The Show for Aug. 25, 2026: State of housing in Arizona, Zoox robotaxis and more

The cost of rent in Arizona is leveling off, and home construction is at its highest point in a decade. But a new report shows we have a long way to go to solve our state’s housing crisis. Plus, a new Amazon-owned robotaxi service has started operating in Las Vegas.

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: KJZZ’s original production, The Show, is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest nonprofit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, nonprofit for Arizona.bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz.

MARK BRODIE: Hi, I’m Mark Brodie, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday, we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It’s The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Mark Brodie.

LAUREN GILGER: And I’m Lauren Gilger. Coming up, the cost of rent is leveling off in Arizona, but people are still spending too much on housing.

MARK BRODIE: And how AI can, and maybe should, be used in military operations.

LAUREN GILGER: But first, two Phoenix police officers have been arrested and fired after a violent, off-the-books traffic stop in south Phoenix earlier this month. It was so violent, in fact, that when it was reported to a different police department, they thought it must have been done by criminals posing as police. The officers involved, Antonio Felix and Luis Vasquez Jr., did not activate their body-worn cameras, did not report use of force, and left one of the people involved on the side of the road alone. ABC15 chief investigative reporter Dave Biscobing broke the story, and he sat down with Phoenix police Chief Matt Giordano to talk more about how people in south Phoenix can trust the department given its history there and this latest scandal. Good morning, Dave. Thanks for coming back on The Show.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Dave. Thanks for coming back on The Show.

DAVE BISCOBING: Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so this is a winding story. Start with what we know about this unreported traffic stop. What are the officers accused of doing, exactly?

DAVE BISCOBING: Well, like you just broke down, they apparently rear-ended this car that the victims claim was following them. They claim the police were following them, and then it got very violent. According to the victims, they ripped off a window, Tased them multiple times, held a gun at them, counted down from three after threatening to shoot them.

The man — there’s a man and woman — the man actually, he’s a big guy, he’s listed at 6-some feet, 300-some pounds, got away, and the car drove off while they had the woman, I think, in custody already — or I should say had her handcuffed.

But they left her just on the side of the road, and then the just — police didn’t report this or pretend like it happened at all. And then once the man got into Tempe, he reported what had happened, and they thought, "OK, this had to have been some sort of wild rip or criminals posing as cops." And that’s how this all began.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. OK, so they didn’t report it. They said actually in court documents after they were arrested that it was because they knew they had broken so many Phoenix PD policies, right?

DAVE BISCOBING: ... That’s their explanation. A lot of their explanation, and it’s not much based on what we’ve seen documented that their side of this was, but it doesn’t really add up when it’s held up to all of the other facts.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, so you sat down with Phoenix police Chief Matt Giordano. ... What does he say about what the department’s doing in this particular case and making sure these officers haven’t done this before and it’s never come to light?

DAVE BISCOBING: So his steps he has announced and told us in our interview are to both investigate these officers specifically, kind of scrub down their work history, but then also have their Integrity Unit take a deeper look at the South Mountain Precinct and the unit, etc., to see if there are some systemic issues. So that is what he says they are doing.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. What about other officers at Phoenix PD? I’ve never heard of a so-called off-the-book traffic stop. Is this a thing that happens?

DAVE BISCOBING: I am getting some source information from multiple police sources that indicates that this, while not maybe being carried out in the way that these officers did this quote "off-the-book" stop, there is something known as "ghost stops." And that is that officers, maybe when they don’t want to have to document a stop because they don’t think it’s severe enough or they just don’t want to or for whatever reason, they don’t activate their body cameras, they don’t call it in.

And they maybe are — maybe it's something as innocuous as giving someone kind of just a verbal warning or, in the most extreme senses, what we’re doing here. And I do want to say we use the word traffic stop because that’s how Phoenix has described it, but traffic stop implies there’s some sort of legitimacy that is what happened with these two officers. And as of right now, the evidence does not show that. So that’s just for a lack of a better term.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. You also asked the chief about a string of incidents with other officers at the South Mountain Precinct where these two officers were based. And this precinct in particular seems to have a culture problem. You described it as out of control. What did the chief have to say about that?

DAVE BISCOBING: Well, my sources say that precinct has a reputation from being out of control, right? And this stems back from far to more recent. And we’re talking about Richard Chrisman, who back in 2010 shot a man in the back and was charged with murder, ended up getting I think 10 years in prison for that.

Then right after that, very close, there was another officer, Sean Drenth, who was found dead in a warehouse parking lot area. They’ve never figured out or determined whether or not that was a suicide or a murder, meaning perhaps a cop killed him because they were all involved in an off-duty work scheme. Flash forward to now, we have the sergeant from that precinct who was trying to bait the students at that ICE protest, he was fired. And now we have this.

So I asked the chief, "What is — is there a culture problem here?" He says, "No, I came up through this precinct. There’s a lot of great men and women there." But many in the community in that area, it’s a very divisive relationship between people in south Phoenix and the police department, and there’s no doubt that just pretending that there isn’t an issue is going to allay any of those concerns.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, last minute here, Dave. This is coming after the Phoenix PD and the chief pushed back against the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden. They released a scathing report about the department’s use of force and more. The Trump administration dropped that investigation. The Phoenix PD was happy about that. But what does this story say about the kind of debate over that DOJ report and if it should have been closed with no action?

DAVE BISCOBING: For the public, for us in the news who report on Phoenix, for everyone, the question is: How much longer can we take what Phoenix says — leadership at every level from the city manager’s office to the mayor to the council to the police department, and say, "Hey, we can police ourselves," when something like this could happen?

They keep asking for our trust. They keep saying that they can do it. Then why do things like this keep happening? We still have a disproportionate number of police shootings and killings compared to any other major police department in the country. We have these massive scandals, and these things keep happening. And yet they keep asking for trust and patience. And at one point, does that just become — if it isn’t already — just completely hollow?

LAUREN GILGER: ABC15 chief investigative reporter Dave Biscobing joining us. I’m sure he’ll be following this story. Thank you, Dave. Appreciate your reporting here.

DAVE BISCOBING: Thank you.

MARK BRODIE: The Trump administration this month proposed changes to the Head Start program. That’s the national early childhood education program for low-income families. Essentially, the changes would give states more control over Head Start, moving many of those decisions away from the federal government. NPR reports a Health and Human Services official said "one-size-fits-all mandates from Washington can’t fully account for the reality of the 1,600 providers nationwide." Under the proposed changes, there would be a cap on how much money Head Start centers could spend on administrative overhead. There would also be a reduction in the number of regulations governing the program, among other changes. But some providers aren’t happy about these changes. Eve Del Real is one of them. She’s president of the Arizona Head Start Association and joins me now to talk more about this. Good morning, Eve.

EVE DEL REAL: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

MARK BRODIE: Thank you for being here. So, what about these changes doesn’t sit well with you and some of the — maybe many of the providers here in Arizona?

EVE DEL REAL: Well, I think it’s important to highlight that Head Start was designed to provide services for those most vulnerable in our communities. And when we say those most vulnerable, it’s for children experiencing homelessness, children in foster care, children with disabilities. The proposal would initially rescind and replace the current Head Start performance standards that provide the safeguards to these protections that are in place to provide a high-quality experience for children. It would eliminate, for example, federal staff-to-child ratios and group size limitations, which we know are essential to providing a high-quality experience for children.

MARK BRODIE: Could the state not just put those same kinds of standards back in place?

EVE DEL REAL: No, actually. So here in the state of Arizona, there is no cap on group size. So when we make a comparison of some of the quality measures that we have in the services we’re providing, even if we followed state statutes, it would significantly reduce the quality that we’re providing, again, for children that have higher needs.

MARK BRODIE: Is that something that, in theory at least, could be changed by the Legislature?

EVE DEL REAL: It could be. I mean, it’s something that we could always help advance and support. That would be phenomenal. But currently, as the statutes lie within Arizona, there’s a significant difference in the support that we’re providing versus what the state has in place.

MARK BRODIE: Are there some decisions that you think it would be better if the state could make on its own, as opposed to having them being dictated from Washington, if not, as the Trump administration is proposing, basically everything being sent down to the states?

EVE DEL REAL: Well, I mean, I think that the NPRM is so complicated. There’s, again, some complexity with the way it’s even written. I think that removing certain things — even such as the detailed requirements for developmental screenings, for disability services, health, mental health — has a huge impact on our ability though to identify children with higher needs and refer them then on to maybe additional state-level interventions. So it’s very complex. So it just depends on on what it is. And then again, the funding that’s related to that, it’s challenging, I think, for the state to be able to compensate for some of those interventions that we’re already providing.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, let me ask you about the money aspect here. I mean, is there a sense among Head Start operators here that if these changes were to go into effect that there would be less money for Head Start generally?

EVE DEL REAL: Yes, there would be less. Especially as we’re looking at the proposal with the administrative cost ceiling from a 15% now to a 5%, it would be extremely challenging for a Head Start program to continue providing services at the level that, again, we’re mandated to, even with this proposed reduction, because of the support that’s necessary within the classroom settings and within family services as well.

MARK BRODIE: Are there Head Start operators in Arizona that, even if things stay exactly as they are, are potentially at risk of closing because they can’t afford to continue doing it?

EVE DEL REAL: I think that the risk is always there for any Head Start program because there are other conditions that we’re currently experiencing. I mean, because we know there was the closure of the federal office last year, there are many Head Start grantees that are still experiencing delays and changes of scope and other federal actions that always jeopardize timely funding.

MARK BRODIE: ... How has enrollment been in Arizona over the last, let’s say, couple of years? I mean, is it fairly steady? Have you seen a decline, an increase?

EVE DEL REAL: You know, after the pandemic, I know that many grantees at a national level were struggling with enrollment. However, here in Arizona, we serve 17,000 children, and many grantees here in the state have an extensive waitlist. So for us, I mean, the call to provide the service is definitely there, and it would be a huge loss to the state if Head Start were ever eliminated.

MARK BRODIE: OK. So I mean, what do providers say? Let’s say that these changes from the Trump administration go into effect, what would Head Start look like in Arizona that would be different than what it looks like now?

EVE DEL REAL: It would significantly water down the service. I mean, we would be equivalent to childcare without the comprehensive service delivery model. Keeping in mind that Head Start again is not childcare. It is high-quality early education with embedded supports that include that disability services, the health, the dental, the mental health services. But then also considering that we employ a highly qualified workforce. So when you put all of that together, we’re providing these beautiful, safe environments that lead to these individualized learning experiences for children. It’s very different than a typical childcare model.

MARK BRODIE: Is there also a concern, as we’ve heard in other areas, where if you have to get rid of the education component of that, that children enter kindergarten, for example, less prepared to be there?

EVE DEL REAL: Yes, they would definitely enter less prepared. I mean, we have six decades of evidence that shows that Head Start improves school readiness, it increases high school graduation and college enrollment, it connects children to health. And, again, it produces lasting gains in adult earnings and even family stability.

MARK BRODIE: All right, we’ll have to leave it there. That is Eve Del Real, president of the Arizona Head Start Association. Eve, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

EVE DEL REAL: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, how involved should artificial intelligence be in military operations? A lawyer who served as general counsel for the Army and Air Force weighs in.

LAUREN GILGER: But first, they may not always be in the headlines these days, but immigration raids are still taking place here and all over the country. And in photos taken outside a recent raid in a Tucson neighborhood, our next guest spotted something a little out of the ordinary: a truck with the letters DEA on the side. That’s the Drug Enforcement Administration, an agency that isn’t traditionally involved in immigration enforcement. Yana Kunichoff is a reporter with Arizona Luminaria in Tucson, and she’s on the line now to tell us more. Good morning, Yana.

YANA KUNICHOFF: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for coming on. So, DEA was spotted at this Tucson raid. Why did this stand out to you?

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, I think that what we have seen is a shift under the Trump administration, we’ve seen a shift in the agencies that have been involved in immigration enforcement. And we’ve also seen a lot of unmarked vehicles, officers who are not wearing tags saying what agency they’re connected to involved in immigration enforcement at the ground level. So this really stark sign of a federal agency that doesn’t usually do this work really caught my eye.

LAUREN GILGER: What does the Drug Enforcement Administration normally do? I mean, obviously drug enforcement, right? Different kind of work.

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, so the DEA is usually looking at, are there cartel operations? Are there drug trafficking operations? It’s part of the effort to get fentanyl pills off of the streets. There’s kind of this bigger international or national view of tracking criminal organizations, and that is really, really different to arresting folks for civil immigration purposes.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, right. OK, so this is not the traditional role of the DEA. But it does seem like this could be kind of the new normal, as you’re getting at there. Tell us about what Attorney General Kris Mayes has had to say about this. She mentioned this in a different interview, right?

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, and so some of this came up about a year ago when the Trump administration deployed officers from a number of different agencies, including the IRS, including FEMA, which is emergency management, to immigration enforcement, and the move with the DEA was part of that.

So we’re seeing this big growth in the immigration enforcement agenda, and then some of these other more traditional other enforcement work, there’s just less of that happening.

And Kris Mayes a year ago wrote a letter to the federal government saying, "Hey, this is actually impacting my ability to fight crime at the border. This is impacting my ability to fight cartels at the border. I need more agents." And at the time, she said there were 60 agents who had been deployed out of Arizona to other places.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, there was also a Cato Institute report showing almost half of DEA agents had been shifted to immigration enforcement last year. And as you say, we’ve seen this similar pattern play out from the Trump administration when it comes to other agencies that are not normally charged with immigration, like FEMA.

There was a recent report from House Democrats and Representative Greg Stanton from here in Arizona that shed light on how the Trump administration had shifted workers at FEMA to immigration enforcement as well, and the House Democrats there said that was an illegal move.

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, I think what we’re seeing is really what has been the impact of this now essentially over the last year. So that GAO report, there were two things that really stood out to me.

One was the Texas floods last year when 137 people died in July, that there was a lapsed contract for call centers, so when people were making calls to look for support, no one was answering those calls because of some of those FEMA cuts, which included moving staff to work in detention centers or help hire officers, jobs that are just outside of their usual position as FEMA employees.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Did ICE or the DEA here have anything to say to you about this particular story?

YANA KUNICHOFF: ICE sent me to the DEA, and the DEA did not give me an on-the-record comment. So I don’t have anything to share that can help us understand this better, besides what we’ve kind of seen in this shift in there’s been some reporting around, OK, so white-collar criminal investigations are going down. There’s sort of numbers about the impact of this in other spaces, but otherwise, no.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. Back up for a moment, Yana, and tell us what this issue looks like on the ground right now. Like, you’re in Tucson, you’re near the border, but this is happening, as I said, all over the country. Are you seeing more immigration raids still happening in Tucson, even though they don’t always make headlines?

YANA KUNICHOFF: Oh, absolutely. And I think what I’m hearing, there’s a pretty broad network of rapid response volunteers on the ground here who try to go out to whenever there’s an alleged raid, they try to be there on the ground, and I’m hearing that those are happening pretty regularly. They’re also happening very early in the morning.

The raid that I wrote about two weeks ago, there was actually a volunteer who saw people going to what they believed was another raid while they were on their way to the first one, so that just tells me that the density of these occurring are high.

But it’s also really hard to get information about it when I’ve asked immigration or when I’ve asked ICE for comment, if I don’t have the full name and the A-number or the date of birth of a person arrested in that, they won’t comment on it, so there’s not a lot of ability to get official information.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, and difficult to track on any kind of mass level. What are you watching for on this front going forward, Yana, in terms of this major shift in law enforcement priorities and what agencies are doing the work, but also just the work that’s going kind of unnoticed?

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s always a trickle down in communities from this. I’m wondering what this looks like in schools. I’m wondering what this means for how people interact with local law enforcement, sort of what it means for the fabric of our communities here in Tucson to have this level of enforcement.

And I think also that people are seeing something happen in their communities, but is that reflected in media coverage or are they able to get information about what happens? I think that just impacts public trust in a broad way.

LAUREN GILGER: Raises lots of questions there. Yana Kunichoff is a reporter with Arizona Luminaria joining us from Tucson. Yana, thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate it.

YANA KUNICHOFF: Yeah, thank you for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning. It is The Show here on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. A new robotaxi service started taking fares this month. Zoox, which is owned by Amazon, is now collecting payment in Las Vegas. It had been operating for free there for several months. My next guest describes the cars as kind of a "cute toaster on wheels," in that they’re square and boxy, but look like they have a personality. Joann Muller is transportation correspondent at Axios, where she writes the Future of Mobility newsletter. I spoke with her earlier, and we started with what’s different about this company and their vehicles from what folks may be familiar with with other autonomous vehicles.

JOANN MULLER: Well, Zoox started out, it was a startup like everybody else, and they got purchased by Amazon at a time when they probably really needed the extra capital. And it was an interesting acquisition at the time. Everyone assumed, myself included, that Amazon wanted to buy Zoox so that they could deliver packages with the Zoox robotaxi. But in fact, it’s always been focused on passengers and ride-hailing. And what’s different about Zoox from other autonomous vehicle companies like Waymo is that they are doing it all. They designed a vehicle from the ground up that is meant to be a robotaxi. It’s not like they’re putting self-driving technology onto an existing car, which is what Waymo has done. If you’ve ever ridden in a Waymo, you watch as the steering wheel turns miraculously by itself. There is no steering wheel in a Zoox. And there’s no brake pedals, there’s no human controls at all. And so they call that a purpose-built robotaxi. But Zoox is different for other reasons in that they are besides designing the vehicle, they’re manufacturing it, they’re going to operate their own depots, they’re controlling the experience inside the vehicle. And so it is a very vertically oriented strategy, but probably comes with some more risk that way as well.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah. So why are they deciding or why did they decide to roll out in Vegas as opposed to anywhere else?

JOANN MULLER: You know, I don’t know exactly. I mean, Nevada is one of the few states that’s been very friendly toward autonomous technology, even from the beginning. Texas is another one, so you see a lot of robotaxis in Texas. As far as Las Vegas, it’s a relatively concentrated area, the Strip. We all know what the Strip is like, and these vehicles can kind of go from one popular destination to another. It doesn’t go everywhere. Zoox has started small, but there’s enough demand, I think, in that concentrated area that they can really get some some volume going.

MARK BRODIE: What will it take for Zoox to be a real competitor to a company like Waymo, which seems to have a foothold in a lot of communities already, including here in Phoenix?

JOANN MULLER: Well, Waymo has an enormous head start on everyone, and Zoox has about 100, 110 vehicles right now. Waymo has like 3,500, almost 4,000 in 11 cities. So, you know, what will it take? It will take time. It will take a lot of technology to continue building out what they’re doing. I think Zoox is very different. They just are they’re going to be slower and more deliberate. They’ve got their cars running in San Francisco now, and then they’ve also targeted, I believe, Austin and Miami as their next markets. But they’re still, you know, what Zoox does is they have a traditional car with their software on it, and they drive around and kind of do all the training with a normal car. But then they have to deploy the vehicle itself, and so that takes another sort of layer of testing for the vehicle itself to deploy. And it will be slow. And so honestly, I don’t know that Zoox will catch up to Waymo.

MARK BRODIE: Do you get the sense, and maybe is there a sense in the AV world, that certain cities may just be like one-horse towns? Like, might Zoox just decide, "Look, in a place like Phoenix, Waymo has this, as you referenced, this enormous head start. It’s maybe not worth it to go there. Let’s try somewhere that doesn’t have autonomous vehicles already"?

JOANN MULLER: I think you’ve identified something that is a very real consideration. Because let’s face it, there’s not that many like, each city’s not going to need that many robotaxis. They will be generally focused on the center city, and so they’ll just kind of zip around back and forth and they’re in constant motion. You don’t need a thousand or five thousand of these in one city. So once a company gets a foothold, there might be room for another one, maybe three total, but I don’t think that you can have a lot of players in each city.

MARK BRODIE: You also write, Joann, about Zoox maybe doing things a little differently in terms of their safety data and sort of giving potential riders a look, pardon the pun, under the hood. What are they doing differently there?

JOANN MULLER: Well, just this week, Zoox released what’s called its Safety Case framework. It sounds very jargon-y and so forth, and only a couple companies have done the same thing, Waymo being one, and Aurora, which is a truck autonomous trucking company. But what they’re trying to do is just show the public and, frankly, the policymakers how they evaluate their own safety, because there are no federal regulations for autonomous vehicles. The Department of Transportation, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is beginning to work on performance standards for AVs, but this is many years away: three, four, five, who knows how many years it will take. And so for the time being, these AV developers kind of largely determine themselves when their cars are safe. And so we have no idea how they decide that. And so transparency is very important.

MARK BRODIE: Have you ridden in a Zoox?

JOANN MULLER: I have! I’ve ridden in a Zoox in San Francisco, and I was with some Zoox officials at the time doing an interview, in fact, in the back of or in the car. What’s nice about a Zoox is it’s I call it like a high-tech stagecoach. The seats face each other, right? So you can have a conversation. There’s four seats, and so some people have to ride backwards. And the car, the vehicle itself, is bidirectional, so there’s no front or back. It doesn’t do U-turns. It just gets somewhere, and then it just begins going in the opposite direction. Now the front is the back, the back is the front. And it was a San Francisco’s a very complicated city to drive around in, and there’s all the hills and intersections and stoplights and stop signs, and it was it was good. It was quite good. You know, there were one or two moments where I was like, "Oh, this is a little uneven," let’s say, but generally speaking, it was fantastic. And it was a funny thing that happened: there was a car that was kind of tailgating the robotaxi, and the robotaxi, the Zoox robotaxi, honked and said basically, "Get off my tail!"

MARK BRODIE: Really?

JOANN MULLER: I thought that was quite interesting. I had never experienced that before.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Joann Muller, transportation correspondent at Axios, where she writes the Future of Mobility newsletter. Joann, thanks as always. I really appreciate it.

JOANN MULLER: Thank you, Mark.

LAUREN GILGER: Arizona has been facing a housing crisis since the Great Recession, and the latest Annual State of Housing in Arizona report from the state’s three public universities shows some encouraging signs, but it also shows we are still a long way from solving the problem. Alison Cook-Davis is research director at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at ASU, as well as co-director of the Arizona Research Center for Housing and Economic Solutions. I got her on the line to tell us more about it, beginning with one of those encouraging signs: housing construction is at a decade high. Is it enough?

ALISON COOK-DAVIS: 2024 was a good year for construction. So that’s really a good sign. But we still see that household growth is consistently outpacing housing growth, and we’re still kind of playing catch-up from that shortage that has started from the recession on.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, it’s been a long time coming. So construction is coming, but not enough. And I’m sure the barriers to that have to do with the economic reality right now. Everything else, including construction, costs more.

ALISON COOK-DAVIS: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, the construction costs have continued to increase. We’ve also seen higher interest rates, which is also very constraining. And so, yeah, these things kind of mount up. There’s also been a number of challenges around just having the workforce, and the cost of building is reflected in that.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK. Another silver lining highlighted in your report is to do with rental costs, which might sound surprising to anyone who’s paying rent in the Valley right now. But they are leveling off, right?

ALISON COOK-DAVIS: Yes. The most recent numbers show that year-over-year, they’re still increasing. But it has the lowest increase since 2021. And so what that suggests is that we are seeing this leveling off, maybe a little bit of moderation here. And I think this is good news for renters to some extent, and that is reflected also in the housing cost burden has lowered slightly. But it’s still over 50%.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And you still find that over half of renters spend 30% or more of their income on housing, which is sort of that recommended amount you’re supposed to spend on housing. And that the state needs just a ton of affordable rental units that we do not have. 90,000?

ALISON COOK-DAVIS: Yes. Yes, I mean, that’s really where the crunch is. The bottom of the market where you have the extremely low and very low-income households, that’s where there is just not enough units, and you can’t build homes at those price points. And so it really becomes a need for preservation, for other strategies for being able to provide housing.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, let’s talk about the homebuying market, Alison, because this is another kind of sticking point here. There was one stat in this section that really made me start: the U.S. median age of first-time homebuyers has reached a record high of 40 years old. That’s wildly different than it was just a generation ago. What’s that look like here?

ALISON COOK-DAVIS: Yeah, I don’t have the numbers for Arizona, unfortunately. I only have the national numbers, but it is stark in the sense that I think that the median age for first-time homebuyers was about 31 a decade ago. So it’s changed rather dramatically.

And so the number of first-time homebuyers has actually decreased quite a little bit, and we have seen that the home values have gone up so quickly over time here in Arizona, and even compared to some of our other close-by states. We’re like 66% increase in the last decade.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, which anybody looking at the housing market here has seen, right? The prices have just skyrocketed. Has that begun to even out as well? Will they ever go down?

ALISON COOK-DAVIS: That’s a really good question. The short answer is probably not 66%.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. Never that much!

ALISON COOK-DAVIS: And I think it’s worth noting, I think that one of the things in the report was also kind of stark was looking at just residential home sales prices over time over the past decade, and just seeing the change where we saw about 40% of homes that were selling between $100,000 and $200,000, and now in 2025, that’s only like 5% of the sales. So you’re seeing a lot fewer of those entry-level homes. And wages haven’t really kept up with these really fast increases.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. You also look in this report at homelessness in the state, and we have seen the rates of homelessness here rise a ton in recent years, and more than in other kind of comparable Sun Belt states, you found. Talk about the connection between the reality of people living on the street, which all of us see every day when we’re driving around or walking around the city, and these kind of big-picture housing challenges.

ALISON COOK-DAVIS: It is the worst manifestation of housing unaffordability. And Arizona also saw a rise in unsheltered homelessness, which was particularly difficult to see. The reality is these constraints, this increase of unaffordability, what that means for different folks, some people may have to rent longer and not be able to get into a home, and some people just may not have a home. This is the continuum of these challenges. And so this really is a housing affordability problem.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, that’s really an interesting way to look at it that we don’t always put it into that lens. Let me ask you lastly, Alison, about the big picture here in terms of, we always think about Arizona, the Valley, the county here, as the fastest-growing place in the country, this incredibly booming metropolis, which it still is, you find here, but that pace of growth seems to be slowing. And because of that, the population here is becoming more diverse. That all kind of leads to housing challenges as well.

ALISON COOK-DAVIS: Yeah, we do continue as a state to grow. I mean, Arizona gained about 67,000 residents in 2025. We have seen international migration decline substantially from 2024. But even that net growth has slowed down. But we still are seeing our household formation is outpacing the units that are being brought online. So all of these things add up to where are we going to be? And I can’t predict that, but we are definitely we could be 9 million by 2030, you know?

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. And that will mean that the demand for housing changes and continues to go up, but also that we need different kinds of housing, right? Like we need those entry-level homes that you talked about us not having enough of, but we also need homes for seniors, things like this that we don’t think about necessarily.

ALISON COOK-DAVIS: Yeah, I mean, this has been a big part of the demographic shift, too, where we’ve seen just this shift in having older Arizonans. And so it is top of mind in thinking about what that means in aging in community and being able to have the place and space to be able to age where you live. Sometimes folks are looking to potentially downsize, but those smaller, easily accessible homes are not always easy to find.

And even if you’re in a home that you have owned for a long period of time, moving can be very challenging, but then having a place to move to that fits your needs could be possibly the constraining factor in being able to do that.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Well, we’ll leave it there for now. Alison Cook-Davis, research director with the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at ASU. She’s co-director for the Arizona Research Center for Housing and Economic Solutions, host of this report. Alison, thanks very much for coming on. Thanks for walking us through all of this. I appreciate it.

ALISON COOK-DAVIS: Thank you so much. I appreciate you.

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, it is The Show here on KJZZ 91.5. I’m Lauren Gilger.

MARK BRODIE: And I’m Mark Brodie. AI has been changing many areas of public life — including in the military.

The Washington Post reports the U.S. used the most advanced AI at the start of the war in Iran than it has ever used before.

It’s a subject my next guest has been thinking about, too. Chuck Blanchard is senior counsel at the law firm Arnold and Porter and is a former general counsel of both the Army and Air Force; he also has served in the Arizona Senate.

He wrote about this recently in a Substack titled “Ban Killer Robots?: AI and the Military.” Blanchard joins me to talk more about this. And Chuck, what got you thinking about this at this time?

CHUCK BLANCHARD: Well, I was heavily involved in the issue when I was general counsel of the Air Force because there was a lot of discussion at the time in 2013, 2014 on what the department should be doing about autonomous weapon systems.

But at the time, I think the feeling was this was all theoretical because we just didn’t have the technological capability to make AI really be something we would be comfortable with in the battlefield. And then I watched AI just explode in the last few years.

I’ve seen how my law firm and other law firms are using it. I know clients are using it effectively. I’ve seen the capabilities. And so it made me think we need to go back to rethink exactly how should we approach autonomous weapon systems.

MARK BRODIE: Could you, back in 2013, let’s say, have envisioned what AI has become and the way that it could be used in weapons?

CHUCK BLANCHARD: AI was already beginning to be used by DOD. Certainly it was used in intelligence analysis. So the issue was, is the AI so capable that we would trust an autonomous system to make attack decisions without a human in the loop? And at the time, the answer was no, that we don’t trust the technology. We don’t think it could comply with international law.

MARK BRODIE: Do you draw a distinction between using AI, for example, to make decisions about who or what to attack and using AI to actually do the attacking?

CHUCK BLANCHARD: Yes, and I think most of the community on both sides believe that there is an important distinction. We already depend heavily on machines to help identify targets, to say, “This is the enemy. This is not the enemy.” And the best example is a pilot in an F-35 never sees an enemy aircraft; they are too far away. What they do see are radar signals that are interpreted by a computer based on a library of signatures to identify that’s the enemy, that’s not the enemy, that’s a commercial aircraft.

And so we already depend on that kind of issue. But we also depend on a pilot making a decision if it doesn’t look right, if what the computer is telling them doesn’t look right, the human being can say, “No, I’m not going to fire.”

And it was interesting at a conference I was at in England in 2014 that everyone seemed to agree that the critical issue was whether or not there was a human ultimately making the targeting decision.

The use of computers or technology or AI to help assist the human being is not really the moral or legal issue. It’s whether or not we completely eliminate the role of a human being in the process.

MARK BRODIE: Well, but as you write, it seems like humans could at least in theory eliminate themselves, right? Like they could just trust the AI over their own judgment, and so even though there is a human in the loop, their role is limited to nonexistent.

CHUCK BLANCHARD: Exactly. And so in response to that, you have to sort of train your pilots or your warfighters that they got to be careful about over-relying on the technology. That’s a reality.

And probably for a Patriot missile system that’s on automatic mode, it’s very likely that human beings are going to defer to the machine because the times are just so short for a missile coming in that they really can’t be an effective human interaction. But at least in that case, what you’re firing on is a piece of metal, a missile; you’re not firing on another human being.

But I think it does become more problematic if you’re talking about air defense systems that attack aircraft where there is a human being there, and then this becomes a concern that you train your folks to show to use their judgment and not just check their judgment at the door because a machine’s telling them what ought to be done.

MARK BRODIE: Do these questions become different in some way when you’re talking about an air war or a sea war as opposed to actual human soldiers on a battlefield?

CHUCK BLANCHARD: Yeah, I think actually the land warfare where you have a lot of civilians mixed in and you have cities raises significant compliance issues with international law. The law of war requires lots of really tough judgments that become very difficult in a land war with lots of civilians.

So I think we may be getting close to where we can comply with international law in the air domain and naval domain against air targets and against naval targets. I think we’re still much further away when we’re talking about ground war — which of course still raises the more philosophical issue: Should we still do it even if we’re capable of complying with international laws? Is there something still morally wrong with allowing a machine to make life-and-death decisions?

MARK BRODIE: I’m curious where you come down on that question.

CHUCK BLANCHARD: I think there should be a high threshold for the use of autonomous weapons. And the threshold’s not only we have to be doubly sure we can comply, but we also have to make doubly sure that there’s a reason to use AI. It’s not just a lazy reliance on machines, but there’s a real, compelling military reason to do so.

And if those both are met, however, I personally think that as long as human beings have some decision-making process, such as, “We’re going to attack in this geographical area, legitimate military targets,” I think this is not that far away from where we already are from a legal point of view.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, I mean, it seems like there’s a difference — and we’ve talked about this and you alluded to it — there’s a difference between, for example, an autonomous drone being sent in to Ukraine or Iran or wherever, and whether, as you sometimes see in sci-fi movies, like a walking humanoid robot with a machine gun that can just go and shoot anything in its sight.

CHUCK BLANCHARD: Right. Although ironically, if you look at the most common violations of the law of war, it tends to be by human beings in land war because emotions take over, fear takes over, rage takes over. And so you could imagine a future AI machine that is not going to get angry, is not going to be fearful, is going to be more willing to take risk to itself in order to avoid harm to civilians.

You can imagine a sophisticated AI fighting machine — I don’t think we have them, we’re not there yet, but you can imagine that would occur. And then the difficult decision is, if we know that these machines are going to be more protective of civilian lives than a human being, should we use them for the very reason of protecting civilian lives, or is the notion of a scary-looking robot on the battlefield making life-and-death decisions, is that really going too far?

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Chuck Blanchard, senior counsel at Arnold & Porter. Chuck, great to talk to you. Thank you.

CHUCK BLANCHARD: Thank you.

LAUREN GILGER: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Stithiva Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah, and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban, and our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.