The high cost of living in Phoenix, Arizona, and how it changed


When you think of places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, you realize that the cost of living in Phoenix, Arizona is much less. But it wasn't always that way. 100 years ago Phoenix was a very expensive place to live. And that's because everything had to be brought in, on trains, from places like California.

In California, however, there were ports with a constant supply of everything people needed. And that made everything cheaper there, from building materials to food. Ships from all over the world unloaded their goods right there, and if you were living on the coast, you got the best price. If you were living further inland, such as in Phoenix, you paid a high premium. That's true of any isolated community, with a poor infrastructure, which Phoenix was until after World War II.
Support Arizona history by becoming a patron on Patreon

Click here to become a Patron!
History Adventuring blog posts are shared there daily, also there's "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, and super high-resolution photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona
Personally, when I moved back to Phoenix from Los Angeles in my 30s, after having been laid off from a great corporate job, I took a ten thousand dollar-a-year pay cut. But my standard of living immediately went up. That's because the infrastructure of Phoenix had been steadily improving since its territorial days, and so everything from houses to gasoline was cheaper than in California.

When my friends from California visit, they are absolutely amazed at how inexpensive the cost of living is in Phoenix. And in the long run it came down to climate. The weather is nicer in California, which brought a lot more people there in the past 100 years. Crowded conditions there drove prices sky-high. In Phoenix, while the growth has been great, it does not compare to the explosion of population in California, and the crowding, especially along the coast.


Image above: Looking north northwest at 1st Avenue and Washington in the 1890s, Phoenix, Arizona.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more