In most cities, an eviction is the start of a housing crisis. In the hottest big city in America — where 645 people died of heat in a single year — it can be the start of something final.
In the summer of 2023, Maricopa County recorded 645 heat-associated deaths — the most ever documented in Arizona, and roughly a tenfold increase over the figure a decade earlier. Almost half of those who died — 290 people — were homeless. Scientific American, reporting on the surge, tied its timing directly to housing: heat deaths began climbing sharply in 2021 and 2022, "after the U.S. Supreme Court ended a pandemic-era eviction moratorium, pushing more people onto the streets." Heat is now the second-leading cause of death among homeless people in the county, behind only drug overdoses.
A Maricopa County public health official put the physical math in terms that need no interpretation: people without shelter during extreme heat are at 500 times the risk of dying from heat as people who have somewhere cool to go. An eviction, in Phoenix, is one of the most direct ways a person loses that somewhere.
Eviction Lab's Lorae Stojanovic laid out the comparison plainly: "14 out of every 100 rental households in Maricopa County last year had an eviction filed against them" — nearly double the average across all the cities the Lab tracks. For context, she noted, notoriously expensive New York City's rate over the same period was 5%. Maricopa County's filing rate is now the highest it has been since the years leading up to the 2008 Great Recession, and total filings have soared 36% above the county's pre-pandemic average.
The scale is relentless and documented month by month. The county averaged more than 7,000 eviction filings per month in 2025; October alone saw 7,579, the second-highest monthly total of the year. The median amount landlords claimed tenants owed has climbed with rents — the average eviction judgment ran about $3,188 in 2025, up from $1,977 in 2019. And these filings cluster: the highest rates appear in ZIP codes in Maryvale, Glendale, and east-central Phoenix, according to Justice Court data.
To understand why Phoenix belongs in a different category than the other cities in this wave, picture what the weeks after an eviction actually look like there. In an average city, a family put out of their home doubles up with relatives, moves to a worse unit, or, at worst, enters a shelter. In Phoenix, the same sequence unfolds under a sun that has produced the city's longest-ever streak of consecutive 110-degree days, and sidewalks that burn skin. The Arizona Burn Center at Valleywise Health has treated dozens of people per summer for contact burns from pavement that can reach 180 degrees.
"The Zone," Phoenix's sprawling downtown homeless encampment, ballooned in the years after pandemic eviction protections lapsed — a tent city of hundreds swelling directly downstream of rising rents and rising filings. The people who died there and in uncooled homes weren't only the unsheltered: Scientific American reported that more than 250 of the 2023 victims died indoors, in homes without working cooling — the elderly, the ill, the recently displaced who found a roof but not relief.
If you want to see where eviction pressure, heat, and race intersect on a single map, look at Maryvale — the most populous and dense of Phoenix's urban villages, predominantly Latino, young, and full of mixed-income families. It carries some of the county's highest eviction filing rates and is, at the same time, one of the hottest neighborhoods in the entire Valley.
Maryvale runs 3 to 7 degrees hotter than other parts of Phoenix, according to a community organizer with the resident-led group RUMBO — driven partly by tree canopy: Maryvale has 7.7% coverage against an 11% citywide median.
At least 40 people died from heat in Maryvale in a single recent summer — one neighborhood absorbing a share of the county's heat mortality far out of proportion to its size.
Residents describe eight-to-twelve-hour shifts in the sun, then coming home to what one researcher called "essentially a hot box" — high summer utility bills that push already cost-burdened households closer to the shortfall that becomes a filing.
The through-line is that in Maryvale, the same households facing the highest eviction pressure are also facing the highest physical heat risk — and the two feed each other. A summer utility bill that spikes because a home has no shade is exactly the kind of shortfall that ends in eviction court, and an eviction in that neighborhood, in that heat, is exactly the kind that becomes a health emergency.
Eviction Lab's Juan Pablo Garnham grouped Phoenix with Las Vegas and Dallas as Sun Belt cities sharing a common profile: places that have "become more expensive in the last decade or so, places that have laws that are friendly towards landlords and that make eviction very easy." Arizona's population boom, particularly the surge of in-migration, has driven rents up while the legal process for removing a tenant remains fast and inexpensive for landlords to initiate.
That combination is why Danielle, a woman nearly 60 who became homeless for the first time in her life after a 2024 Phoenix eviction, told a reporter the process simply "moved too quickly for her to find help" — that more time might have let her avoid the street entirely. Roughly 52% of Maricopa County renters are now cost-burdened, per Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, spending more than 30% of income on rent — a margin thin enough that a single bad month, or a single brutal summer, can tip a household into court.
There are signs of movement: a Phoenix right-to-counsel pilot funded by pandemic relief dollars, Arizona's first-ever $3 million allocation for civil legal aid, and a newly elected county board chair who named combating eviction filings her top priority. These matter. They are also, against ~85,000 filings a year, early and small.
Perfect Tenant Innovation can't lower the temperature or rewrite Arizona's landlord-friendly eviction statutes. What it can do speaks directly to the county's own most hopeful statistic — the one-third of filings that get dismissed and sealed when a tenant and landlord reach an arrangement. PTI is built to make that outcome the norm instead of the exception: rewarding on-time payment, building credit through rent instead of just extracting it, and giving a landlord a concrete reason to work through a hot, expensive month with a paying tenant rather than filing against them.
In most of this wave, keeping a family housed protects their stability. In Phoenix, it can protect their life.
See how Perfect Tenant Innovation helps tenants build toward stability and helps landlords keep good tenants housed instead of filing against them.
Join the Tenant WaitlistIn the hottest big city in America, a sealed case beats an eviction, and a housed tenant beats a heat statistic. PTI is one more tool for making sure the shortfall never reaches the court — or the sidewalk.