing his mother to visit their neighbors with food in hand. Whenever a local mill worker was injured on the job, he said, nearby friends would flock to their house and help in any ways they could.

Everyone knew everyone.

Dominguez and his wife built the house they now live in, only two streets away, in 1978. They finished construction for about $10,000, which is about $52,000 today.

“My wife, my kids, the neighbors, anybody that came by to visit, they were put to work,” Dominguez said. “There were still a lot of families that lived in this neighborhood, the old neighbors, the old timers.”

Almost 50 years later, Dominguez said he could count on his fingers the number of long-time friends and local families who still reside in La Plaza Vieja. Others were driven out by high prices.

On a spring Thursday, Dominguez reclines in his living room, nestled in his warm leather chair. Dark eyes drift across his walls, filled by his collection of metal crosses and dozens of pictures of his smiling adult children. They eventually land on his window, and Dominguez begins pointing to the housing units he can see, one at a time.

“Rental,” he confirms before moving his finger to the next one. “Rental. Rental. Rental. Rental. Rental. I’m the only owner-occupied in this block.”

Dominguez worked for Flagstaff’s Housing Authority for 53 years before retiring. In that time, he said he heard comments daily from city commission members wanting to raze La Plaza Vieja entirely and “start beautiful.”

In his opinion, that is exactly what happened. With renters now making up a majority of the neighborhood’s population and limited job opportunities in the area, he said his children could never afford to live in Flagstaff.

The same was evidently true for the many neighborhood residents who once lived in La Plaza Vieja, ones whose children sold their homes and traveled elsewhere.

“It was a vibrant neighborhood, and I was lucky to be able to go through that,” Dominguez said. “Now, we’re in the resurgence, I guess you would call it, but we have all basically investment properties, absentee landlords. Once the absentee landlords take hold, you have no control of your neighborhood because they don’t care.”

Often evoked like a curse, syllables dripping with vitriol, many Flagstaff residents attribute high housing prices, limited supply and waves of absentee landlords to the short-term rental industry, often organized through Airbnb or Vrbo. Dominguez lives right beside one.

About 1,000 short-term rental owners have registered their addresses with the Flagstaff city government, but the exact number of short-term rentals in the city could be higher. At least 480 are located in western Flagstaff.

The Northern Arizona Association of Realtors estimates up to 8% of the city’s housing stock is taken up by short-term rentals. It also found that annual short-term rental occupancy rates have been declining since 2021, suggesting many units spend portions of the year empty.

Laws of supply and demand would indicate short-term rentals are driving up local prices by reserving units for rotating visitors instead of full-time residents. Yet, some data suggests blaming housing insecurity on short-term rentals would be reducing a 15-story problem to its ground floor.

An April report from the Common Sense Institute, one that uses 10 years of short-term rental data in Arizona, argues short-term rental growth trends are too small to effectively explain the state’s affordability crisis.

The 57,000 state short-term rental listings in 2024 paled in comparison to the 3.3 million housing units in the same vicinity, meaning they lack the power to control the market.

In fact, the report finds that short-term rentals may have taken the place of second homes instead of full-time units. Short-term rental growth was almost fully offset by a reduction in vacation homes, all in areas that were already expensive and exclusive before rental booms in the 2020s.

The Common Sense Institute instead argues the real culprits are a weakened housing pipeline following the Great Recession and fallout from a 2020 housing demand surge.

Earlier studies, like a 2021 entry in the Journal of Urban Economics, suggest restrictions to short-term rentals can lead to decreases in tourist town rents, but said restrictions are prohibited under Arizona state law. As are rent caps.

While reminded of rental turmoil every time he walks to get the mail, Dominguez said tries to use every method in his power to counteract it, including serving as the neighborhood’s association president and joining Sunnyside and Southside representatives to advise on community plans.

He also describes himself as a landlord, just not quite an absent one. Of the four neighborhood houses he owns and rents out, all in La Plaza Vieja, he charges rents significantly below market rate. This includes setting rent at about $1,000 per month for the three-bedroom house he inherited from his mother.

“They’re struggling,” Dominguez said. “People are struggling, but I have people that stay forever and ever and ever. I would, too.”

For tangible change to happen, he said he hopes the city’s Housing Commission and planners make efforts to source and listen to target neighborhood residents.

In 2026, five years after implementing its last consolidated plan and executing the infrastructure and housing projects within, the city of Flagstaff released a draft for the one that will guide its CDBG spending until 2030.

The statistics it uses to define La Plaza Vieja are all the same, with one notable exception.

The renter to homeowner ratio is now 5-to-1.

“If you have all the realtors and you have all the investors on the commission, and you have nobody from down here that is trying to figure out where their next paycheck’s coming from, you’re not getting a good picture,” Dominguez said.

PART SIX

Juggling affordable housing applications with transportation, grocery and childcare costs can make the road to permanent shelter a long and gruesome one.

Pamela Jensen knows that firsthand.

In October 2005, a heavily pregnant Jensen became unsheltered after moving herself and her three kids out of a dangerous living situation in New Mexico. After traveling back to Flagstaff, her family spent the fall living in Hope Cottage, a homeless shelter for women and children.

The ensuing winter was harsh. If someone in the neighboring room swung the door closed too hard, the resulting wind would blow out Jensen’s pilot light. Neighbors came and went, and Jensen’s children learned not to get too attached to their playmates within the shelter. There were times when on-call staff members could not fix the heating promptly, so Jensen grew accustomed to the chattering of her own teeth.

Even when shivering to the bone, Jensen stayed focused on their future.

“I told my kids, ‘This is temporary,’” Jensen said. “‘No one needs to know we’re here. You get a shower and clean clothes. They feed us.’ That was the hardest thing for me, putting my kids in that situation, but I have always been pretty upfront with them. I try to make good choices for them.”

Between submitting transitional housing applications and following job leads, Jensen took time to make vision boards for herself and her children. She rallied her daughters and son to dream big about what they wanted life to be like when they found a place of their own, from things they wanted in their rooms to the dog she knew they could not afford.

The birth of her youngest son in January was one of many ensuing life changes. In 2006, she got a job in patient services at the Native Americans for Community Action family health center, a location she would continue to work in for the next 13 years.

Jensen moved from transitional housing to low-income housing to countless income-based housing complexes in quick succession. Rejections based on her credit score or inability to provide a proper down payment were common, and load-bearing increases in rent had Jensen perfecting her budgeting techniques early on.

By the early 2010s, her three oldest children had moved in with their father in Phoenix, and Jensen had to downsize due to the loss of assistance programs dependent on household size.

She described the next apartment she could afford in the city as a glorified attic, one whose cramped surfaces boiled to dangerous temperatures in the summer.

Family members and passersby encouraged Jensen to search for long-term housing outside of Flagstaff, but she did not humor their requests. Her family moved from Tuba City to modern-day Sunnyside when Jensen was small enough to attend kindergarten.

Since then, the sacred mountain Dook’o’oosłííd — her grandmother, her protector — repeatedly drew her back to the land her people named Kinłání, meaning “many homes.” Even when physical homes were few and far between, she said she could not imagine taking her family and leaving Flagstaff behind.

Then, in 2013, Jensen finally got confirmation that she would not have to.

After months of waiting, sending out safety net applications and completing sweat equity volunteer hours, Jensen was handed the deed to a Habitat for Humanity home in September of that year. It was not the home she had initially qualified for, which was still waiting on city documents confirming land securement, but it was one her children adored from the moment they stepped onto its yard.

“We didn’t even walk in the door, and my youngest was already looking at the ‘Beware of Dog’ sign,” Jensen said through a light smile. “He was like, ‘This is it! This is it! This is our house! I just know.’ They’ve been wanting a pet ever since they were little, but the cost of rent and pet fees meant that we couldn’t do it then.”

Jensen lives in the $135,000 sky-blue home to this day, but her decade-long fight to find a safe place to land left her cavernously aware of the barriers impacting people in similar positions.

Since Jensen became a homeowner in 2013, the Northern Arizona Association of Realtors calculates that the median price of a Flagstaff home has increased by 171.8%.

“All the years I’ve been in Flagstaff, the rent has just gone up and up and up,” Jensen said. “There is no break. I tell my mom, ‘If my kids weren’t living with me, I don’t know if I would survive.’ There’s got to be a better system. There’s got to be better services to help folks get to those next steps. I could be a resource telling people how to start, where to go, how to get into these services.”

Fate led Jensen to Flagstaff High School in 2022, where not only was her son attending at the time, but Marks was working as the Native American academic adviser. The duo immediately connected over shared lived experiences; Marks, too, was a single parent and had been unsheltered during his junior year of high school.

The Indigenous Circle of Flagstaff conducted a multiyear investigation into citywide homelessness while advising the city’s adoption of Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 2018. The project unveiled a need for resources beyond what local shelters could provide, and Marks responded with a community nonprofit developed with the then-executive director of the Southwest Center for Equal Protection, Wendy White. Candidly, Marks invited Jensen to a board meeting and asked her if she had any faith in his new project.

“I said, ‘This is what I’m doing. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I’m wasting my time,’” Marks said. “The adverse effect was that she said, ‘I want to do this, too.’”

It is one minute to 9 a.m. on a chilly Friday morning, and the occupants of one office unit off South Blackbird Roost are preparing for a morning’s work.

The towering walls within are eclipsed by dozens of fully packed shelves. Every surface cradles carefully folded thermal clothing, glinting piles of aluminum food cans and cardboard packages of varying hygiene products. The muffled roar from the Amtrak train crossing on the bordering hillside joins the hushed instructions passed from volunteer to volunteer.

One woman slips her hands into rubber gloves and heaves a plastic bin of donated children’s clothes onto a floral-patterned tablecloth. Another man scrambles to turn down the heat on the nonprofit’s slow cooker, narrowly avoiding burning the soup warming inside.

The right half of the unit’s garage-turned-donation-pantry is noticeably empty, and when the sound of whirling tires meeting gravel just outside causes the preparation team to stand at attention, it seems the missing something has arrived right on schedule.

An ash-gray shuttle, uniquely customized to include a functional shower, pulls sideways into the parking lot. Its sides are decorated with dents and a single palm-sized sticker of a leaping mountain lion. The dual translucent doors at the 24-foot-long vehicle’s nose hiss open, and its driver steps out with tranquil determination.

The glasses on the crown of her head push curtains of feathery black hair away from her eyes. One hand holds firm to a well-loved thermos, and the other tucks the keys to the freshly gassed-up shuttle safely into her moss-green fleece jacket.

“Good morning,” she calls. Her soft, balmy voice does little to mask the restless fire of a natural problem solver.

A fervor for healing lies deep within her bones. Her paternal grandfather was a renowned Diné medicine man from Gray Mountain, Arizona. Decades of health service experience and generational teachings have led her down the path toward this building on Chateau Drive.

The woman is inside the unit’s front office in a blink, greeting each familiar face by name and setting up the donation pantry’s check-in sheet. She spent the previous two days taking the shower shuttle and a sampling of the room’s offerings to the Flagstaff Family Food Center and the downtown Mountain Line bus stop, meeting with dozens of unsheltered individuals from the Flagstaff area.

Today, as her schedule outlines, her clientele will be coming to her.

Jensen has worked as the executive director for the Community Assistance Teams of Flagstaff, or CATS, since the summer of 2025. Before that, she called the CATS office her professional home as a volunteer, board member and assistant director since 2022.

The COVID-19-born nonprofit distributes clothing, food, nonemergency first-aid and agency referrals for employment and housing support to Flagstaff’s unsheltered population. Its shower-fitted outreach bus is one of many volunteer-driven initiatives created for immediate aid, with others including a bike repair and distribution shop and a roadside cleanup project offering workforce experience and one-time pay to unsheltered Flagstaff residents.

January marks the start of CATS’ fifth year using on-the-ground assistance to mitigate the impacts of unmet housing needs, with the Diné concept of kinship — k’é — standing firmly as its motto.

“The word k’é is not taken lightly in my mind and in a lot of our Indigenous minds,” Jensen said. “We’re taught when we’re as little as babies that we need to take care of each other. People I’ve never met, they may not be blood related to me, but they are clan related to me. I learn quick if I am their sister, mom, grandmother or auntie.”

In practice, k’é means Jensen’s work as executive director extends beyond the typical 9-to-5 workday. Jensen never leaves home without packing hygiene kits, nonperishable snacks and spare water bottles in the back of her truck. At every stoplight, her hazel eyes scan the streets for unsheltered visitors she has not seen in a while.

When the weather makes it unsafe to drive the nonprofit’s outreach bus, Jensen jumps into her personal truck. It is not uncommon, she said, for groups to form at frequent CATS locations in anticipation of Jensen’s visit.

“Pam weathers all the elements,” said CATS co-founder and Diné activist Darrell Marks. He and Jensen sit side-by-side in front of Jensen’s dual computer monitors. She purses her lips around a quiet, humble chuckle at the remark. “Rain, snow, shine, she gets out there. As long as they see Pam, and as long as they see the truck, they know they have someone.”

CATS meets with between 16 and 65 unsheltered relatives a day through three weekly outreach windows, though Jensen said exact numbers fluctuate depending on the weather. About eight of these individuals a week are first-time visitors, and the demand never stops.

The most recent American Community Survey indicates about 18.2% of Flagstaff citizens live below the poverty line, a value more than five percentage points higher than the 2024 state and national averages.

U.S. Census Bureau data from the same year posits Flagstaff’s median household income is about $6,000 less than the national median, yet the Greater Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce’s cost of living index points to 2024 housing costs being 56.5% higher than the national average.

Even if one can afford a local home, there is no guarantee there will be one available. Flagstaff has a housing deficiency of almost 11,500 units, according to its 2025 housing needs assessment. This does not include the additional 734 units the city would need by 2029 to meet demands from population growth.

As of February, Jensen is the only full-time salaried member of CATS. She oversees the weekly outreach events, plans biannual pop-up care villages, manages grant funding, keeps the organization’s email in check and ensures the shuttle is always gassed up.

Since White’s retirement, Jensen said her role as an executive director is like an “apron” she can never take off.

“Pam is the heart and soul of what we do right now,” Marks said. “She’s created that home environment as a sister, a mother, a matriarch for our community. The things we’ve seen take place over the five years we have been in operation, a lot of the movement, is credit to her. She brings those values. She knows how to plant those seeds. I don’t know how to thank her.”

Their shared commitment to k’é and hunger for housing units set Jensen and Marks on the path toward their long-term goal: creating their own transitional housing village.

Housing affordability plays a critical role in homelessness resolution. One 2023 comparative analysis by a libertarian think tank, The CATO Institute, found that U.S. programs designed to address homelessness were only as reliable as their host city’s stock of vacant, low-cost units.

Affordable markets directly coordinated with declines in homelessness, and cities like Flagstaff, with high costs of living and documented housing shortages, left their unsheltered residents with fewer long-term solutions.

In 2023, CATS leadership called on 16 volunteers to make a one-room sleeping pod from scratch. The group had little more to start with than contractor guidance and about $5,000 worth of wooden beams. A weekend of volunteer labor transformed it into a 100-square-foot private room with 6-inch-thick walls and an angled roof for rainwater collection.

Jensen and Marks plan to use the model to spearhead the creation of multiple transitional residential units, each constructed for under $10,000. For the past three years, they have met repeatedly with county and city officials, hoping to one day acquire the land, municipal support and grant funding needed to duplicate their efforts.

The duo draws their inspiration from a collection of affordable properties in Eugene, Oregon, that CATS leadership toured this summer — Emerald Village, a 22-unit affordable tiny home community, and Opportunity Village, a 30-unit micro-home community for unsheltered individuals. Each property makes use of only 1 acre of land and requires extensive city involvement to function through cost-reducing credits and leasing arrangements using city-owned land.

As of February, CATS reports making little to no progress with coordinating a similar relationship with local governments.

The city of Flagstaff owns nine property sites designated for housing construction. Its housing department recommended two of these properties for nonprofit partnerships in a September 2025 city council meeting, though each features peculiarities that make less than 1 acre of land within it buildable.

“They had that close connection with their city, and we need that,” Jensen said. “We know there is a problem, so why can’t we think of solutions? These communities can be developed everywhere, and it’s just a matter of the community coming together.”

As if overtaken by a restless energy, incapable of standing still, Marks suddenly stands and gestures emphatically to the 3 acres of gnarled, overgrown land lying across from the CATS office. It is one of many sites he and Jensen talk about, an unused land plot that could easily be swept up for housing projects.

One knee-high sign, made almost unreadable by sun damage and cracked paint, indicates the land used to carry out that very purpose. In 2001, it belonged to a mobile home park in La Plaza Vieja called Arrowhead Village.

County records show the property was purchased by Kings House Inc. for $2.25 million in November 2017. The developers sent eviction notices requiring residents of all 56 mobile homes on the parcel vacate the premises by July 2018, according to previous reporting from The Arizona Daily Sun, with goals of rezoning the property for commercial use.

Kings House Inc. representatives confirmed the empty land remains zoned for manufactured housing as of February. Its current asking price is $3.5 million.

“Every time we open the door, this is what we’re seeing,” Marks said. “Right there. The city could buy it and say, ‘Hey, we really care about human beings. We care about our people. We’ll buy it, and you can lease it from us.’ How many of our pods could we put in there?”

It is one minute to 1 p.m. on a humid Sunday afternoon, and Marks holds the Blackbird Roost office door open for Jensen as she lugs in a poster beneath each arm. Both vision boards are entirely covered with photographs from the CATS team’s summer visit to Opportunity Village, representing a future for unsheltered relatives neither is willing to give up.

The duo has returned from a meeting with Coconino County representatives with no new leads on making their transitional housing community a reality. Back in the office for the weekend, a familiar occurrence for both of them, they get to work on their next steps.

“It’s a lifestyle,” Marks says long after Jensen affixes the boards to the wall.

Jensen sends him a patient smile. “It’s a good lifestyle.”

Final Part

It didn’t work out.

“We were trying to get the apartment complex to let us view a unit, and their office is very hard to get ahold of,” Coleman said. “Turns out, they have fees for a lot of facets of the apartment, and we’d end up only saving $200 a month. That combined with the extra gas we’d have to spend living so far from the city bus route means it just wasn’t a good fit.”

Coleman and her family still live in the two bedroom apartment on University Avenue. In between serving as her children’s primary caregiver, a kindergarten teacher for her home-schooled oldest and an experienced thrifter of baby clothes at Flagstaff Doulas, she waits for an email from city partners confirming she has a chance at a permanent home.

None are currently on the market.

As she waits, Coleman has no choice but to think long term, making a 10-year housing plan of her own.

“Hopefully, in five or 10 years, I would finish grad school,” she said. “We would make more income and not be in this situation at all.”

Coleman pauses, wringing her hands as she contemplates further. Her 5-year-old son loves to be outside, she says. The crisp air, the feeling of running at full speed, it helps him regulate his senses. It can be difficult to meet those needs in her compact apartment.

Many of the wealthier residents of her home city subscribe to the “not in my backyard” mindset, frowning at the idea of affordable properties being built within or around their neighborhoods.

Coleman just wants a backyard. Period.

Before getting up to leave, rejoining her family upstairs, she resolves to summarize her long-term goals in a single, compact, curtly spoken sentence.

“I would love to be in Flagstaff, purchase a home in Flagstaff, and live here,” Coleman said. “That’s all. That’s all I want to do. Like a normal person.”

“Poverty with a view: The status of an unsolvable housing crisis” is an upcoming investigative journalism project analyzing Flagstaff’s ongoing affordable housing issue and the many factors inhibiting the city’s reactionary actions.

Incorporating voices from the mountain town’s housing authority, nonprofits and long-time residents, the story will investigate how and if solutions are being implemented, how locals perceive the city’s long-term housing plans and the ways the concept of “affordable” housing is defined in 2026.

Five years ago, the city formally declared a state of housing emergency and prepared a 10-year plan to halve Flagstaff’s housing needs by 2031. As of December 2025, its metrics report it is only 31% of the way toward reaching this goal.

Affordable housing is the foremost determinant of whether or not residents can access food, transportation, employment and healthcare, and the city’s survival entirely depends on its ability to house its residents comfortably. The cost of living in Flagstaff remains well above the national average, as does the median price of home ownership, and median household incomes climb at significantly slower rates than both values.

Locals and visitors alike nickname the mountain town as being “poverty with a view.” Considering the responses to Flagstaff’s 2020 housing affordability surveys, insurmountable rental costs could leave Flagstaff without any locals to perpetuate the name if trends continue as they are.

Flagstaff residents will vote to ratify the county’s updated Regional Plan 2045 in May 2026. It is more important than ever that locals fully understand what the city has already attempted and what it cannot accomplish alone to bring more housing to northern Arizona. All of these subjects, alongside 2025 estimates of the average U.S. home buyer being well above 40 years old, set the stage for a timely interrogation of Flagstaff’s housing crisis and how its low-income residents are coping.

This section will contain additional information on the investigative project as the story develops. “Poverty with a view” will be fully published online by May 2026.