♪ Music Playing ♪ >> Coming up next on "Arizona Horizon", homeowners are staying put longer than ever.

We'll talk about what that means for the housing market and the economy.

Also tonight Chicanos for the Casa organization is combining community and tech to go to promote healthy aging among Arizona be as and Arizona's new poet laureate and her hopes to educate and inspired others around our state.

Those stories and more next on "Arizona Horizon."

>> "Arizona Horizon" is made possible by contributions from the friends of Arizona PBS.

Members of your public television station.

>> Good evening and, welcome to "Arizona Horizon" I am Rick filling in for Ted Simmons tonight, a new report says home owners are staying put in their houses for the longest since 2000.

Mortgage rates that people got during Covid are making them feel locked into their homes it may have a ripple effect throughout the economy as the housing market stays stagnant, join is you now is mark tap the director of real estate development at the WP Carey school at Arizona state university itch guess let's start with the basic question, why is people staying in their homes a bad thing?

Or is it.

>> For some people it's a good thing.

Waging in mace means easier for them to make the transition in their life and many of them it's cheaper.

They have paid your mortgage off or had mortgage as you mentioned the low interest rate on it.

And so the alternative to them is more expensive.

If they can stay, maybe they want to, stay in their social network.

Weighs about it is fluidity.

You need mobility in the marking place, you need housing to turnover and you need people to be able to find places to live if they are moving here for jobs.

You need people to be able to move from one type of housing to another type of housing.

And when it starts to lock up, you lose that mobility, both the intra and Inter urban mobility.

And then that causes problems and lack of supply.

So lack of available supply.

That means prices get pushed up When they get pushed up, the trade off of selling and moving gets even more difficult for you.

>> There are three elements to this problem, one is low interest rates the fact that people don't want to go out and find those houses that cost them more.

>> Yes.

>> Higher interest rate for somebody saying I don't really want to move bought I don't want that higher interest rate.

And the baby boomers who are not leaving their homes is there potential movement in any of the three areas?

>> Not at the moment.

Not a lot.

If I am going to moved house I lived in and raised may family in I will move to something maybe more suitable for my current lifestyle.

A lot of time it's the quintessential -- quintessential downsizing you have to find house that go fits your criteria had in a place you don't feel pulled out of your social network.

You can afford, you are not just trading dollars.

And it exists and that product doesn't exist in substantial numbers in this mark.

We call them missing middle.

Townhomes, patio homes, condominiums and things like that.

We have never built a lot of it >> One extreme or the other, apartments or single family homes.

>> That's what we have developed here.

As we are maturing, we are seeing the need for densification, meaning to build more of that product.

But it comes with policy issues, comes with political issues.

It's hard to do.

>> Density has been a bad word in some cities.

>> Oh, my gosh, yes, right.

The feeling that density is going to cause problems like more traffic.

You'll have people in your neighborhood that you don't know and you don't like or they may be evil.

There is a lot of misnomer about density.

Unfortunately.

But some of the greatest place in the world that we love to go visit are very defense.

>> So let's talk about Phoenix versus the other places in the country.

Because I hear this is a national problem.

>> Yes.

>> How is Phoenix the same or different than the rest of the country in this area?

>> I think one of the things that makes Phoenix different is our age, right?

Where we are in our maturation as a metropolitan area.

So we really didn't start to evolve much until the 1950s.

So we don't have a historic building infrastructure and we don't have a lot of the housing we built it when we needed it.

And so we are maturing.

We are changing as we mature and reach limits to some of our development.

And that is also causing pressure to create density.

You can only push out so far to the edges.

Right?

And still be able to commute reasonably to work.

Or have the kind of lifestyle you want.

Nobody wants -- not everybody wants to live on the edge, right?

It's about these matching, matching lifestyle, housing availability, housing type, housing affordability.

And we are figuring that out as a metropolitan area.

>> In the past we built our way out of the problem, correct?

>> We did.

>> We had plenty of room and built another house and solved that problem.

>> Right.

We had this relatively flat urban landscape and easy to attach one piece of pipe to the other piece of pipe and keep going.

We have run up against the limits to that pattern.

>> Is the only solution going to be lower interest rates?

Some could argue interest rates we saw over the last six years or so were almost artificial.

You know, the fact that they were historically low.

And you could argue might not ever reach that level again.

And yet you've got to get people to wrap their minds around that.

Is roaring interest rates a solution to this problem?

>> It's going to help.

So we -- I think in my opinion, we have to have mortgage interest rates down around 5% to really loosen this whole thing up.

It makes the trade off of I have this house, it's too big.

The maintenance is high.

You know, but I don't want to trade off a much higher mortgage payment.

So that's part of it.

You know, I think the other is pages have to rise.

Until line with the rising price of homes.

Homes continue to rise, just rising at a slower pace than they were but they are not going down.

>> People are always talking about, especially people who are relatively new to the housing market, saw the collapse in 2008, not realizing that that type of thing had not happened in a long time.

Are we seeing prices start to ease off enough that that might make up for the lack of interest rates?

>> No.

And the reason for that is we are not handing a lot of new supply.

The ability to add the new supply has been greatly constrained.

And because we under built the reaction to the great recession, was under building to such a degree that we were left with a really huge deficit.

That is very hard to make up.

And so it's more expensive, so financing for home builders, finding available land that's affordable, the construction of infrastructure is very expensive.

You know, you start add these things together it's hard to add new inventory.

>> In your role at the WP Carey school looking at these factors, I will ask you to look into the crystal ball, how long are we going to be in this situation?

Is this a two-year, 5-year, 10-year stagnation?

>> It's more likely 5-10 than 2-5.

Simply because of the factors the marketplace are such that they are not going to change radically.

So land, lake or and capital.

We are doing things that are making labor much more expensive and much more difficult, in short.

You are doing things that raise construction prices, tariffs.

Things of that nature don't help.

Pricing has eased a bit but not enough.

And then land.

And finding the available land that's cheap enough.

>> And briefly, is there a legislative way out of this?

Or is this just going to be an economy as it moves and drifts the way it traditionally has?

>> So legislative changes, there's a lot in the process, both local jurisdictional level and on state level.

And some on a federal level.

There is no substitute for interest rates coming down.

But those are affected by public policy as well, right?

There is no single right answer, no single silver bullet.

You gotta change the incentives and you have to change the ability to build more housing.

>> All right.

In other words, stay tuned.

We'll see that it all is going to go.

>> That's right.

>> Thank you being for being here we appreciate your time.

>> My pleasure.

>> Next time.

>> Is it a quarrel or execution >> When inspector Sullivan investigate a murder.

>> This is the work of George.

>> He's framed.

>> None of that is mine.

>> I have been instructed to arrest you.

>> The world turned upside down >> Father brown.

Saturday night at 7:00 on Arizona PBS.

♪ Music Playing ♪ >> Next time on "death in paradise" a man is murdered after his expedition strikes it history.

You mean an actual treasure.

The victim identified his killer with a final phone call.

>> What more do you want?

>> Find out on "death in paradise."

Ate night at 8:00 on Arizona PBS.

>> I like to think that at "Arizona Horizon" we are unique in the way that we present information.

Public policy, sometimes news.

These sorts of things because we have conversations.

And I don't want conversations, that human interaction to go out of style.

And up hope with "Arizona Horizon" it never goes out of style.

>> "Arizona Horizon" needs your support.

Donate now and double the impact of your gift.

Thanks to the James and Barbara ratcliff charitable fund challenge.

Thank you.

♪ Music Playing ♪ >> Chicanos is working to promote healthy aging among Arizonans the nonprofit organization has a healthy aging program open to the public and aims to help seniors find better access to community and technology.

Here it to talk about the impact of the program, is the director.

Community service organization for Chicanos por La Casa Robert tear we thank you for being here.

>> Thank you for the invite.

>> Before we get into the cool technology side of it.

Let's talk about the healthy aging program at Chicanos POR La Casa what do you do?

>> That program has been around for 40 years, it's been supporting Arizona for a very long time.

Not just in Phoenix, we are also in Tucson now, we have two other centers being it's a senior center.

Equipped with full commercial kitchen that provides congregate meals for our seniors.

It's nutrition based a lot of education classes, prevention.

We do everything to put smiles on their faces.

>> Need based in terms of how much people are paying.

>> No.

>> No payment.

We are grant funded and community partners cover a lot of expenses.

No, our seniors can give a contribution to the program if they lake, it if not we take care of that for help.

>> That's awesome.

>> It's a congregate meal every day.

>> Let's talk about the complication.

Every age group at some point has this, in terms of seniors and Hispanic seniors in particular of technology and you are coming one a plan to kind of bridge that working with Cox, explain that.

>> So we were fortunate to get some funding through Cox communication to develop an innovation lab.

When we get our seniors into our location, to our home, we do a basic needs assessment and we started seeing that a lot of our seniors wanted to learn about how they were going to gap this digital divide, right.

They wanted to learn how to go on a computer.

How did I make a Facebook.

How do I log into my bank account.

How do I look at pharmacy, medication.

>> Everything is line.

>> Everything.

They walk into the center with their phone and can you help me out.

I don't know your password, we saw there was a need there and a curiosity from our seniors.

So we were able to be gift third degree lab with Cox communication and it's thriving.

>> There is a hardware element you have the equipment do they have the computers and you have those that they can access.

It's are there enough, you notion websites in Spanish, true Spanish translation, do you have Spanish language keyboards being so many elements come in to play with that that you have to work with your seniors.

>> Luckily our staff are all bilingual.

And a lot of our seniors though learn the language.

They understand it.

They might struggle but they get it.

With the hardware, we have so many different components to it.

Everything online is if they want it in Spanish they can get it in Spanish.

One of the coolest things is VR head societies, we get excited with it too.

That they are getting to experience it.

Getting to to museums in hometowns, visit old neighborhoods, learn different classes.

So many different lines of education and -- that they are getting from these little headsets and the laptops and do different classes and English, Spanish, whatever is needed.

>> So you mentioned, seniors coming in and just any handing in their phone, as you look at the seniors who are, you know, coming in to the technology center.

Is there a single largest area of need that you rook at them as they come in and say, you know, this is where the gap exists and where we need to help them?

>> It's -- I would say right now it's some of their medical appointments.

You know, we learned during COVID that, you know, we had to go online.

We are forced to it.

The seniors struggled.

A lot of them didn't have access to that.

Think this computer lab gives them access.

There are private sections they can do their appointments, even just checking on their medications.

How can I fill my, you know, get my refill, going to my pharmacy.

That was the biggest need.

And then behavioral health, you know, that came in.

Little telehealth.

Yeah.

We do that also.

With the company.

>> How long has the innovation center been open?

>> I believe November.

>> Okay.

Not long.

Just curious how it's going in its early months.

>> We started with laptops, we were donated laptops issue know, a couple of years back.

And you know, they are refurbished with the schools and we started seeing, okay, they like this.

We got some ipads and we are like there is a bigger need.

We need something bigger and this was the dream.

And our I.T.

department, you know, came in, they are like what if we do a computer lab?

That's what we want.

Seniors want this.

And then luckily Cox came in with the funding.

And it just all came together and our amazing staff at the center and our support from our leadership.

So everything fell in to place.

>> And the seniors that, you know, maybe in the beginning were like this is interesting, how have they adapted the thinking of this is not just a fun little interesting thing, but it's an important part of their world now.

>> Yeah.

It's just another piece of our centers of our programming, but it's a fun part.

You know.

There is education but fun also You know, we are trying to implement more than of our nutrition classes, you know.

Get a lot of recipes in there.

They can print.

We are getting 3D printers for them also pretty soon, there are so many different pieces.

We are going to keep brogue and we pivot.

>> Important to do that for that age group I am in that age group I know it very well.

Thank you Roberto, appreciate your time best of luck with the innovation center.

>> Thank you.

>> Thank you.

♪ Music Playing ♪ ♪ Music Playing ♪ ♪ Music Playing ♪ >> New England.

>> So we got Pennsylvania.

Virginia.

New York.

>> You know how I know New York is up there and it's little.

It's those.

>> New Hampshire.

>> Maryland.

>> Wait.

[ Laughter ] >> Pennsylvania.

>> Do you know this one?

>> Yeah.

>> You don't know it?

>> No.

California, Colorado, Delaware.

>> Delaware.

Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho.

Indiana.

>> Maine.

Rhode Island.

>> New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio.

>> North and south Carolina.

>> Kansas.

[ Inaudible ] >> Massachusetts.

>> West Virginia.

>> Wyoming, Pennsylvania.

>> Pennsylvania.

Tennessee.

Texas.

Utah.

Vermont.

Virginia.

>> Vermont.

Yeah.

I being I got 13.

>> You got every state you got 13.

>> I think so.

Sorry, no.

No.

>> Arizona has a new poet laureate, Dr.

Laura Tohe is an award winning poet and writer.

And served as the poet laureate for the Navajo nation from 2015-2019.

She also taught English right here at Arizona state university for 25 years and now hopes on inspire and education others in our state when it comes to poetry.

Joining us now we welcome in the Arizona poet laureate.

Dr.

Laura Tohe, we appreciate you being here.

>> Thank you.

>> Before we talk about your journey getting here, let's explain what a poet laureate?

What's the job, what's the role >> That's a question a lot of people ask.

What does a poet laureate do.

I usually say we -- I think the poet laureate came from the Greeks who used to honor the individuals in their community that except sell -- excelled in various ways, medicine, athletics, literature and so forth.

So they would make this laurel out Laurel plant and put on their head.

That's where the U.S.

eventually adopted that.

The poet laureate does very things.

It varies bistate.

Since I am representing Arizona, what I am interested in doing is working with the communities that are rural and small.

I grew up in one myself.

In crystal, New Mexico.

I know what it's like to be kind of in a rural place where you don't have access to poetry or even libraries.

I didn't have eye library or even a television when I was growing up I know there are communities like that in Arizona.

And I would be outreaching to some of those community or if they want to out reach to me saying hey, we would like to you come down and share poetry or a workshop or anything like that.

I am here for that.

That's part of what a poet laureate does is also educating people on poetry.

Some people mate feel like what is true tree?

It's mysterious and has to rhyme.

>> We have discovered that poetry is different as well as we have gotten older.

>> That's right.

We have a lot of younger poets writing now.

What I want to do is also bring poetry to the communities and say, these are our Arizona poets.

You know.

And show some of their work.

It's important for the Arizona community to know who our writers are.

>> Let's talk about your journey.

How did you become the poet laureate for Arizona.

Are you just a professional poet?

You worked at ASU, but how do you become the poet laureate?

>> I was thinking about that one day and I realized it's a lot of work over the years.

[ Laughter ] >> I wanted to be a poet when I was -- I actually wanted to be a writer when I was about 12 years old.

I think I was lucky in that I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

I grew up among Storytellers.

Among my extended family.

And I didn't know what pro tree was until probably Yankee high or high school.

And then I didn't start writing until after I graduated from college.

So poet -- I kind of came late to publishing poetry I think and writing poetry.

I was actually a closet poet for a while.

>> Are you a traditional poet in terms of, you know iambic pentameter?

>> No, I mostly write in free verse and pros poetry and written librettos.

>> The Phoenix sim fun, right?

>> Yes.

>> And real briefly, what is a Libretto.

>> Those are the words for an opera or an oratorial.

And I wrote one for a company in France.

>> A poet laureate.

Personally my work as a poet branched out.

Righting poetry and Librettos and art with poetry as well.

A poet laureate the way I define it branches out to many things and working with words and literature and language.

And having fun with it.

For me, poetry is a passion, I have always enjoyed read and it just sort of came to me when I was in college I heard poets that came to my university.

In Albuquerque and I was instruction by what they were reading.

There were few native poets but what they said struck me so deeply.

I wanted to do what they were doing.

But I didn't really know how to go about doing that.

I didn't have role models.

I didn't take classes because classes in indigenous literature were not at the university at that time.

So when I heard these poets come to my university, and I listened to what they were saying.

I knew that's what I wanted to do.

>> People will be surprised to know this is actually the poet laureate has been established by the Arizona state legislature.

This is not something the governor just decided to name on her own.

There is actually a place for it within state -- the State law now, correct?

>> Yes.

>> And you are the second one.

>> I am the second one, yes.

>> We'll say the first female because there have been two and the first one was a guy.

>> Right.

>> And first indigenous person to be a state poet laureate.

>> Railroad briefly, what's your goal in terms six how far do you want to go in that state?

Where do you want to be and once again, only 15 or 20 seconds to answer that question.

>> Well, since I just started, the job is still coming to me and I am mainly right now doing a lot of what I am doing now interviews, getting my name out there.

But eventually a going to do outreach with the communities in Arizona.

And work with them.

>> Great.

Doctor, the Arizona poet layer yet.

Thank you for being here we appreciate it.

That does it for this edition of "Arizona Horizon."

Ted Simons will be back tomorrow with our weekly journalist roundtable I am Rick, have a great night.

>> Arizona PBS is made possible by the general donations of our members, including real estate.

Like personal red he is.

Rental homes or commercial real estate or undeveloped land, farm, or ranch land.

There are a number of reasons to make a real estate gift.

Supporting a favorite cause.

Receiving a tax deduction, based on fair-market value.

Avoiding capital gains tax, receiving an income stream or for eliminate the heartless of a real estate transaction.

Most types of real estate can be given.