Arizona Sucks

When life might have become uncertain, gloomy, too expensive, or stagnant, people have turned to Arizona hoping for a brighter future and brighter days. With over 300 days of sunshine a year, plenty of people are easily convinced that a move to the Phoenix area is the right thing to do. And on just about any relocation website you will come across, Arizona sounds like a pretty damn good choice. You will come across countless claims on the affordable housing, an expanding and prosperous job market, terrific year-round weather, and a million other reasons why you should join the millions of lost souls spread throughout the state of Arizona.

It is not until you pack up the family, all your belongings, the golden retriever, and actually make the move to Arizona that you will realize life out here is drastically different than what your Realtor had told you. You will encounter life forms you were sure only existed on other planets, a job market that appears to be severely misplaced, and a housing market that may never fully recover. Everything you had ever worked for essentially thrown away in that snap relocation decision, and now you must live out your sentence melting away in an extremely over-priced stucco dwelling in the Arizona summer heat. You will go from having your own office to working your own drive-thru window – you will go from having equity in a nice house in an established neighborhood to paying down a mortgage which is hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the home is actually worth – you will go from having real, valued friendships to locked away in your house to avoid these people, all the crime, and the temperature extremes. It won’t take long until you realize you have become just another one of the many trapped in this discouraging, dusty, densely packed desert called Arizona.

Anyone with two brain cells left to rub together will know that Arizona is known for low wages and that the mainstream careers out here include retail and call centers. It is unfortunate that the job market in Arizona is so piss poor, but to say that it is anything else would be a straight up lie. Since there are so few places to further your career in Arizona, many people end up working the drive thru window or retail just to support their families. Plenty of people in Arizona are stuck in jobs where it becomes next to impossible to put away any money or acquire any valuable skill sets for a real chance to get themselves out of this mess. It is hard enough to land an out-of-state job, but it is increasingly more difficult if your recent work experience was polishing urinal mints at an Arizona fast food chain. Employers want experience and there aren’t too many jobs in Arizona where you can gain this experience unless you always dreamt of maximizing your number of plates washed or outbound calls per hour. Those stuck trying to move out of Arizona often realize that any time spent in Arizona has done nothing to build their resume or expand their professional network and this makes it increasingly difficult to leave. Arizona will not help you further your career and even if you do manage to get out, you will be stuck all the way at the bottom once again.

So many people bought into Arizona’s bogus housing market and are now stuck with mortgages they will spend a lifetime paying off. It is frightening how many people in Arizona are paying hefty mortgages, are upside down on their mortgages, or are just a month away from foreclosing. The Arizona housing market is not rebounding anytime soon, and many people who buy out here really have no idea what they are potentially in for. You would be surprised to find out just how many people are stuck out here just because they have a mortgage on a house they couldn’t dream of selling and can’t find any qualified renters for. In a real estate market where there are already so many available homes, more developments going up for some reason, and so few buyers, it really gives those buyers and potential renters the upper hand. Many people cannot afford to take the several hundred thousand dollar hit by selling their homes right now, so they end up stuck living in Arizona even though it is often not by choice.

Countless others arrive in Arizona and just let themselves completely go. Just a few months in Arizona and it is understood that ambition means nothing out here. Look at the people around you – so many people out here surround themselves with beers, double cheeseburgers, and chrome wheels they are just renting. It is absolutely astonishing when you look at the number of people who move to Arizona and become social drinkers who drink every day, drive-thru regulars, and people who think getting paid anything over ten dollars per hour is a lot of money. Arizona is a strange place and many people fall right into the trap, and become just as useless as the next guy out here. The overall vibe in Arizona is just scraping by, and once you also develop this mindset, it is next to impossible to accomplish anything. Suddenly, you have zero goals and no initiative, and the only thing keeping you kind-of going is the thought of going to Happy Hour. You no longer care about advancing yourself or your career, and as long as you have booze and fast food close by, you become just content enough to actually live in this wasteland.

It is easy to say that none of the above will happen to you – make the move to Arizona and see what happens. I don’t think a lot of people want to imagine what would happen if they were trapped in a desert, but it happens to thousands of people who move to Arizona each year.

If you’ve kept up with this blog and many of the reader comments, then you’ve surely seen just how many times we’ve read somebody’s story about how his or her quality of life was turned upside down upon relocating to Arizona. A lot of people get suckered into moving out here with the false claims of nice weather, cheap homes, ton of activities, great & plentiful jobs, and a high quality of life. People are easily fooled when they see the palm trees, sunny skies, pools, and nicely manicured golf courses on their TVs or in Arizona relocation guides. Unfortunately, move out here for just a week or two and you will quickly realize that you are really in for a unique and unpleasant treat. Arizona is one of those rare places where you can try your hardest to make the most of it, and you will still be left feeling worn out, defeated, misplaced, disgusted, and just sick to your stomach. There’s just something about this place and it’s scorching weather, discouraging landscape, horrifying crimes, monotony, and lack of opportunity that will really get you down and will keep you down until you can finally escape.

Many, many people have reported moving to Arizona and realizing just how unfriendly and lacking the job market really is out here. There are NO good jobs out here – well, of course there are a few but you probably aren’t going to be fortunate enough to land one of these positions. There was an abundance of fast food, retail, landscaping, call center, and other ’strip mall jobs’ in recent years. However, as it became more clear that Arizona was greatly overbuilt in the past few years, the number of these jobs are on the decline while the number of applicants is on the rise. Not a good situation for you if you had dreamed of moving to Arizona and introducing yourself to the fast-paced world of Wendys. It might already be pretty clear to a lot of people, but I cannot stress enough that nobody should ever move to Arizona to look for a job or even with a job offer in hand. You might wonder why it might be a bad idea to move to Arizona even with a job already lined up, but the answer could not be simpler. It is not worth the risk or the hassle of relocating to Arizona. If you move out here even with a great job and get laid off, it will be next to impossible to find a similar position out here. You will be forced to relocate once again or take a huge pay cut with another organization out here. That’s certainly no fun and Arizona does have some of the lowest unemployment benefits in the country should you need to file a claim. Don’t be fooled by news reports and talk of Arizona having a hot job market – it certainly doesn’t now and probably never will.

You probably thought it was bad enough when you moved to Arizona and you couldn’t find work or were stuck taking a position far below your skill level. Once you landed a job somewhere and somehow out here, you probably had the pleasure of dealing with commuting and just driving out here in general. You soon realized one day as you were driving to your dead end job, just how terrible all the construction, traffic and the drivers are out here. Other states may have more traffic, but Arizona certainly has some of the worst drivers in the country. Arizona drivers are famous for driving drunk, driving in the left lane, cutting off others, having no concept of merging, blocking people who need to get past them, not signaling, throwing caution & trash out the window, running red lights seconds after the signal change, and just about anything else you can imagine. Living in Arizona will allow you to witness some of the worst accidents you have seen in your life and the opportunity to sit in the subsequent traffic backups. Driving in Arizona is a lot like playing Mario Kart, except out here you will be forced to dodge illegals, drunks, tire debris, ladders, and old mattresses. Driving in Arizona will anger, frustrate, and quite possibly kill you.

Managing to make it out of the traffic alive and into your first day of work, you encountered some of the lowest forms of life on the planet. People in Arizona are like one giant herd of sheep with no direction, no ambition, no work ethic, and piss poor attitudes. People out here don’t care about you, and you shouldn’t care about them. Most relationships in Arizona are built solely on getting ahead or taking advantage of a situation. People in Arizona who work hard and share their own ideas will only be taken advantage of. It really doesn’t matter whether you are working the drive thru or retail or with a small business or in a corporate office building in Arizona – you will still be surrounded by these worthless, uneducated, drunk cowards. And to make matters worse, it is almost always these people who manage to get ahead out here. You will NOT grow your career in Arizona and shouldn’t even bother coming out here and giving it a try.

You surely thought that even though your job and commute in Arizona was terrible enough, you can at least have a great time at home and out on the weekends. Right? C’mon now, you have a brand new house in far, far East Mesa with a pool, and you live right next to a half vacant strip mall. Life could not sound much better to the majority of these uneducated fools in Arizona. Although, you quickly realized that life in an Arizona subdivision, as well as everyone else living in Arizona will manage to piss you off in one way or another. People out here struggle with menial tasks including grocery shopping, fueling their car, checking their mail, and even walking their dog. The majority of retail and restaurant workers out here are lazy, not knowledgeable, pushy, and just unpleasant to deal with. There is no common courtesy out here and people tend to just do what they feel when they feel like doing it. From having landscaping crews show up well before the sun comes up to tying up a barking dog for hours on end to listening to awful, deafening Mexican music late into the night to people of all ages road racing down the streets of your subdivision – you WILL encounter it all in Arizona. People in Arizona will drag you down to their level and at some point you will probably just give up and take it. The longer you spend in Arizona, it becomes more and more likely that you will be that jackass who is out with a chainsaw at 5AM, drunk, naked, and cutting down that dead palm tree in your yard. Don’t let it happen to you – leave now while you can still think rationally.

And then there’s the weather. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse out here, April arrives and so do the 100 degree days. No matter how you slice it or justify it, the fact is that the weather in Arizona is miserable for close to half the year. Don’t be fooled by the idiots who tell you there are just three hot months, and then nine months filled with the best and most beautiful weather in the world. This is not the case, was never the case, and will never be the case. Being in Arizona is close to unbearable from May to the beginning of October. The winter months are a mixture of mild and cold, but one thing is certain and that is that you won’t regularly be laying out by your pool in December like some people would like to have you believe. Tell me how a state where you are just about forced to lock yourself indoors for months on end has beautiful weather worth bragging about. The bright, hot, miserable, dusty, and lengthy Arizona summers will take a toll on your mental and physical health.

You really can try your hardest to make living in Arizona work for you. You can do the opposite of everyone else in Arizona and be friendly, work hard, go out and see what Arizona has to offer, think for yourself, drink in moderation, and strive to get ahead. Unfortunately, you will quickly realize that it is all for nothing as you sit in a dead end job and fail to build any true friendships or meaningful relationships out here. Arizona will quickly turn even the best of people into depressed, worthless, demotivated zombies who look, think, and act like everyone else. Try and justify it all you want but there is no reason for settling down out here. Ever thought your life couldn’t get any worse? Come to Arizona because it can and it will. How quick did you experience the downturn in quality of life since moving to Arizona? The first week?

Many thanks to member, Out of AZ, for recently posting this invaluable, honest look at how life really is in Arizona. I wanted to be sure everyone got a chance to read it, so enjoy!

I lived in the Phoenix area of AZ for eight years and just moved back to CO this summer. There are definitely negatives about anywhere, but there seems to be more in Phoenix than most. I’ve lived in NY, CA, CO, and NE and AZ is definitely the worst of all the places I’ve been.

For the nation’s fifth biggest city, there is absolutely nothing to do. You can go to one of 1235 shopping malls around the valley to escape the heat or go watch a movie, but you can do that anywhere in the country. You can go to an indoor baseball game if you can afford it. If you don’t have a swimming pool, your time in Phoenix will be miserable. If you do have a pool, expect crazy APS/SRP electric bills due to the pool and 24-hour air conditioning your house will need to keep it livable.

Your car will take a beating, the heat notwithstanding, but also the AZ drivers that you’ll drive defensively to avoid slamming into. Constant road construction is also a negative. There is approximately 15 miles of valley freeway closed every weekend for construction.

The job scene isn’t all that great. Not only is this place a right-to-work (more like right-to-get-fired-for-no-reason) state, the economy is heavily dependent on construction, which has all but ceased to exist right now.

There are like 21236 strip malls in Phoenix that look exactly like the 21235 others in the area. Same stores, same restaurants, same landscaping. It’s pretty hellish. And now, roughly half of most of the strip malls stand empty because of Arizona’s economy (and the broader US economy as well).

There’s no culture here. I’m not kidding. The best Mexican food here comes from chain restaurants. Or at least that’s what most Phoenicians think. Most Phoenicians love spending long weekends in Mexico but look down on Mexicans, Mexican food, and Mexican culture. Any other culture? Forget it, the best Italian food in the valley is at Olive Garden, the best Chinese is at Panda Express. For a metro area with a population over 4 million, it’s pretty pathetic.

The homes/neighborhoods/cities all look the same. Stucco brown boxes with eight tons of crushed rock in the front yard. You don’t know if you are in Ahwatukee, Tempe, Peoria or Chandler. It’s all the same.

I don’t know about public schools, I don’t have kids. But I will say that if you really think you’re going to receive a world-class education in a college with 70,000 others like at ASU or by paying tens of thousands for a degree people may or may not take seriously like at University of Phoenix, this may be a good place.

Phoenix is a waste. Truly. They waste water for miles of grass for golf courses or huge resorts. There are fountains and fake lakes everywhere. It’s great if you want to live near a body of green water so you can be eaten alive by mosquitoes. They waste electricity. How else do you justify living in a town that can get upwards of 120 degrees?

Phoenix is a demonstration of human accomplishment and hubris all at once. The fact that you can take a desolate, uninhabitable desert and turn it into the nation’s fifth-largest city shows what we can accomplish as a society. But for what purpose? So your kids can stay indoors for six months watching tv and playing video games because it’s too hot to play outside. So you can drive in your air conditioned car to your air conditioned office and back to your air conditioned home. So you can earn less money than most people doing the same job in the rest of the country. All this, with fluctuating real estate values, increasing crime, decreasing job opportunities, it’s all reason to stay out of Phoenix.

Looks like the 100 degree days are gone for a few months.  Regular updates returning soon …

Thanks to everyone keeping the site active by visiting, sharing comments, and letting their friends, family, and colleagues know the place to learn the real truth about Arizona!

In the past, one of the very few reasons for actually relocating to the Valley was the low-cost of living. Everything was cheap, and real estate was extremely affordable – just about anybody could actually afford to buy a decent sized home with a pool and actually make the payments. As time went on, Arizona real estate prices would become increasingly more expensive and many Arizona locals were effectively priced out of the market – or forced to try and buy in the far, far outskirts of town. Obviously, real estate has risen in price across the entire country and not just in Arizona. However, the job market and average Arizona salary has remained quite stagnant over the years and has left many people struggling to buy their own home and actually make the payments.

Home prices across the Valley have not (and may not) fall back down far enough where the majority of Valley residents will actually be able to afford to own their own home. Many have been priced out of the Arizona real estate market due to the abundance of poor paying jobs in the area.

Arizona can attract tons of people and we can continue to build tons of new housing developments – but if there are very few who can actually afford their own home, then what will happen to all these homes? Who is going to buy them? How many people will be forced to leave Arizona due to the lack of high paying jobs?

Unless you are retired, actually work in the area, or you work from home – you may want to think twice about buying that home on the Valley’s fringes just because the initial investment sounds quite a bit cheaper. Arizona has a ton of relatively open land so the real estate trend has always been to build out, and not up – resulting in suburban sprawl which spreads for miles and miles. These new areas often offer brand new housing, shopping centers, restaurants, and schools – but are they just too far away from everything else and do they offer many jobs outside of retail/restaurants? How successful can these fringe cities be if they can’t offer good jobs in the immediate area?

For the most part, the majority of jobs in these fringe areas are service-oriented to meet the daily demands of the residents in these new areas. Many of these jobs include grocery stores, restaurant chains, movie theaters, and gas stations. If you are planning on working for any of the few big employers in the Valley, you are almost guaranteed a lengthy commute every single day. The roads leading out of these fringe cities will be extremely congested as just about EVERYBODY has to commute elsewhere for work.

Many of these fringe cities may have grown too fast and too far out because of the recent housing boom. How much planning actually went into these cities or were they rushed to meet the Arizona housing demand of recent years? Will they stand the test of time or will they be abandoned by people hoping to move closer to everything else?

Arizona homes built in fringe developments may seem a lot cheaper initially, but are they really cheaper in the long run? What do you think?

I had a yard sale at a house I rented just north of downtown Phx. I’ve had plenty of yard sales in my life and NEVER had any one try to pass a counterfeit bill. At this one yard sale, I had THREE different people try to pass fake bills! I accepted one (tried to spend it at Taco Bell and found out when they didn’t accept it), my roommate accepted one, and I caught the third one because it had gotten wet and the ink was running. – Furreal

I guess this is what Arizona residents have to resort to now that the real estate boom is over and their HELOC has been frozen or canceled. Can’t even afford to shop around at yard sales anymore … sad and pathetic.

You may not like it – you may even blame many of Phoenix’s current problems on it, but all of the growth in Phoenix’s history has been absolutely necessary for its survival. Just about everyone has complained about one thing or another when the population of the Valley has surged from transplants from the mid-west or California. Comments such as ‘we don’t need or want these people’ and ‘they ruined my quality of life’ are all too common. Unfortunately, the truth is that this growth is absolutely necessary for the Valley’s economy to survive another day.

Obviously the influx of new residents is responsible for more traffic, pollution, and potentially more crime. However, without this growth where would the Valley be? Would it even continue to exist or would it become the ghost-town of a former model city?

Unfortunately, Arizona must take the good with the bad (there is currently no other choice). If Phoenix stops growing and people stop moving here – it will create quite the situation that I don’t even have words for.

Everyone knows by now how useful the Internet can be when researching just about anything. There is a wealth of free and easy to find information scattered through out the Internet. Unfortunately, anyone can create a website and there is a lot of information on the Internet that is anything but factual. Websites aimed at Arizona relocation more often than not paint a picture of the Valley as a tropical, oasis in the middle of the desert that everyone dreams of visiting and moving to some day. These websites are owned and maintained by Arizona Realtors who are trying to sell homes, so of course they want to make the Valley look inviting. One of the many reasons why this site was created was to offer a REAL look at life in Arizona and not just tell people what they want to hear. Here are some of the most laughable LIES I have stumbled across on Arizona relocation websites.

‘The Arizona economy is very strong’ – of course nobody wants to relocate to an area with a declining economy, so why not tell potential clients that the economy is doing great? Unfortunately, the Arizona economy is just about done for after the housing bubble burst and the chances of a strong rebound are quite slim. Construction and real estate jobs are drying up across the state as there is no real reason to continue building more homes when very few are actually buying/able to afford them anyways.

‘The people are very friendly’ – sorry, but this really could not be any further from the truth. Arizona is home to some of the most rude, arrogant, and unfriendly people on this Earth. The trash, fakes, and frauds who could not make it anywhere else all seem to collect in this place we call the Valley of the Sun.

‘A beautiful year round climate’ – the weather in Arizona is beautiful for 2 months of the year at best. Temperatures well into the hundreds for close to 4 months is about as far from beautiful as you can get.

‘Affordable real estate’ – Arizona real estate prices may be falling, but prices are still high considering what you get. Not to mention if you make an average Arizona salary you will be hard-pressed to even qualify for a mortgage, let alone actually make the payments. And the cheapest real estate is found on the outskirts of town which works fine if you are retired, work-from-home, or work at the neighborhood grocery store. Otherwise you can brag about your 40 mile each way commute to work, while being stuck in traffic and getting repeatedly cut off and getting slammed into by illegals with no insurance – all while hoping you or your car doesn’t overheat from the 100 plus degree temperatures.

Supply and demand – inventories of available homes across the Valley are extremely high. There are more Arizona homes out there, than there are people who wish to move into them. Less demand – prices will go down.

Foreclosures – Arizona can brag about having one of the highest home foreclosure rates across the nation. Over the next couple years, many more homes will end up in foreclosure due to thousands buying homes they could never afford. What happens as more and more homes go into foreclosure? Supply of homes goes up and this will continue to drive Arizona home prices down. You can thank your neighbors who bought homes they could never afford for driving the value of your home down as well.

Lender owned homes – what happens when these repossessed homes end up sitting vacant? One of two things is more than likely to happen and both WILL drive down the value of your home. Vacant homes can often be very poorly maintained and this can deter any potential buyers browsing YOUR neighborhood. Or these lender owned Arizona homes are sold at below-market cost, which will effectively drop prices in your subdivision.

Qualifying for a mortgage – the days of mortgages for anyone and everyone are long gone. Good luck buying a house without a modest down payment, income verification, and/or credit verification. Fewer and fewer people are able to qualify for a mortgage which is keeping the supply up and bringing Arizona real estate prices down.