Q&AZ: How did air conditioning affect Arizona’s population growth?

Where there’s water, there is life. And where there’s air conditioning, there’s Arizonans.

It’s a technology so ubiquitous in Phoenix that many of us take it for granted — until it stops working.

Through KJZZ's Q&AZ reporting project, one listener asked how the advent of AC affected the population growth of the Phoenix metro area.

As it turns out, the answer isn’t as easy to pin down as it seems.

Beth Jarosz, a senior program director from the Population Reference Bureau — a nonpartisan research organization based in Washington, D.C. — said AC isn’t the only thing that contributed to a massive population boom in the mid-1900s.

”People had ways to cool their houses all the way back to the early 1900s,” she said, “I think it was 1903 or something like that when the first swamp cooler was invented. So I’m not sure it’s as clear a trend as some people want to suggest that it is.”

Phoenix is currently one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States.

Data from MacroTrends shows Arizona’s population drastically increasing starting in the 1950s — about the time modern air conditioning became common.

But Jarosz said the explosion in population is also due to a number of other factors, especially the largest growth period from 1990 to 2000.

”A lot of that was cost of living — really inexpensive land. So inexpensive housing, but also inexpensive for businesses to build whatever infrastructure they needed,” she said, “whether it was clean rooms or an industrial park or office space.”

Jarosz said the advent of cooling technologies correlates with the growth of other cities in the Sun Belt.

”It’s challenging to live in a place that gets that hot without a way to cool off,” she said. “I do think that if that hadn’t happened, we probably wouldn’t have seen the rapid rate of population growth in places like Phoenix — but how much faster it grew because of the technology, I don’t think we can say.”

Arizona has been growing faster than most of the rest of the United States for several decades now, said Jarosz, due to lower cost of living, cheap land and wide-open flat spaces for companies to build massive facilities like data centers and warehouses.

She said many people in Phoenix believe the city and its surrounding metro area are at capacity, as far as population goes.

But if the city manages to handle climate change in the coming years, Jarosz said it could actually keep growing.

”There are some cities globally that have added trees and plants everywhere and they were able to drop the temperature in their city by a couple of degrees,” she said. “But in a place like Phoenix, that’s gonna be especially challenging because you also have limited water.”

Air conditioning has certainly had an effect on the Valley’s population since it became commonplace.

But it’s important to know that it’s actually just one of many factors that helped turn the Phoenix metro area into the population hub it is today.