In Arizona, small quivers of an impending quake?
Despite the mandate to "say something positive about the community," sometimes the Arizona Republic can’t avoid saying something truthful about the community. Today there’s an ominous story about emerging evidence that in-migration "slowed sharply last year."
This matters because "growth" is the overwhelming (legal) economic driver of the state economy. There’s tourism, too — hardly a way to sustain a populous, urbanized region in the 21st century. The few other assets, such as the chip plants, would be big for, say, Tulsa. But for a region Phoenix’s size, the technology sector is actually smaller as a proportion of the economy than it was 20 years ago.
That leaves "growth" — meaning population growth, not growth of venture capital, IPOs, Ph.D.s, patents, per-capita income, foreign direct investment, research grants, college graduates, etc. If this even slows for long, the urban Arizona economy will face a recession the likes it hasn’t seen in modern times.
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